Jade Kerrion

Today, the author spotlight is on Rachel Creager Ireland. She grew up in a small town in Kansas, and studied Sociology-Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Knox College. After graduation, she continued to pursue her studies by bumming around the US, hitchhiking, busking, knocking on doors for the environment, and otherwise avoiding respectability. Eventually she decided to settle down, and took a course in massage therapy. Currently she resides in Strong City, Kansas, where she and her husband own and operate the Prairie Fire Inn and Spa. They have two children and a cat.

Tell us a little about your book.

It’s sci fi in that it’s futuristic and technological, but there’s a lot of nature and wildlife and wilderness. It’s character-driven, and most of the characters are women seeking connection and relationship. It’s dystopian but not post-apocalyptic. Much of the story takes place in rural Kansas. You can’t be in Kansas without talking about religion, so there are some Jehovah’s Witnesses, and pagans as well. Also, there is no battle between good and evil, and no villain to vanquish. It has political themes, but I don’t think it could be pegged as either leftist or right. It sprawls all over the place. And there are songs, some old hymns, pop music from the 1850s, and others I wrote myself.

How did you come up with the title?

I was very early in the writing process when, one day, while massaging a client, the word “caryatids” popped into my head. I had no idea what it meant. My guess was that it was some kind of insect genus, since I sometimes read about entomology. But it kept repeating, and lasted on an off for weeks, until I finally looked it up. Since I never studied architecture or art history, I had no idea that caryatids are giant statues that make up support columns for the porch at the temple to Athena at the Acropolis. I decided to take it as Divine inspiration and incorporate it into the book.

What inspired you to write this book?

My husband told me about a news story he’d heard on NPR about a fox breeder who had discovered that he could breed foxes to be very gentle, but they were all black and white, because somehow the gene was related to fur color. So I started thinking about people being bred in a similar way, to be easily managed. I had recently had a baby, and birth politics got mixed up in the story, and ideas about how children should be raised, what children need. Another article I saw was about a trend in lifestyles, toward staying home and taking media experiences, rather than going outside and traveling and being active. Living in the Flint Hills of Kansas, I couldn’t help bringing the endless horizon and the prairie into the mix. So all these ideas were sloshing around in my head for a while, and I kept wishing somebody would write a book about them. Finally I realized that there was no other person on the planet who would put all these elements together, and if I wanted to read the book I would have to write it myself.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

There are multiple messages, probably some are contradictory, or seem to be, and surely some I’m not aware of. Rather than telling people what’s important about my book, I would be more interested in hearing from readers about what they took from it.

If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your book?

Probably. I think I could keep re-writing and changing it forever, especially since it takes place in the future, and the technology changes faster than anyone can keep up with. I had to decide to freeze it in the moment, so I could go on and write other things.

What was the hardest part of writing your book?

By far, the hardest part was giving myself permission to do it. Sometimes the house was a wreck, the checking account was overdrawn, and my children were literally begging me to play with them, while I was ignoring it all and writing my novel. It seemed so self-indulgent. Beyond that, I had a lot of internal baggage that I had to jettison so I could move on. I had to change some mental and emotional habits that prevented me from self-expression and completion of projects.

Did you hire an editor to review your manuscript before publishing?

No. I was very aware of the conventional wisdom that authors simply must have a professional editor, and your friend with an MFA doesn’t count. (My friend was writer Nathaniel Beyer, whose input was invaluable.) The right editor probably could have helped a lot. But I also read some novels by emerging writers who had invested quite a bit in their work, and who wrote very polite, well-edited books which I found less than compelling. It reminded me of Robert Bly writing about people who have done nothing in their lives but study writing, getting advanced degrees, going to workshops, but they’ve never really gone out and lived. They end up like well-trained puppies, who don’t have much to say, but are very good at not peeing on the rug. Except some of the authors I’ve read had lots of interesting life experiences, but maybe their passion got lost in following the rules about writing. I’m not ashamed to say that I probably pee all over the rug. But if I had to choose, I’d never hesitate to sacrifice being well-behaved and playing by the rules for a vibrant, imaginative, brilliant, passionate mess. My hope is to accomplish at least this much.

Did you try the traditional route to publishing, i.e. querying agents/publishers? What factors influenced your decision to self-publish to Amazon?

I am testing the hypothesis that when we do what we are meant to do, other things fall into place. It was clear to me from the start that the book I was writing would cross genres, and wouldn’t be an easy sell. If I had concerned myself with publishers and agents before the book was written, I wouldn’t have bothered writing a whole novel that had no chance of publication. Instead, I just did it, on faith that something I couldn’t predict would happen to make things work. While I was writing, a revolution took place in publishing, and by the time I was done, people no longer needed agents and publishers. Unknown writers with weird, unclassifiable books had total freedom to make their books available to the world for practically no money. It’s an incredible time to be a writer.

Besides Amazon, are there any other sites where your books are for sale?

I published through Bookbaby, who make ebooks available to practically everyone, including Barnes & Noble, kobo, iBookstore, ebookpie, and others.

What’s next for you? / What is your next project?

I think the next piece I publish will be a small collection of short stories I wrote when I first started writing fiction. They’re all from dreams, and I would call them surrealist fiction. Right now, I’m trying to catch up on some personal things I neglected while writing Post Rock. But I’ve come to see myself as having a need to write, so I don’t want to put it off too long. Starla is a character in my book who has a mysterious past, so I might go back and explore her story.

Connect with Rachel: Website / Twitter