We recently connected with John Copenhaver and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, John thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?

A writer or artist of any sort, if they’re being true to themselves, create from a very personal place. It’s not always evident on the surface of the final product, but it needs to be there for that story or painting or piece of music to work. It’s why crowdsourced ideas or AI-generated BS will always fail as good art. Trust me.

However, when it comes time to market yourself as a creative, you often find yourself misrepresented. Consumers struggle with paying for things they don’t at first understand, so whether you fit neatly in a box or not, to sell your product, in my case, a book, you have to be forced into a box or slotted on the shelf.

As a writer, I straddle genre fiction and literary fiction. I write crime fiction with a noir sensibility, but it’s not the hyper-masculine noir sensitively that popularized the subgenre in the 1930s and 1940s; I don’t write the gritty “masculine” prose of other well-known noir writers, but something more feminine and queer—I often think I’m more of a gothic writer than a crime writer. Anyway, at times, it’s difficult to have to identify with a particular publishing lane … and I’m still in the process of figuring it out!

John, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m an author and an educator. I’ve written three historical mysteries set in the post-WWII era about LGBTQ+ people during an especially oppressive decade. Dodging and Burning and The Savage Kind both won national awards, the Macavity and the Lambda Literary Award. The second in the trilogy, Hall of Mirrors, which began with The Savage Kind, will arrive in bookstores on June 4th. I’m obsessed with writing queer lives back into history through gripping mystery/thriller stories. I want readers to be absorbed in a twisty tale but also experience the complexity of living as a queer person in midcentury America. Hall of Mirrors takes on what it means to be queer and a BIPOC during that time and the different experiences of characters who are “read” as “other” and of those who pass.

I’m also an educator. For many years, I taught at and chaired an independent day school English department in northern Virginia. Now, I teach Queer Literature and fiction writing to undergrads at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I’m on faculty at the University of Nebraska Low-Res MFA program, where I mentor MFA fiction candidates. I’m passionate about education and reaching students who have been thwarted by the pandemic. I love helping students see their projects come together and providing realistic and concrete advice about writing fiction and navigating the publishing industry.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

It took me ten years to complete my first novel, Dodging and Burning. I worked full-time as a high school teacher, so I only had my vacations to do the work. It took another two years to find my agent, the amazing Annie Bomke, for whom I continue to be thankful. However, what I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of rejection Dodging and Burning would receive from publishers. I would consistently receive warm rejection letters from editors telling me they loved the manuscript but didn’t know how to market it: “It’s too literary for a mystery imprint” or “It’s too mystery for a literary imprint.” In my mind, this was all code for “It’s too gay for us.” After twenty-five to thirty rejections, we decided to press pause, and I wrote the first draft of what would be The Savage Kind. Unfortunately, when I shared the draft with Annie, she pointed out rightly that it wasn’t working … You see, I was writing that early version of the novel from a place of defeat. I was writing in an abstract attempt to please an imaginary future editor, and I held myself back and kept myself from digging into the characters. So, at a low point and realizing that I had to rewrite The Savage Kind completely, I told Annie that I wanted to sell Dodging and Burning no matter how small the press … and then something lucky happened: Pegasus, a small but robust independent publisher, picked it up, and they did a beautiful job with the novel.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

During my MFA in the 2000s, the writing life and famous and notable writers were talked about with a certain mystique, an awed reverence. On the one hand, I wish, as a culture, we still held authors (and teachers!) with more reverence. I don’t (only) say this just because I am one, but because I believe respect for learning is essential for a functional society. I fear we’re at an all-time low for respecting teachers, especially by the institutions that employ them, and we’ve begun to treat storytelling as mere content (God, I hate that word!).

I digress. Although there was a mystique to how authors were spoken of when I was going through my grad program, there was also an unwillingness to address the more practical aspects of teaching the craft of writing and professional practices of navigating the publishing industry. There was also a snobbery toward genre fiction, which was (and still is in many circles) considered low culture. So, I had to roll back any snobbery instilled in me by my MFA program, demystify the writing life, and learn more deeply about practical craft concepts.

For readers, I still hope there’s some mystery to the writing life, but if you’re a writer, you need to look at the truth of it worst and all.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.johncopenhaver.com
• Instagram: @johncope74
• Facebook: John Copenhaver Author
• Linkedin: john-copenhaver-educator
• Twitter: @johncopenhaver
• Other: Bluesky: @johncopenhaver.bsky.social Threads: @johncope74 TikTok: @johncope74

Image Credits
Nic Persinger