We were lucky to catch up with Janet Goldberg recently and have shared our conversation below.

Janet, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

I’d never intended to write a novel. I actually consider myself a poet and short story writer. But once The Proprietor’s Song got under way, it took on a life of its own. From one day to the next, I had no idea what would happen or what characters might appear. And, of course, since I was used to writing in short form, I worried that I might not have enough material to reach 200 pages, a traditional length for a novel.

At the same time, I knew exactly where I wanted to set the novel–in California’s Death Valley and Eastern Sierras, places I’ve been to many times and used as settings for short stories. In some ways, The Proprietor’s Song is a road trip book as all the main characters spend lots of time driving through the mountains and the desert developing an affinity for the beauty and the harshness of the landscape.

As for the core issue of the novel, loss and its aftermath, I think this comes from my own experiences with loss. First, my younger sister died suddenly at 36, and her manner of death, much like the death of the character Lorna Uribe in the novel, was a mystery. Then, while I was deep into writing the novel, my sister’s youngest son at 14 was killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre in Parkland, Florida. Though The Proprietor’s Song in no way deals with school shootings, it does deal with the disappearance of a young man, a college student, in Death Valley’s backcountry. So the novel is a tapestry of two stories–the sudden death of Lorna Uribe and the disappearance of Jared Fisher–and how the surviving family members come to cope, to try to find closure where there really isn’t any.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was a professional dancer during my younger years, though even while I was training I read voraciously. So it was only natural that after my dance career ended that I gravitated to writing, eventually getting my B.A. in English from the University of Pittsburgh and then an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Mills College. After that, for some three decades, I taught first-year writing and led workplace writing workshops. At the same time, I also wrote, publishing many poems and short stories in literary and academic journals. But it wasn’t until I got deep into writing The Proprietor’s Song that I seriously considered publishing in book form. After Regal House accepted that manuscript, I decided to review all the short stories I’d written to see if there was enough for a collection. Now that collection, tentatively titled Like Human, will be published by Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, in Fall 2025.

I’m also an editor. For the past two years I’ve served as the fiction editor of Deep Wild, a literary journal that focuses on wilderness experiences. Discovering and publishing talented writers is always a pleasure. But finding fiction focused on the wilderness has been a challenge, as most wilderness writing seems to come in the form of poetry and essay.

While I’m certainly proud of my achievements as a writer and an editor, I have to say I’ve probably done the most social good and reaped the most rewards teaching first-year writing, especially in community college, where the students, unspoiled and often neglected, hunger for knowledge. Unlike in the theater or on the page, in the classroom there’s no distance between performer and audience, teaching being a face-to-face business. After each class, I often put myself through a mental evaluation, reviewing what I’d just taught and how well it went. I think this is a good training ground for all work, including being an author, a solitary sometimes lonely job, full of more downs than ups.

I also think teaching writing taught me how to write, that my education continued long after I got my graduate degree, and for this I thank the thousands of students who’ve passed through my classes.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Like many writers entering the publishing world, I certainly had unrealistic expectations. First, I went the literary agent route, and while some of the few agents even willing to read a literary novel gave positive feedback, saying they thought the novel worthy of publication, I also discovered that if the manuscript didn’t check certain boxes it wouldn’t see publication from a large house, the sort that pays an advance and has a marketing budget, regardless of its quality. I hate to sound like Willy Loman’s rather ruthless boss Howard from Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, but publishing is a business. Salaries need to be paid; product needs to sell. When a publisher rejects your manuscript, it may have little to do with quality. That’s why, early on, writers should have a clear sense of what success is for them and probably shouldn’t measure it solely or at all by the number of rejection letters or copies sold. Plenty of not-so-good books can sell very well while brilliant books languish.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

As a writer, I don’t exactly have a co-founder or a business partner. Rather I have a live-in editor–my spouse. No doubt, his indispensable feedback was and still is key to my success as a writer. We met on a tennis court in a city park in Berkeley called The Rose Garden. Knowing nothing about tennis, I bought a used wooden racquet for $20.00. Then I started going to the courts, though I’m not sure why as I’d never played tennis. Maybe it was because the setting was so lovely, a kind of amphitheater, each descending tier abloom with fragrant roses, and near the bottom, the courts. There was a wall there too, where I hit, demonstrating my hapless technique and my dancer’s poise, both of which caught the attention of my now-husband.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://janetgoldberg.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100069794703283
• Other: https://regalhousepublishing.com/janet-goldberg/

Image Credits
I took all these pictures. Some need to be turned around though.