We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mindy Quigley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mindy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My childhood spanned the 80s and 90s, when benign neglect was the dominant parenting style. My mom and dad didn’t micromanage my schoolwork or bog me down with organized extra-curriculars. For a good portion of my childhood, they probably didn’t even know where I was.*

That parenting style freed me to read and watch TV for countless hours every day, unfettered by parental expectations. The fact that they worked the kinds of jobs people without college degrees tend to work—secretary, restaurant server, auto parts store manager, etc.—was also a blessing. When it came time for me to get a job, I chose work that interested me, with no fear that my parents would judge my choices and no expectation of making giant sums of money.

*Definitely not climbing into that broken storm drain by Jenny’s house! Nor “borrowing” Christine’s brother’s chinchilla and trying to make it live in a Barbie camper van! Those things for sure didn’t happen.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I write mysteries in the “cozy” genre. Cozies are often dismissed as fluff, or as mere “puzzle books,” in which a writer arranges clues, suspects, and motives into what is, essentially, a novel-length Sudoku. Like other forms of genre fiction, cozies are classed as entertainment as opposed to art.

While my Deep Dish Mysteries bear many of the hallmarks of cozy mysteries, e.g. an amateur sleuth, a small-town setting, I ascribe to what I consider the Norman Lear school of storytelling. Before Lear came along, sitcoms had plots like “My husband’s boss is coming to dinner, and I burned the pot roast!” The ensuing hijinks would constitute an amusing way to pass thirty minutes. But Lear tackled social issues and real feelings, using laughter and the sitcom format to get people to let their guard down and engage with difficult topics. My books have cozy trappings, like food and cats, but I want to use that format to tell engaging stories, draw well-developed characters, and balance plot and humor with emotional exploration. I, like a lot of modern cozy mystery writers, believe cozies give us a way to take a sidelong peek at even that grimmest of topics—death—and break it down into manageable, bite-sized chunks.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

This is cheesy as hell, but I find it incredibly rewarding to get positive feedback from readers. I know, I know, writers are supposed to be nestled in our writerly lairs, insensible to worldly concerns, getting high by shooting up pure, distilled art juice. And here I’m admitting that the thing I like most is when I hear that my neighbor’s cousin’s wife liked some words I wrote.

This is especially true when readers tell me that one of my books helped them get through a hard time. One of my readers is currently undergoing a brutal round of cancer treatment, and she reached out to tell me that getting an advanced copy of my new release made her week. That made MY week.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I mistakenly thought that a career as a writer would be mainly about massaging pixels into something that’s roughly story-shaped. You know, writing. Ha!

Being a professional writer is a whole different kettle of very frazzled, angst-ridden fish from what I thought. I’m essentially running a small business. Scheduling appointments, creating social media content, juggling deadlines, doing appearances, making decisions about where to devote my time/resources/efforts, figuring out the IRS Schedule C, managing relationships with booksellers, editors, publicists, journalists, and readers—these are the very-tangentially-writing-adjacent tasks that snarf up Big Gulp portions of my time.

When SIX FEET DEEP DISH, the first book in my series came out, I had no idea that I should set aside several hours each day leading up to pub day just to respond to Instagram comments and tags. Bookstagram is a hugely important constituency for cozy mysteries, and it’s crucial to cultivate those online relationships. Plus, building those relationships is incredibly satisfying, because you can find out, in real time, how your work is being received. But I had no idea about any of that, so I found myself on social media in the wee hours, trying to keep up with a flood of comments and pings.

Sometimes, all of that “extra” stuff feels like a distraction, but I remind myself that it’s part of the modern publishing business. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to be in this position, and it’s not lost on me that the Mindy of ten or twenty years ago would’ve army- crawled over hot coals to be where I am today.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mindyquigley.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/minty_fresh_books/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mintyfreshbooks/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindy-quigley-58530b16/

Image Credits
Headshot credit Natalie Gibbs