Writers at the Well

Novelist Karen Dukess on Writing with a Spirit of Play

• Tess Callahan • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Novelist Karen Dukess talks about daring to write with joy and the fun she had with her new book, Welcome to Murder Week. 

Karen is the author of The Last Book Party and Welcome to Murder Week, (6/10/25). She contributed to the forthcoming anthology Ladies in Waiting: Jane Austen's Unsung Characters. Karen lives outside of New York City and in Truro on Cape Cod, where she interviews some of today’s most acclaimed writers as host of the Castle Hill Author Talks for the Truro Center for the Arts. 

Find Karen on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, and her website: https://karendukess.com/.

Enjoy this inspiring conversation!

Tess Callahan is the author of the novels APRIL & OLIVER and DAWNLAND. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and is a certified Mindfulness Meditation teacher taught by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. She offers author interviews on her Substack: https://tesscallahan.substack.com/publish/home, and guided meditations on her sister podcast Heart Haven Meditations, available on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere.

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Host: Tess Callahan
Substack: Writers at the Well
Guided Meditation Podcast: Heart Haven Meditations
Meditations on Insight...

Tess Callahan:

Welcome to Writers at the well, a podcast that offers intimate conversations with authors about how they draw words and images up from the depths of their inner well. How do they move into a flow state? Do they meditate? Walk in nature? Do they do cartwheels? Let's find out. I'm your host. Tess Callahan, author of the novels April and Oliver and Dawnland. I hope you enjoy this deep dive into the inner workings of the creative process. Today, my guest on Writers at the Well is Karen Dukess. Karen is the author of The Last Book Party, which was an Indie Next and Barnes & Noble Discover a New Writer's pick, and Welcome to Murder Week, which comes out on June 10. She has been a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia, and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has a degree in Russian studies from Brown University and a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives outside of New York City and in Truro on Cape Cod, where she interviews some of today's most acclaimed writers as host of the Castle Hill Author Talks for the Truro Center for the Arts. Welcome Karen,

Karen Dukess:

Hi. Nice to be here.

Tess Callahan:

So pleased to have you here. I adored The Last Book Party, and I doubly enjoyed reading an arc, an early version of Welcome to Murder Week, which is really beautiful book, and fun!

Karen Dukess:

Thank you. That's what I wanted it to be. It's very fun.

Tess Callahan:

So can you just tell us a little bit about it?

Karen Dukess:

Sure. Welcome to murder week is a story about a 34 year old woman named Cath Little who discovers, after her estranged mother dies, that her mother had booked the two of them on a trip to the English countryside to participate in a one week solve a fake murder mystery event being held by a local village. And this makes no sense to Cath. It doesn't fit with her mother's personality, and it doesn't make sense to her that her mother, who was very flighty and unavailable to her, would have wanted to travel with her, but unable to get a refund, she goes on the trip, and she teams up with two other solo travelers, also American, in solving the fake murder mystery. And at the same time, they solve the mystery of why her mother had wanted to go. So it's a fake murder mystery and a real family mystery, and there's also a little romance, and it's kind of a send up of the Golden Age detective novels and all the village mysteries that you'll find on Brit box and Masterpiece mystery, that kind of thing.

Tess Callahan:

Wonderful. I definitely enjoyed the double mystery aspect of it. So I did want to ask you how that came about. But also I just wanted to, you know, gush a little bit about the things I really enjoyed about it before, obviously, I start with the questions, the witticism, the British quirkiness was so delightful, and the sense of place was extraordinary. I felt like I was right there, really soaking in this English countryside. And then it was also incredibly well paced. The double mysteries moved along seamlessly, and both of them very engaging and incredibly fun. And at the same time, I was very moved by Kath and her search. So it just hit me on all levels. And the little romance in it too was just wow. I was totally engaged. Read it twice, so yeah, delighted to have you here.

Karen Dukess:

Thank you.

Tess Callahan:

I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your process in writing this book and how that may have been different from the last book party or other things you've written.

Karen Dukess:

Yeah, this book was very different. So this book was inspired by a trip that I took with my sister to the Peak District in England, and I didn't go there with the intention that I would write a book in this place, or this was just a pure vacation. We We stayed in a cottage in a charming village, and we walked all over and when I got there, I was amazed how much I felt like I had stepped into the pages of my favorite English novels, and that I also stepped into scenes from shows that I had seen, everything from midsummer murders to Grandchester, Father Brown, masterpiece, mystery, Jane Austen series. I mean, everything I did there, I felt like I was a character that I had seen. So if I was walking across the field, I felt like I was Emma wood. House, going to deliver a basket to someone. We went to the Moors, and I had actually never been in, never seen Moors before, and I felt like Jane Eyre, and I even threw myself down on the ground to see, like, what was it like when Jane Eyre so distraught and it's very wet, I didn't know how wet it was going to be, and I got up and my pants were soaked. And so it put me in this very joyous and buoyant and kind of silly mood. And my sister was in the same mindset, because we share a love of these books and films and and so when I came back from that trip, I felt like I really wanted to write about Americans going there and having this experience where they were seeing it through the lens of things they had read and things they had watched. And then I thought, Okay, well, I'm sending Americans there. They have to do something there. What are they going to do? And because so many of my references from there were village mysteries, I decided to have the Americans solve a fake murder mystery. And I wanted this book to just be fun. So I started out just really having fun with the characters and the mystery, but I also knew I wanted to write the kind of book that I wanted to read at that time, which was something fun and light and escapist, but that also had a real emotional story to it. I tend to like things that even get a little bit melodramatic or Gothic. You know, the dramatic scenes in Jane Eyre, the heart of it, the despair of it, like I wanted a little of that. And I think that's what kind of drew me to pulling out Cath's story, which is really a story about grieving and and learning things about her mother that she didn't know, that had and had that her misconceptions about her mother, the story that she had told herself about her mother, had affected the way she was living her life, and that she finds out that these things she thought, there's so much she didn't know about her mother. So it kind of grew from initially just a sort of fun impulse to wanting it to be fun, but also have some emotional heart to it.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, I think you definitely achieved the goal of making it this kind of multi dimensional book that hits you on all aspects. I'm always curious about the seed, how the seed of a novel begins. So there you are with your sister just having a fun vacation in the Peak District of England, and I wonder if there's like, a particular moment in the midst of this fun, or throwing yourself down in the grass, like Jane Eyre, when you thought there could be a novel here.

Karen Dukess:

I think I really didn't think about it when I was there. But while I was there, I was started writing these Facebook posts in the evenings, and I was writing them in this incredibly free way because they were just a Facebook post. And I don't even write on Facebook that much, but I just wanted to share. It was just fun to sort of capture something that had happened to us. So one day, we set out by foot to walk on these, you know, their public walking paths all through the English countryside, which I didn't even know. And we were walking to go see this medieval home that we were going to take a tour of, and we got lost, and the British directions were just ridiculous. And, you know, there are things in the novel that are directly from this experience I had. And so I wrote a Facebook post about it, and I found this tone in these posts that was just like light and funny and silly and playing off, sort of my expectations, or my view of these British things that encounter that affected me in a funny way, or that I found funny, and I got such incredible response from these posts. People were just so amused and saying, write more. Write more. Is this your next book? And I wasn't thinking about that at all. And it really wasn't until I got home after the trip, I sent another novel, The second novel I wrote out on submission. And this novel was very different from either my first book or Welcome to murder week. This was a novel that drew on the six years that I lived in Russia as well as time that I had studied in the then Soviet Union. The novel took place in 2017 it had flashbacks to the 90s, and it was going on submission less than six months after Russia had invaded Ukraine, and there was just extreme sort of anti Russian sentiment in the world and from myself as well. And the novel felt very anachronistic at that point, because things had changed so dramatically, and it felt I was very unsure. I felt very nervous about it. It hadn't been a lot of fun writing it. I felt very much like, this is my Russia novel. This is when I make something of those years that I spent there, working as a journalist, and we sent it out on submission and got a lot of lovely rejections. You. Know, beautifully written, compelling, etc, but there was a lot of just sort of, this is not the great time to to put a novel out into the world that it's about Russia. And I was disappointed, but I also felt like, yeah, they're right. This, this book now, it's just not the right time. And so we went on a one round about six or seven editors had rejected it, and my agent said, you know, we can keep going. There are many more editors. And I just said, No, I don't want it. It's not right. I don't feel right about it. So we pulled it from submission, and I was feeling not so happy about that. I'd spent two and a half years, maybe, maybe three years working on this novel was a bit of a slog, so it was really disappointing. But then I felt like, Okay, I'm going to start something new, and I've got to do something completely different. I said, if I'm going to spend another two and a half to three years writing a novel that may not get published, and I hadn't experienced that before, because my first novel got, you know, snapped up very quickly. Then I have to do something that's fun. I just need to do something that is just really what I want to do now. No shoulds no sense of, you know, I should be writing a serious novel. I should be writing a Russian novel. It was just like, I want to have fun. And so I just felt like I'm going to just go back to that feeling I had when I was in England, and I'm going to have fun with it. And so I didn't think about genre. I didn't think like, this is a classic mystery, or this is a romance, or this is a grief story. I just kind of threw it all in there and had so much fun writing it had more fun than anything I'd written it, and I wrote it quicker. You know, I really wrote it in less than a year and a half, which is really fast for me. It was, it was a really, really great experience. That's an

Tess Callahan:

amazing story. And I'm so intrigued by, as a fellow writer, this idea of owing a debt to a certain period in your life, like you spent all these years in Russia and you wanted to somehow to write by it, or it felt like what you should write. And then your experience of writing that book being used the word a slog. And then in this book, based on a week of your life, more or less, that you spend on vacation, and the experience of delight that really comes through to the reader, your joy in writing comes through to the reader.

Karen Dukess:

Yeah, I think that's really true. And I think, you know, I talk about this, I'm in a writing group with a couple of writer friends, and just yesterday, a friend of mine was saying, like, Oh, I feel like I should write this scene about this particular thing, and I just don't want to. And we were just encouraging her not to write it. You know, like if you really don't want to write it, it's probably not going to be something a reader wants to read either. You know that, especially in I don't know if you find this, but in writing your first draft, you kind of have to go where your energy goes and where your interest goes, and trust that. And there was something for me that was very freeing about not succeeding with the Russia book that I kind of went into this one with completely different parameters, like, I'm just gonna do what's fun. I'm just gonna amuse myself, you know? And I was kind of amazed that, like other people, actually found this book funny, because at times I was like, it was funny to me. I don't know if anyone else is gonna laugh, but it's hilarious.

Tess Callahan:

Oh yeah,

Karen Dukess:

I think the mindset is just so important in writing. You know? I think everybody always says, like, you have to keep your butt in the chair and just keep working. And it's not waiting for the muse. It's just hard work. And it's true, it's not waiting for the muse. But I think I've learned that if I'm in a certain frame of mind where I'm just really forcing it, that it's probably better at that point to just go take a walk and do something else and come back to it in an open mind. You know when an open frame of mind, when you can just sort of let your subconscious do a lot of the work, and you're not wrestling it so much. This

Tess Callahan:

is such a great counterintuitive message. I had a painting teacher once who, I think taught me more about writing than a lot of wonderful writing teachers too, but he always would say, if you're not having fun, then something's not working, even though you're not doing serious work, but you're serious work done lightly, and you're really communicating that lightness, and then the meaning kind of slips in on its own, like this, welcome to murder week. Has beautiful meaning and transformation, but it's it feels organic. It doesn't feel like you're striving for it as an author.

Karen Dukess:

Yeah, I think, I think that's true, and I think my experience with the Russia novel in retrospect, you know, I was writing that novel with a lot of other people and other criticisms sort of sitting on my shoulder. I think, I think second novel is difficult. I mean, I don't know if you felt that way, but I think there's a sense of, like, am I a one hit? Wonder, was that a fluke? So second novels are often hard for people. And then I think I also had this sense. Sense of like, all the people I had been in Russia with, and then people who study Russia and people who know about Russia, what are they going to think of my take on Russia, and having those things sort of weighing you down while you write is not helpful. And you know, there were times when I was working on, welcome to murder week, when I felt like, oh my god, this is so silly. There's so many important things in the world, and I'm writing this silly book. But book, but then sort of things bubbled up in it, about relationships, about family, about love, that are not silly. And I think it took a certain, I don't know, a certain freedom to just let that be. And even if it, even if it didn't come up, it's okay to write a silly book, too, you know, a light book, absolutely,

Tess Callahan:

yeah, and regarding what kind of slips through when you're not trying to make it happen, I found quite profound the transformation that your main character here, Kath, takes in the course of the book, in terms of the constraints that she puts on herself, in terms of her inner narrative about who she is in the world and her past and how that limits her ideas of what's possible for herself. You write a little bit about this in your substack essay that you wrote for my substack. And there's also a similar thing with the last book party, where she is held back a little bit by ideas of herself. And then, in both cases, they take these big leaps, these big adventures that are maybe not so wise, but wow, bear a lot of fruit. And it seems like you yourself did that in the writing. Yeah, you took a big leap into unknown waters,

Karen Dukess:

yeah, I think so. I mean, with the last book, yeah, I think there are similarities. I mean, on the face of it, they look like such different books. And the last book party, you know, is the coming of age of a young writer in Cape Cod in the 80s. And then this book is this fake murder mystery and family mystery and one week traveling and but I do think there are similarities. I mean, I think we probably tend to write the same thing over and over again in different forms. But I think both of them, you know, are about the young women who had certain accepted certain narratives about themselves. You know, in the in the last book party, it was kind of like her role in the family. She was a certain way. She wasn't the brilliant one. Her brother was the brilliant one. She wasn't supposed to make trouble, make waves, call attention to herself. She had ideas that she wasn't a real writer. She wasn't able to pursue the path she wanted to pursue, and she had to make a lot of bad decisions before she found a way to pursue that, and in this novel, my character's relationship to her mother, who had left her pretty much left her when she was nine years old, left her to be raised by her paternal grandmother, and kind of flitted in and out of her life. And her mother had such an extreme personality that Cath kind of interpret it in a certain way, that she didn't know why her mother was the way she was, but she saw things in her mother she didn't like, and she was determined not to be that way. But it's not until she takes this journey and she learns she learned some things about her mother that she realizes why her mother is the way she was, and that she didn't have to take lessons from her. You know that trying so hard to not be like her mother was doing a disservice to herself, and she had to learn that to sort of get herself on on a different path. And I think, I think those sort of narratives that we learn from our families, from the world around us, are so powerful, and they can be so limiting, and I think that's something, you know, that I'm that I'm interested in, yeah, I mean, I probably relate more to the character in the last book party. That book was sort of more like a reflection of my journey as a writer. You know, if I had confidence in myself as a writer, I accepted that narrative of myself. I would have written a novel way before 55

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, I think you're you're in a great book. All of the characters are struggling with something similar. And I think in Welcome to murder week, even the secondary characters are wrestling with this in a certain way. They're they think they are this, or should be this, or have always been doing this, and then over the course of the book, they step into, oh, there might be another possibility for me, such a satisfied the book is so satisfying in that way. So I'm curious to ask you about character and how they come to you, because all of these characters. So Kath is the main character, and then she has these two cohorts, Wyatt and Amity, who help her solve the mystery together, and they both come onto the page. So quickly, like within a few paragraphs. I see them visually. I have a sense of their personalities. They're fully alive. I'm engaged in them, and they're just I thought it was actually astonishing characterization, and I was as interested in their trajectories through the whole novel as I was in cats, which I think is really an accomplishment. So just wondering how like characters step into your consciousness,

Karen Dukess:

you know, it's funny, those two characters really just appeared to me very quickly. And I've heard writers say that, you know, and a character just kind of appears fully formed, and I know who they are. And I think that had happened with me, with one character in the last book party, the character of Jeremy just kind of popped in there. But really very strongly. When I initially had this idea to write about Americans going to England, my first idea was I was going to write about members of a writing group going to England together, and because I like the idea of taking people that ordinarily wouldn't become close, but bringing them together and they get to know each other in a way sort of outside of their regular world. That's something I love about writing groups. Like people come and you be you can become such good friends of people in a writing group, you know them so well in a certain way, because they're sharing their writing with you, and they're often sharing things with you that they're not sharing, even with their spouses, but yet you Ness wouldn't necessarily have it met them or been close to them in any other circumstance. So I liked that concept. I ultimately did not make it a writing group. I was talking to a friend of mine, and I told her this idea, I'm gonna send this writing group to England. And she said, Okay, what are they gonna do there? I thought, well, that's not gonna be very exciting novel if I just writing about them, writing in England. And that was part of the evolution of the murder week. But when I was thinking about them writing, Wyatt and Amity just sort of appeared as like arriving at this Writers Group. I mean literally, Wyatt showed up. He was late, and he was complaining about his husband and the birds. Because in the book, Wyatt's husband is a birder who owns a birding shop, and Wyatt is working there because he loves his husband, but it's really not his thing, and he's bit of a lost soul, and that just, I don't know he came and I saw him. He was tall and he was skinny and he was red headed, and he was funny, and Amity was Amity, and they just kind of appeared. I mean, their arcs I had to work on to develop. I, you know, this story, like Kath is the main person, and I wanted Amity and arc, Amity and Wyatt to I wanted Kath to learn from them, so that their arcs are important to them, but they're also important to Kath because they're both struggling with marriage and relationships. And I wanted Kath to sort of see different versions of how things could play out. And then, you know, in the next draft, I was like, Babe, good people. I need to develop their stories a little more. So I wanted it to be satisfying. I wanted you to know them enough that when they get to their point at the end of the book, which is a little different than where they were at the beginning of the book, it feels satisfying, yes, but I had a lot of fun with them. I like, I just, I had a lot of fun with these three people that are so different. I mean, Kath is 34 she's an optician. She's had the same job that she's, you know, since high school, she started working at this shop. She lives in Buffalo. She's never really gone anywhere. She's living a very narrow life. Wyatt is 10 years older. He's married and kind of adrift, loves his husband, but feels a little lost. And Amity is 10 years older than him and is recently divorced and kind of still figuring out what she feels about all of that, having been left by her husband. So they're so different, and they're in different stages of life, but they become friends in a way that I think sometimes happens when you take yourself out of your milieu, there's something about like the three of them find themselves together in a cottage for some random reason, and they're just very open with each other right away, like there's a there's a freedom. They don't have to be anything to each other. They don't have any expectations of each other, they don't know each other's past. They can just be who they are, and I think that kind of helps all of them figure stuff out.

Tess Callahan:

You really capture that, that experience of strangers meeting in a foreign place, and the kind of instant connection that you can have and willingness to reveal yourself that you might not do at home, right? Because

Karen Dukess:

people expect a certain thing of you, or you don't want to surprise them, like you're doing what you know, they have no expectations of each other. They just are who they are, yeah? And

Tess Callahan:

so supportive of each other, and each of them so much fun. Really, so much fun. Yeah? So setting it in England, you know you talked about. Your vacation with your sister and how it evolved, and the novel sprang into your mind, and it's so beautifully evoked the English country aside and in the last book party, it's set in Cape Cod, and that's also you do an amazing job with setting. We're just fully immersed in the sense of place. So I'm curious about how that evolves for you in the writing of a novel. Does it come first the sense of place and including specific scenes like you wrote on my sub stack? Actually, each of my novels has a scene that's dramatic, involving the elements, wind, waves, darkness, trees, as my protagonist struggles to accept a truth and that really, you can feel that there's like a relationship, there's a conversation happening between the character and what's physically happening in the environment that moves the scene. So I'm just curious about your process there, or maybe even your own experiences with nature, and, yeah,

Karen Dukess:

it's an interesting thing, because I don't think I knew this about myself until I'd written several novels that I am so inspired by place and it's so important, I wouldn't have thought that. I would have thought, no, no, character first, always. And I really felt like with the last book party, I was writing a set in Cape Cod, in the place where I had spent every summer my entire life. And so it was very effortless. It was just in me. I didn't have to I didn't have to try hard, I didn't have to research, I didn't have to go back and look at photographs to describe it. It just kind of came out very naturally. But then I was interested to see, well, the next novel was Russia, where I'd spent a lot of time and had a lot of thoughts and experiences. And then this one England, where I had gone. And this one was much harder, because I was there for only a week. I didn't know I was writing a novel when I was there, I was very grateful that I took a lot of pictures, and I really did respond to the place when I was there. I mean, it was so beautiful, and we were outside all the time, and it definitely made a big impression on me. I'm a very outdoors person. I love being outside. I mean, I think my places are very much nature. You know, I don't think I'm inspired by a place like a particular house. It's more of sort of being outside. And I think that I'm always intrigued by the idea of the elements, sort of reflecting the turmoil in someone, whether it's rain or wind or ocean. It was harder with this book because I didn't know what it smelled like, you know, I didn't necessarily know what flowers bloomed. You know, when I was writing the last book party, I could have my character walking somewhere, and I would just know like that, the when she crosses a railroad track, the weeds there are scratchy and they scratch her thighs, because I've done it 8 million times. I didn't have that sense in this book. So I'm glad that you found it evocative of the English countryside. I did take a lot of pictures, and I did look at those, but I've often thought like, what am I going to do when I run out of places? Although the next novel, The novel I'm working on now, takes place in California, in a place I visited. But again, it's not a place I know intimately well.

Tess Callahan:

Apparently, you only need to go there for a week, I guess. Yeah,

Karen Dukess:

this one, I was only there for like, four days, so it's getting harder. I may have to go back.

Tess Callahan:

Well, that could be a fun research trip, yeah, but there was

Karen Dukess:

also a freedom in Welcome to murder week, I did not I was inspired by a real village, but I made my village. I made it up so I could use everything I had seen to make it feel real, but I didn't have to worry about making it accurate. You know, I kind of placed it near real things, because my characters go to real places in the Peak District, but my village doesn't exist, and that that made it easier, and

Tess Callahan:

you only needed to know it as well as Cath did, because she doesn't, yes, she's not a resident there. She's visiting, so she might not notice or know the names of all the wildflowers either.

Karen Dukess:

Yeah, exactly. So that was something that was very freeing, because I'm very particular about getting things right. You know, I was a journalist before I wrote fiction, and I hate it when I'm reading a novel and some dumb little detail is wrong. It just pulls me out right away, and it makes me not trust the net the author as much. So in the last book party, you know, I was very particular about that. It wasn't that hard, because I knew the place well, this one, I would sometimes worry it was wrong, and then I thought, well, it's a made up place, and these are Americans, so they can be stupid, you know, I make making fun of them in a way more than I am the local people.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, John Gardner writes about that breaking of the fictional dream through some obscure thing that's anachronistic or doesn't fit, and how it just the dream of the story momentarily is broken and the reader has. To work to get back in

Karen Dukess:

that's an interesting way. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it, because it can be a small thing and it's very jarring. It's very jarring for me when it happens as a reader. So

Tess Callahan:

you mentioned your background in journalism, so I'm curious how that has led into fiction writing, or how you might feel that makes you a better fiction writer or your experience of writing,

Karen Dukess:

I think that journalism probably made me a better author for an editor to work with, because I'm pretty easy to edit. I'll change anything. You're open. Yes, I'm very open. I'm very used to being edited, but I had to unlearn so much about writing. I had to unlearn so much of what I had learned as a journalist in order to write fiction. There's so many aspects of journalistic writing that are not helpful to fiction. For instance, probably the most important one is I had to learn to let the story unfold and let the subconscious do some work. I had to learn that you don't have to know exactly what you're writing about in order to write. And I think believing that I had to know it all, I had to know exactly what I was trying to say and how I wanted to say it, and why, believing that, I think deterred me, prevented me from finishing a lot of things that I started as a fiction writer, because I'd have this impulse to write fiction, and I would start, and I would think, I don't know where this is going. And so I think, okay, then I guess I don't really want me to write this story, or I'm not really cut out for this. And it was really only in a because of a writing group I was in. The leader of the writing group said to me constantly, like, whenever I said, I don't know where this is going, he's like, that's okay, just keep going. You'll figure it out. That is not a way that one writes journalism, you know. And I had worked as a speechwriter as well, and you got to know what you're going to say. So that that was definitely a challenge. That was probably the hardest thing to unlearn and let myself trust in this process of fiction writing. And then the other thing is, you know, in journalism, you kind of say everything important up front, you know, in a news article is going to get cut from the bottom, and you want to get it all up front. And fiction writing works really the opposite way, and that it's not telling things that makes the reader want to keep reading. If you tell everything, then why turn the page? So the whole idea of withholding information and letting it come out slowly was really challenging for me. I mean, I feel like in this writing group that I was in the first years that I was writing fiction, seriously, I felt like the advice I needed to hear over and over again was, you know, let the story unfold, trust yourself and slow down. I kept giving too much information too quickly, you know. And people would say, No, this is okay, like we're with you. We like this character, we like this narrator. We're with you. We're going to stay with you. You don't have to keep rushing it. You know, my writing is quite I think it's pretty sparse, and I think that's sort of a holdover from journalism. I envy people who say they write too long and then they have to trim back. I'm always like trying to get it longer. I was so happy when I was drafting the Welcome to murder week and I hit 70,000 words, which is kind of like classic novel length, and that was a big moment. It was hard to get there.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, that's yeah. I can see that the challenges of coming from journalism into fiction writing, and the invitation from your teachers and your fellow writers in your writing group to, you know, just let it flow, open to the subconscious, like people can say that, but then really allowing it or finding your own ways to let that tap OPEN is another thing. Yeah, and so you've mentioned like when you're stuck taking a walk or swimming in the kettle ponds. So are there other ways that you feel like when you get a download of a scene, for example, that's nothing about what you had planned, per se, you're not a journalist sketching out your article. It's just something comes to you, like the way Wyatt or Amity just kind of walked onto the stage right, and you're Can you say anything about what nurtures that, or what creates a good environment for that to happen, or what hinders it?

Karen Dukess:

That's a good question. I mean, I think those things don't happen if I'm not feeling sort of relaxed with myself, you know, if I'm feeling self critical or I'm feeling uptight or rushed, they don't happen. And it's been something I work with an editor, sort of writing coach, more of a writing coach than an editor. She doesn't do a lot of she doesn't do line editing, but she'll read things that we talk about them, and sometimes, when she'll I'll talk about having a frustrating time writing, she'll say, like, you should just walk away at those times. And then sometimes I'll think, no, I have to keep pushing. I have. To keep pushing. This is supposed to be hard, but I think it's what you were saying before. It shouldn't necessarily be hard all the time, so, but it's hard to walk away, because there's also sometimes you walk away. Well, I can walk away from the computer before I even sit down at the computer because I'm nervous, you know. So there's like, what is helpful walking away, and what is procrastination? And that's always a challenge for me. I do think that just moving my body and getting exercise and getting outside, definitely, I think it just improves my mood. And so then I'm easier on myself, and then I can look at something and say, oh, there's possibility there that wasn't so bad, and go back at it, or it's just that sort of working of the subconscious. When you're not trying to solve a problem, you tend to solve it like, I'm incredibly good at crossword puzzles when I'm half asleep, you know, my husband will be doing a crossword puzzle, and he'll ask me questions, and I'll come up with an answer like It amazes me, like I'm not even looking at the puzzle. He'll be like, third letter E, second letter T, and give me some obscure cue, and I clue, and I can just see it, and I know if I sat down and tried to do that, I'd be like, I don't know this word. And I think with writing, it's it's similar. It's fascinating to

Tess Callahan:

me. That is really fascinating. Sometimes

Karen Dukess:

reading can help. Sometimes I will stop writing, and I'll pick up a book, and I think it's the same thing. I think it's occupying your mind on a different problem. It frees up the part of your mind that's doing over the writing. I don't know if you've had that experience, but sometimes I can be reading a book and it's a good book, and all of a sudden I'm thinking about my character like something jogs your memory. I think it's just like pushing you out of gridlock in a way,

Tess Callahan:

yeah, yeah. That makes sense, yeah. This talking about instinct and intuition this way calls to mind this quote that I had pulled out from Welcome to murder week. It's Amity, who's a cats cohort, and she says, I believe that sometimes, against all logic and reason, people know the answers to the mysteries that perplex them. They know it viscerally in their bodies, if not intellectually. That seems to be what you're talking about, like with the crossword puzzle answer.

Karen Dukess:

Yeah, true. It's like we're better than we think we are and but I think you have to sort of create the conditions. You have to be kind to yourself to let it happen. And I think that's part of why the Russia novel was such a struggle for me. It wasn't fun writing that novel. Somebody told me once that after way after I wrote the Russia novel, somebody, a friend of mine said her editor told her, don't make the second novel too deeply personal. I mean, obviously every novel you write is personal. It's coming from you, but if the plot is something really tied to your life, and I think the reason she was saying that was it's hard enough to write a second novel, you know, that's just, especially if the first one has gotten published. You know, it's it's hard enough to go at it again and think, can I do this again? Because every novel, like people often say, Well, but you know how to write a novel now, I'm like, No, well, I know how to write the novel I wrote. I don't know how to write the next novel. So second novel is hard enough and to add to it, a story that's really personal and important to you, not just in the writing of it, but like in your life, I think it adds another, another level of pressure. And I think with the Russian novel, I sort of wish I had known that, because it was sort of important to me to write that novel for reasons, some reasons that had nothing to do with writing or a story I wanted to tell, that there was some other way I wanted to prove something, and those were not, you know, having second novel pressure and this sense of like, for some reason, it was important to me to Have on paper, my take on Russia, even the No, novel, wasn't directly about Russia. I mean, it was about a character. It was American. It still had this added weight. And writing under those conditions is kind of the opposite of letting your mind go, you know, being creative in a kind of pure way. Yeah,

Tess Callahan:

that's really fascinating and great advice you have. It seems like you have gleaned great advice from writing friends and mentors, yeah, but some of it a little too late. But maybe you did need to write that novel for your own purposes, yeah? And

Karen Dukess:

I have to say, I think I did need to write. I mean, okay, I don't know. Did I need to write that novel I did at the time? And, yeah, the act of not succeeding and getting it published did Free me. You know, I don't know that I would have, I might have come back from England and felt like I wanted to write a fun novel there, but I, I think I was really strongly in. The camp of this has to be fun, because of the experience I'd had of it not being fun and not succeeding. I was like, Why do this? If it's there's no guarantee. I think that intellectually, I knew that there's no guarantee when you write a novel. But my experience wasn't that. My experience was I write a novel, I work hard on enough someone's going to want to publish it. And then I wrote a novel, and I worked really hard on it, and nobody wanted to publish it. So I learned, you know, I knew it in a different way, and then it becomes okay. So why am I doing this if it might not get published? Why am I doing it? And then it became something about like, Well, what do I need to do right now? I need to do this for me. Because I didn't know it was going to get published. It was a much happier way to write.

Tess Callahan:

I love that you gave yourself permission to to have that fun, because a person could have two responses to that. They could say, well, I worked so hard on this novel, it didn't get published. So the next one, I better work harder. But Karen Duke House said the next one, I better have more fun.

Karen Dukess:

That's a choice. Yeah, and it didn't feel as hard, it didn't feel as hard, it was like the process was fun. I think it also freed me to write a lighter novel, you know? I mean, there were times while I was writing it where I felt like there was a lot going on in the world when I was writing it, it's was very disturbing. And there were times I felt like, what am I doing? I'm shouldn't I be writing about important things in the world? Shouldn't I be doing something more serious, trying to make a difference? Write something that would be taken more seriously? And I feel better now about the fact that I wrote a book that I don't think is purely fluffy, but that it is a book that I think will give people joy, like, that's okay, you know, we get serious everywhere. Walk out the door and they're serious, and I don't think there's anything shameful about wanting to read a book that makes you forget about the problems around you and think about somebody's fictional problems that may resonate with you personally or may just be interesting to read.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of snobbery around genre, but the truth is that when your heart is open. You know, like when you're laughing in a book, which I've laughed many times in this book, then things your heart is open. So meaning can slip in, in a way, yeah, that interesting way of putting it, you know, if your heart is kind of clenched around the density or the seriousness of something, you can be more guarded. And so I think Kath story of transformation, and just the invitation of the novel to go outside your comfort zone and take a daring risk, it really comes through, through the witticism and the fun and the humor. So yeah, this is a profound book, you know. And just speaking of genre, I loved this. This, this little bit also from your character, Amity, who is a romance novelist, right? And she's getting, she arrives at the murder week competition. She gets a little snobbery from a fellow competitor, and she says, lots of people think romance is silly, and to that, I say you find love superficial. Well, then I'm sorry for you. She tosses back the rest of her wine. What's more important than the pursuit of love, of cherishing someone and being desired in return? If a romance novel is written, well, it's a story of being fully human, of firing on all cylinders, sexually, emotionally, intellectually, there's nothing more exciting. I adore that from Amity, because she's right. You

Karen Dukess:

know, it's interesting. I didn't think about genre when I wrote this book. I just wrote the book I wanted to write, and I was very surprised that I actually like wrote a mystery. I'm not a huge reader of mysteries. I like them. I read some. I read everything. I love books with secrets. I think the best books have a something you want to find out that makes you keep reading. And I was kind of amused that I had written a mystery. And I remember saying to my agent at some point, is this book going to be like in the mystery section of a bookstore. And he said, it probably is, it might not be, and it's been an interesting experience. I think genre is not something one should think about when writing a book. And I think, you know, several people have commented, this book is sort of a genre defying book, yes, and I think it's genre defying because I didn't think about genre. I didn't think like, this is a mystery, therefore it has to be this, or this is a romance, it has to be this, or this is a coming of age or a grief story. It just is what it is. I do think that genres really I think when, when it is spoken about for better or for worse, is is in the marketing of the books, and it is much easier to promote a book when you can clearly see. Say what it is, even though my book isn't exactly that. It's it's an interesting thing. But I've also realized that I don't know, there's a lot of snobbism about genre. You know that, like, well, mystery and romance aren't literary fiction, but there's a lot of literary fiction that has a mystery in it or a romance in it. There are romances and mysteries that have a lot of great writing or human, you know, just emotion or profound profundity. I think the the use of genre in marketing is sometimes an unfortunate thing for the perception of of the book. I think sometimes people will be like, Oh, I don't read that, or I don't read this. And I think I don't know. I feel like there's a it's, it's too bad, in a way, because I think there are books out there that are put in a pigeon hole that really they shouldn't be.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, I love that this book defies categorization, really, you know, it's just, it's its own beautiful gem. And if you had tried to fit it into one of those genres, you know, before you started writing, it wouldn't be what it

Karen Dukess:

is. Yeah, it's funny, though, because in the selling of the book, you know, there were some editors were like, I like this, but I don't really know how to market it or what to do with it, because it's neither here nor there. But then the editor that I'm with was like, I love this because it's this. I'm that, yeah, I can sell it as this and that, you know? So it, it's really depends on the perspective. But I think some of the best books sort of blend, you know, I think so too. Yeah. I mean, Jane Eyre is really a mystery. It's also a romance, yes, you know, it's also a coming of age, yes, exactly, but you wouldn't find it on the mystery shelf, right?

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, speaking of Jane Eyre, I love all of the literary allusions

Karen Dukess:

in this book. Yeah, I can't help myself with that.

Tess Callahan:

It's so much fun. It's really delicious. It seemed like you were having fun inserting, yeah.

Karen Dukess:

I mean, that was really, was like, you know, that really grew out of my experience there. And, you know, walking the Jane Eyre trail. And, you know, it was just, it was so interesting. All the things that, you know, I play with, I address this in the book, but just so many times where you read something online or in a guidebook like this is said to be the inspiration for that, and then you find out it's not even true, but it's like you want to believe it, you know. And so it persists. These myths persist. So some of what I encountered was true, but even like when we would visit, we visited a place called Haddon Hall, which is this medieval home, which was the model for Hadley Hall, where Lady blanders lives. And I didn't even go that far from the hilarity of it, like in the real Haddon Hall, the woman who lives there is named Lady manners. I mean, I couldn't have made that one and but they have these stories there when you walk through the castle, and like the little guidebooks, they'll be like, these are the steps where, in the 1800s the, you know, the young woman of the house ran out down to the garden, where she ran away with the such and such. And then you read this whole story, and then there'll be something in it that implies that, like, it may not actually be true, but this is the story that they tell. You know that? And so I had a lot of fun, sort of playing with with all of that stuff.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, it's delightful. So you've mentioned several times the fellow writers that you connect with in your writing group and mentors, and this podcast is called writers at the well. And wells are our our meeting places, for resources for the community. And I just sense that in your journey as a writer, this has been deeply meaningful to you, your writing friends and and also your and now you have your interview series through Yeah, Castle Hill. So I wonder if you could speak a little bit about that. Yeah.

Karen Dukess:

I mean, I never would have written a first novel, let alone a second or third if I hadn't been in writing groups. I mean, that has been everything to me. It is a combination of accountability and community and shared experience. You know, when I talked about not understanding that you could write a novel without knowing exactly where you were going with it. I also kind of didn't understand how common it is, more common than not, for writers to struggle and to have self doubt and to question themselves and to give up and start again over and over again. And I think being in a writing group and coming to understand that, that because you were struggling, it doesn't mean you're not cut out to be a writer, which is, I think, what stopped me before, so I can never get enough of you know, before I was in a writing group, I was reading interviews with writers I love, I could, I could never get enough. Off of reading things about real writers, acclaimed writers, prolific writers, and hearing about their struggles. Because I really, I don't know where I got it, but I had this idea that, like great writers, just wrote, and they didn't doubt and they didn't throw pages out, and they didn't start over, and that, because I was having such a hard time, it meant that I wasn't a writer and I and so it was through talking to other writers and being in community with writers, and then encouraging each other and seeing each other's processes that I've learned so much and that it kept me going. Wasn't even so much learned. I mean, I do think it was learning about the craft, but even more, you know, and seeing people struggle and discussing scenes, that was all helpful. But I think you get a lot of that just from reading, you know? I think I wrote my first novel very intuitively. It was kind of like, this feels like a novel, because I had read so much in my life, but the community as well as the accountability, I mean, the number of times I have gone to a writing group, and I think, Wow, if I didn't have to go to that group on Thursday. I might not have written that chapter. You know that I needed this little deadline, and I'm in a small writing group now with two other writers. And what's really wonderful about it is I feel so comfortable with them that I can really share with them stuff that I think is utter crap and come away from it, realizing what in there is not crap and what I'm trying to say. I mean, just yesterday, I went in and I been so distracted lately dealing with things having to do with the upcoming publication of murder week that the novel that I'm working on I haven't paid much attention to, and I had this chapter that I knew was a mess, and I knew there were too many things in it. And I said to these two writers in the group, I was like, I'm only reading this as a testament to how much I trust you guys, because I'm so lost. And I read it, and in the course of reading and talking about it, I realized, like, no, the chapter's fine. I just needed to get rid of a lot of the stuff that's not fine. And I understood the point of the chapter and go back at it, and I it completely changed my whole outlook on the novel and how much I might get done before murder week comes out, and that kind of thing is just, it's the best, it's the best. That's

Tess Callahan:

a beautiful trust, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Bravo for working on a new novel while you're going through the production

Karen Dukess:

working that much now, I've tried, you know, I wanted to get, I was hoping to have a rough draft by the time Welcome to murder week comes out. I won't, but I wanted to have enough going that I felt okay about the voice and the direction it was going in, so that if I spend a month or six weeks, you know, doing nothing but promoting murder week. When I come back to it, it won't feel like starting from scratch.

Tess Callahan:

So yeah, and you might have fresh eyes as

Karen Dukess:

well. Yeah, I'm hoping, I'm hoping that I can say that month away was great. And do you want

Tess Callahan:

to say anything more about it? Besides that, it's in California, or would you rather not? I can

Karen Dukess:

say a little. I don't want to say too much, but I will say that I am continuing. It's not it is a mystery. It is narrated by Amity, so it's kind of a sequel. Oh, I love that. Yeah. So the the idea I have, and I don't know that, I'll do three, and we'll see what happens if number two is successful, because I haven't gotten far enough along to say for sure, but you know, the Welcome to murder week is narrated by Kath, but Wyatt and Amity have their arcs, so now Kath takes the back seat, and this is narrated by Amity, who's back in California, I won't say where, and so it's first person. Amity and Wyatt will appear in Kath a very little bit. So it's her story.

Tess Callahan:

But I am sort of so delighted to hear this and that the idea that Wyatt will have a book too, honestly, because I will,

Karen Dukess:

I adore them. No, I like them too. I like them too. I mean, it's funny though, because I'm like, if I'm going to write a real mystery this time, I mean, it's a very, it's a very meta thing, because, you know, the murder mystery in Welcome to murder week is a fake mystery. And I've been very happy that, like, Advanced Reviews have been very good for the book. But there was one that made me laugh where somebody was like, oh, as soon as I realized there wasn't a real murder in it, I decided not to finish it. And it kind of made me laugh, because I'm like, oh, people want their fictional murders to be real. It's all fiction. But she was like, it wasn't good enough that the my characters were solving a fake murder. She wanted to read about a real murder that I created. I don't know, because kind of makes me Yeah, but there is a difference, like I So, yeah, anyway, so where Amity ends up in this book, kind of, she continues that path in the next so we'll see

Unknown:

delightful. Yeah, and

Tess Callahan:

do you want to say anything about your experience hosting the Castle Hill author talks, it seems like you're having a lot of fun there, too.

Karen Dukess:

Yes, that. Is really fun. So that is something that, you know, Truro Center for the Arts, which I know, you know, and Cape Cod had never done anything like this. They do week long workshops and visual arts and writing and and during COVID, I just suggested to them, you know, I've taught there, and I'm on the board, and I was like, why don't I do a zoom thing, you know, in the winter, where I interview authors, and so I started it in 20, late, 2020, early, 2021, so it was real dark days of the pandemic when zoom was newish. And what was amazing about it was because writers had no way to promote their books, because book tours were canceled and bookstores were closed, authors were just very happy to do this. And so I got some really big name authors initially, and then that just kind of kind of followed on itself, because then I could approach an author and say, Well, I had this one and this one, and they think like, oh, this is some big thing. And it was really just, you know, a zoom with a bunch of people from Castle Hill, but it's been really fun. I mean, I've done a mix. Initially, I thought the books had to be very specifically related to Cape Cod, but not necessarily anymore. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're not. The people who zoom in. There always are people who are in the cape or affiliated with Castle Hill, but a lot of them aren't there in the winter. And I only do it in the winter months. I don't think anyone wants to be on Zoom and good weather, but I've really, really enjoyed it. I mean, I love interviewing authors. I love, you know, as I was saying before, I love hearing about their processes and their struggles, so I find it inspiring. And I also just love sharing books, you know that I've read and loved with other people. I mean, I just love that. And on my Instagram, you know, I'm always posting about books I've read and you know, it's my favorite topic. So that's just been really fun. Yeah, do

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, that comes through. And you're a deep reader and a beautiful interviewer yourself, so it's a joy to listen to those. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us about Welcome to murder week, or anything at all that you'd like to share before we start wrapping up here? I don't

Karen Dukess:

think so. I think I would just like to say that I would hope people you know read it, even if you think you're not a mystery reader per se, and I think it's, I just think it's a nice place to spend time in this book. You know, it's nice people, but they're smart and funny. You know, it's cozy mysteries sometimes. This is called a cozy mystery. Cozy mysteries sometimes are a little like very sweet. Think, I don't think if this is a sweet book, but I think it's a fun book. It's like a comfortable place to be. I just hope people give it a try. Yes, I'm hoping to have fun just promoting it. You know, it feels good to give people a good reading experience. I mean, I love nothing more than getting lost in a book that makes me laugh and made me cry. I love it. So that's what I want to give people. And I'd

Tess Callahan:

like to emphasize that although that the murder week, the murder is, you know, a fake fun game, there is a genuine mystery. Yeah, in this novel that's very compelling, emotionally compelling. Yeah. So yes, I, I highly encourage any one of any you know, whatever genre you like, you're going to love this book.

Unknown:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Tess Callahan:

And where can listeners find you? If they want to find out more about your work or connect with you,

Karen Dukess:

you can find me on Instagram at Karen du Kess, where I'm always posting about books. Obviously, I'll be posting a lot about mine, but I post about other ones too. And I have a sub stack, which is called, stay calm and carry on. But I think you find it by my name, charactercast substack.com and I have a website, charactercast.com where I have information. Oh, and there is one other thing I want to say I forgot, please. I'm also contributing to an anthology that is coming out in November, the same publisher, gallery books. It's called ladies in waiting, Jane Austen's unsung characters. So it's an anthology of fictional stories by I think they're eight writers, and this book is coming out this year. Is 250, years from Jane Austen's birth. So that's why you'll see a lot of Jane Austen this year. And so everybody in it has chosen a minor character from a Jane Austen novel and written something about it. And I wrote about Georgiana Darcy is short story called what Georgiana wants. It's Mr. Darcy's younger sister in Pride and Prejudice who really doesn't have any voice in the novel. She doesn't have any actual quoted lines. She's just spoken of and described. And I wrote a story that's about Georgiana at 27 Been years old having a midlife crisis, and I haven't read the other stories in the book yet, but there's some great writers, and it looks like a lot of fun for anyone who's a Jane Austen fan. What

Tess Callahan:

a wonderful premise. Yeah, I will definitely look for that. Yeah, it's fun, yeah. And what a great opportunity to take a character who has no lines in the current book, and just give you all that freedom. Yeah, yeah,

Karen Dukess:

it was really fun. And I'm not a short story writer. I mean, I've had one, I think I've since college, I've written one short story so that it was, it was really fun to do. I it was fun to spend, I don't know, it was a couple months doing something and they'd be done with it, as opposed to a couple of years? Yes, yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was kind of like my foray into fan fiction. That's great. That's really fun. Writing can be fun. Yes, that's a

Tess Callahan:

great that's a great summary to this whole conversation. Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Karen and listeners, you can find Karen at her website. Karendekes.com her substack. Keep calm and carry on and on Instagram and look out for her anthology, and especially look out for Welcome to murder week, which you can pre order now.

Karen Dukess:

Yes, thank you so much. This is really interesting. I love talking to you. That's

Unknown:

a delight. Thank you, Karen, okay, bye,

Tess Callahan:

that's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please help spread the word. Follow us. Review us. Give us five stars on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And subscribe to our writers at the well substack, where we offer short written interviews with authors on similar topics. Huge thanks to Christopher Lloyd Clark for the intro and outro music, and to Eric Fisher for his ever patient and often miraculous audio engineering. And thank you for listening. See you next time you