Megan Staffel’s new novel, The Causative Factor, won the Petrichor Prize at Regal House Publishing and was published by Regal House on October 22nd, 2024. Staffel is the author of two recent collections of short fiction, The Exit Coach and Lessons in Another Language in addition to the novels The Notebook of Lost Things and She Wanted Something Else. Her first collection, A Length of Wire and Other Stories was published in 1983 by Pym-Randall Press. Interviewer Laura Hulthen Thomas sat down with Megan Staffel to learn more about how art became central to Rachel’s journey, and what inspired The Causative Factor’s lens on the witness.
When asked about her writing, Amy Hempel once said, “I like the moment the thing changes. I like the aftermath of the big event more than I like to portray the event itself.” In The Causative Factor, Staffel captivates the reader with both the big event and the emotional and artistic arc of the afterwards. After seeing a sudden, traumatic act, Rachel struggles to understand the burdens of loss and witnessing through her maturation as a visual artist. The aftermath, Rachel learns, can become both purpose and inspiration if one is committed to explore what can’t be unseen or fully understood. The Indypendent calls The Causative Factor “…a beautifully written look at the psychological factors that shape us into the people we ultimately become… a troubling love story about lingering pain and what it means to find peace after a traumatic experience.”
Laura Hulthen Thomas: Your main character Rachel is a visual artist. Her influences include surrealism, Dadaism, and performance art. There’s a terrific quote early in the novel where Rachel is “marveling at what can happen when control is removed from the creative act.” Do you yourself have an art background?
Megan Staffel: I have always been surrounded by artists. My mother, Doris Staffel, was a painter, and my father, Rudolf Staffel, was a ceramic artist. After high school I decided I wanted to be a painter too and attended one semester at an art school where I landed in an excellent foundations program that gave me a good sense of the hard work and constant questioning that accompanies any artistic endeavor. My husband, Graham Marks, is a ceramic artist and when my children attended the Rhode Island School of Design I followed their travails and successes as they made it through that high-pressure environment, though only my daughter, Annabeth Marks, is a practicing artist now, while my son, Arley Marks, has channeled his creative endeavors into the hospitality field. In addition, simply by living in New York City, where I often visit museums and galleries, I can attempt to keep up with the art that the people I know are looking at and talking about.
Given your background in the arts, how did you approach writing about Rachel’s boxes and how they evolved artistically and visually?
Having lived with artists, I know that with all creative endeavors, the work is always evolving whether you’re a sculptor, a painter, or a writer. And what you learn in one discipline often gives you insight into another. For instance, my husband, a ceramic sculptor, is always the first reader for anything I write, and in his studio, I’ve watched, questioned, and critiqued his work, and seen it clarify and change direction over the years. So, it felt natural to imagine the evolution of Rachel’s boxes, not only in their purpose, but in the ways she thought about using color, symbols, and references as she tried to communicate the effects of the horrific event she had witnessed. She used her art to contain that experience, to keep it separate from the rest of her life. So, a box, which then becomes a diorama, was the perfect solution.
While Rachel’s life as an artist is central to the novel, other characters’ jobs and labor contribute to The Causative Factor’s narrative richness and story line. How did you approach writing about skilled laborers like the plumber Walter Henry or Rachel’s best friend, Angela, who works long days forming Chinese dumplings? Is the novel drawing intentional connections between skilled trades and the fine arts? I’m thinking also about how Rachel and Rubiat use their hands to make their livings, and how physically taxing their professions can be for dedicated practitioners.
I admire people who perform a skill that involves a use of the body: plumbers, mechanics, gardeners, masons, cooks, people who work on something outside of their body that improves the world in a practical way. I certainly understand the need for software engineers, CPAs, academics, etc., but because a skilled laborer is so opposite to a writer, that’s the kind of career that intrigues me. While I spend my days in my head, imagining people and situations, they spend their days in the material world, creating something tangible. The tangible product we writers create is of course a published book, but it’s an outcome that is most often so far away in time from the original imagining, it loses that simple, direct relationship.
The Causative Factor is dedicated to the witness. What inspired the novel’s dedication?
In my new novel I am once again, as in my previous books, writing about my relationship with my sibling. I have a sister who is two years younger and from the beginning, our lives have followed very different trajectories. As the older sibling, I witnessed my sister’s struggles with academics, beginning in grade school when dyslexia made her a slow learner.
In the sixties, dyslexia was not widely recognized so they labeled her “retarded,” a label my parents should have fought with everything at their disposal. But they didn’t know enough to do that, so she had to grow up under the shadow of that prejudice which set the stage for other, less classifiable troubles.
But as children tend to do, they overcome, and we both managed to grow into responsible adulthood. When we were teenagers, my sister was always on the lookout for abandoned dogs and straying, troubled men; I was always on the lookout for my sister. What I’d say about that now is that imagining you are essential to someone’s life, that is, when she is an independent person with a full and separate existence, is a complicated psychological burden. It’s one I’ve struggled with for many years but at this point, when both of us are over sixty, I really do offer necessary assistance because my sister is disabled from a heart attack and can’t manage paperwork. That’s my job now while her son, who lives with her, offers support on a daily basis.
Rachel’s experience as a witness leads her to conclude “…that the witness is a person with a peculiar burden, a twist of terror and powerlessness…” Did your relationship with your sister inspire Rachel’s insights into bearing witness?
Once I realized that even in this novel I was revisiting the pattern of my sibling relationship, I was surprised. It certainly hadn’t been my intention. That is, while I was writing about a woman who witnesses her lover do something tragic, I hadn’t seen the connection to my role as witness within my birth family. I had been thinking more about the sudden, spontaneous witnessing the American public has had to watch on the news every time there is a mass shooting that captures media attention. That is, if we’re lucky enough not to be a victim. These incidents cause us to have a deep empathetic response that is awkwardly coupled with powerlessness. When someone commits a violent act of any kind, and that includes self-inflicted violence, it ripples outwards to the witness. In my novel, there’s only one witness, but often, in our country, there are many. But to go back to your question, as soon as I saw that witnessing touched on the powerlessness one sibling feels toward the troubles of another, I was able to deepen Rachel’s struggle with a psychological complexity I knew very well.
The Causative Factor’s plot upends the arc of the traditional love story, where two characters spend a first and sometimes a second act falling in love, with the challenge or roadblock to the relationship occurring later in the story. How did you make the decision to structure the novel around two lovers who come together quickly and are parted just as quickly, and then spend so much of the novel leading separate lives?
I’ve always been attracted to novels that begin with an event that immediately upsets the character’s equilibrium because right away, it places the reader deep inside the body and mind of the point-of-view character. In the many years I’ve been a reader, there were two novels that memorably modeled that structure: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Both have opening chapters that shatter the reader’s sense of normalcy and both made a lasting impression, so I’ve been fascinated with that structure ever since. When I imagined a situation that could benefit from an opening where chaos descends suddenly, those first chapters were my prototypes.
What elements of Erdrich’s and Coetzee’s crafting of “sudden chaos” in their novel’s opening chapters fascinated you the most?
In the first chapter of Erdrich’s 1984 novel, we meet June Kashpaw on the street in an oil boom town in North Dakota where she has been living temporarily. She is on her way to catch a bus that will take her back home, but when she passes a bar where a man sitting in the window gestures her to come inside, she decides she will have just one drink. Many drinks later, he drives her out to a country road where he parks and falls asleep on top of her after unfulfilling sex that June, in her boozy condition, has assented to. She extracts herself, climbs out of the man’s pick up, leaving the door wide open with the heater running, and walks into a field of deep snow intending to walk all the way back home in her insubstantial nylon parka and thin-soled boots.
Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace, is the other novel with this kind of structure that impressed me. On the first page, David Lurie, a twice divorced professor of communications at a technical university in Cape Town, declares that he has solved the problem of lust by visiting a sex worker every Thursday afternoon named Soraya. But he starts to feel possessive and makes inappropriate overtures to see her outside of their assignations. One day, he happens to see her enter a chain restaurant with two little boys. Knowing he’s committing a transgression, he nevertheless goes inside too and makes eye contact. She leaves the agency after that, but he hires a private detective who furnishes him with her true name and home phone number, and when he calls her, she accuses him of harassment and tells him never to contact her again. Her rebuke so reduces him, morally and emotionally, that he himself sees what he’s become—a predator. That is, a person who lacks the most basic moral and spiritual grounding.
In both novels, a series of cascading events create a painful emptiness within the point of view character. Each sinks to the bottom of their being, losing a sense of who they are as well as any confidence in their right to exist. More importantly, both opening scenes leave the reader with the burning question: how can she, or he, go on? For June Kashpaw, we expect her to freeze to death; her actions have put her into grave physical jeopardy. David Lurie is physically safe, but the emotional territory he’s entered feels just as treacherous. With both of these novels, I remember the delicious feeling, as a younger reader, that I’d never before seen two people so believably stripped of confident self-awareness. They were truly on the edge.
Laura Hulthen Thomas is a teaching professor of fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Michigan’s Residential College in Ann Arbor. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Witness, Epiphany, The Cimarron Review, failbetter, and others. Her short story collection, States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, 2017) was a finalist for a Foreword Reviews Indie Award. Her novel, The Meaning of Fear, is forthcoming in Spring 2026.
Megan Staffel is the author of two recent collections of short fiction, The Exit Coach and Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books) and two novels, The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho Press) and She Wanted Something Else (North Point Press). Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals: the New England Review, Ploughshares, The Woven Tale Press, The Common, Cortland Review, Northwest Review, Gargoyle, The Seattle Review, Kansas Quarterly and others.