Recently, Sharon White and Janice Deal settled in to talk about White’s new novel, If the Owl Calls. Set in 1979 Norway during a time of environmental resistance and cultural awakening, the book is a mystery steeped in atmosphere and history. When Oslo police detective Hans Sorensen travels north to investigate sabotage at the Alta Dam, a body is discovered. As he confronts his Sami heritage and grief over the recent loss of his wife, Hans is drawn into a dangerous search for justice, uncovering secrets that challenge his loyalties—and sense of self.
Janice Deal: How did this novel begin for you? Was it with an image, a place, a scrap of dialogue? What was it about place (Scandinavia, primarily Norway) that drew you?
Sharon White: I’ve been writing about Finnmark, the far north of Norway, since I worked there a year after I graduated from college. I lived in a little village above the Arctic Circle and fell in love with the landscape. It was like living on the top of a mountain, something I’d always wanted to do: the tiniest flowers like miniature lace on the taiga, the arctic fox running along a sandy glacial esker. I lived there for several months and wanted to return, but it was years before I went back. I thought I was going to live there permanently. Eventually, I decided that three months of darkness in the winter would be too difficult for me. But Finnmark changed my life. I carry that wilderness within me.
When I decided to write a mystery, quite a while ago, I had the image of a very tall man I’d met while I was in Finnmark, who turned out to be an American, fishing in the famous salmon river that flowed past the village. I thought he’d be my first corpse, but I cut him from the book in an early draft. I didn’t have a detective until many drafts later.
What inspired you to write a mystery?
I’ve been reading murder mysteries for many years, but my focus for my own writing was poetry and memoir. The story I wanted to write about the political and environmental threats to the communities of the far north needed a bigger canvas than the forms I’d been working in.
Once I researched Danish artist Emilie Demant Hatt’s life and discovered her work, I wanted to include her story in the novel with its own mystery embedded in her past. The character of Kathryn, an American and recent college graduate working on a farm in Finnmark, explores some of these same themes of politics, intrigue, and the environment. Because of all the elements I was juggling, the structure of a mystery seemed like a fit.
I’ve always loved mysteries. I devoured Raymond Chandler and other writers from that period when I was in college. I admire Dorothy L. Sayers for the moving thread of grief in her work and the Oxford setting. I spent a year there, and even though her books are set in the 1920s and 30s, the place is evocative for me. P. D. James’s complex characters and multiple plot lines inspired me, along with Tana French and her ability to highlight the physical reality of her characters. I looked closely at Kate Atkinson’s work and the clever way she structures her detective novels, knitting the pieces of the story together through images.
One of the characters notes that owls can bring good luck. How does this perspective relate to the book’s title and themes?
I was interested in the interconnection of human and nonhuman worlds, and the cooperation and sympathy between characters who might not share histories. I think the image of the owl reinforces the chance meetings on trains, or in far-off places, that transform the lives of some of the characters. These threads reinforce the persistence and necessity of the natural world in our lives.
For Hans, watching birds, something he wasn’t interested in before his wife’s death, connects him to another world outside his grief. The birds are practical. They hunt, they sleep, they raise their chicks. But also, mystical. They escape the ordinary world for another otherworldly place. Their mysterious lives connect to the larger universe where things are not always transparent. I think I’ve given Hans this trait because I love spending time in places where I can watch birds, even on my own third-floor deck in the middle of Philadelphia. I have no idea what the birds are saying, but their chatter comforts me.
If the Owl Calls explores, in part, the challenges faced by the Sami people: to preserve their culture, to retain a certain way of life. What drew you to the issues surrounding forced assimilation?
When I was in Norway, several people in the village where I lived were involved in a movement to recognize Sami culture and rights after years of discrimination by the Norwegian and Swedish governments. The protests at the proposed site of the Alta dam were part of larger global protests against the destruction of indigenous communities. The dam would flood a village and cause environmental and ecological damage to traditional Sami territory. I had seen how important salmon fishing and reindeer herding were where I lived.
The rapid transformation of the Arctic region from climate change echoes the historic threats against the Sami community. The Alta dam protests were a massive movement against the government and helped publicize Sami issues and rights. The years of protests didn’t halt the project, but a Sami parliament was established in 1989. This led to a national recognition of Sami culture and rights. Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped the threats to the fragile nature of the ecosystem in Finnmark. Recently, for example, the BBC featured an article about the area. The author, Katya Adler, visits Kirkenes in the far north of Finnmark, where foreign investment in a transshipment port is an example of the continuing possibility of destructive development from governments, businesses, tourism, and greed.
How does this exploration of a clash between cultures relate to other themes resonating in the book: e.g., the meaning of home/how our origins define us, loss/grief, or the stories we tell to make sense of our lives and the world?
Hans left the north when he was quite young to live a very different life working for the government in Oslo as part of the Norwegian Police Service. He believes he’s protected himself from some of the painful memories of his childhood and adolescence, but the death of his wife has made him more vulnerable. And going back to the town where he grew up, his police status exposes him to the disapproval of his family.
He leaves the identity of the person he’s become, along with the care of his dog, to Malin Lund, his supervisor and friend in Oslo. Before he returns to his parents’ village, he thinks he’s in control of his story. But when he interviews Olav Elstad, one of the suspects who is from a nearby town and knows his family, he almost immediately understands that another version of him is still alive from the past. Unlike Oslo, the community where he grew up has a web of stories connected to everyone in the village. Hans doesn’t fit into that past now, and the death of his wife Astrid has destroyed his carefully constructed persona.
For Hans, the death of his wife is the personal upheaval he grapples with throughout the novel. He’s spent months feeling numb after Astrid’s death. He has been locked into his grief and unable to see beyond the weight of his loss. His role as a detective forces him to acknowledge that his grief is just part of a collective history of loss that accumulates as he finds out more about the case. Olav Elstad understands this about him, and Hans responds to Olav through his grief.
You are a gifted poet, and your prose is alight with poetry’s rhythms and music. What do you see as the similarities and/or differences in your process of working on poems versus a novel?
This novel took me years to write, and I went through many drafts, sorting out characters and timelines and fiddling with the structure. I began without an extensive outline for the book but realized I needed to keep track of the many pieces of the story. This is very different from my method of composing poetry and hybrid work. I think I work more by instinct in my poetry. Often the poem can be finished in one draft.
I have stacks of pads where I outlined the novel countless times as I was writing it. I deleted several characters and settings. I pared back the structure until, finally, the elements worked as a whole. For several drafts Emilie Demant Hatt’s letters were floating in their own chapters. This is where Kate Atkinson’s novels about private investigator Jackson Brodie were a very helpful model as far as the structure and use of images when I was revising the book.
I found it much more difficult to write a novel than to write poetry. I often felt as if I couldn’t hear the sentences the way I can hear the words in a more lyrical form.
Music is a throughline in this story: the importance of yoiking, for example. Can you tell us a little more about yoiking (one character describes it as being “like a fingerprint”), and its significance to you and the characters you have created? What role does music play in your life, and did any specific music inspire you through the writing/editing of this book?
I love this question. I hadn’t realized how important song or music was in the novel, but of course it is. When I was in Finnmark the first time, I heard men singing as they poled their narrow black boats up the wide Tana River. It was a haunting sound as I sat on the bank listening on those nights when the sun never set. One of the villagers I met during that time, a musician, described yoiking as a portrait of each person’s personality. A yoik is the essence of a person, or of a river, a bird, a mountain. Throughout the book, several of the characters are struggling to understand who they are after being turned inside out by the loss of someone they loved. Or they’re off balance because of their encounter with a different kind of life. A yoik celebrates who you are with all your contradictory characteristics.
I’m not a musician, although I love music. I listened to Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s wonderful symphonies on my iPod while I was in Denmark for several months, following in the footsteps of Emilie Demant Hatt as I was writing this book. She and Nielsen fell in love one summer at her aunt’s house when they were both visiting, but his age, along with the geographical distance between them, ended the relationship.
I decided that jazz should be important to Hans. I listened to Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, along with Gary Burton and Chick Corea, to have a sense of what jazz Hans might be playing when he was alone in his apartment. Sami musician Mari Boine’s music, a combination of yoik, jazz, rock, and electronic sounds, helped me to see Ingrid and Eric, the two musicians in the book, more clearly.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve been writing a nonfiction book about New Zealand artist Anna Caselberg for the last few years. In 2019 I was an artist-in-residence in the house where she lived with her husband John, a writer, from the 1980s until her death in 2004. She was the daughter of the most famous artist in New Zealand, Toss Woollaston, but her powerful work has not been appreciated as much as her father’s paintings.
Sharon White is an award-winning author of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction; her new novel, If the Owl Calls, was released by Betty (an imprint of WTAW Press) in November 2025.
Janice Deal is the author of several works of fiction, including her most recent novel, The Blue Door.