About the Author: Susan Helene Gottfried owns West of Mars, a boutique editing business for authors of fiction. Lately, though, she’s returned to the publishpoing sphere for the first time since the 2010s with two new short story collections, Permission to Enter and Broken but Undaunted. This was in preparation for launching the Tales from the Sheep Farm series and its kickoff book, Maybe the Bird Will Rise.
West of Mars Maybe the Bird Will Rise publishes on September 26, 2023 and is available where books are sold.
You’ve been busy! Tell us about that.
I had some downtime in my editing schedule last March, so I went through my hard drive and took a good, hard look at the short stories I had sitting there. The ones that were finished were, I thought, really good and deserved to see the light of day.
I cleaned them up and decided to put them together into a collection, and so Permission to Enter was born.
And Broken but Undaunted? Tell us about that collection.
Broken but Undaunted is pretty straightforward: It’s the short stories I’d published in various places: Juried anthologies, charity anthologies, and even a couple as stand-alone stories. I own the rights to all of them, so I decided that since I have some dedicated readers who may not have followed me across the various publications, I’d bring the stories together.
This book wound up being half the size of Permission to Enter, which is itself a small book. But splitting them into two made sense, thematically.
That was last March. Where have you been between now and then?
Busy! I have a full slate of authors I provide editing services for, so once that window in March closed, I was back to working on the collections in my spare moments. That’s why I didn’t ultimately publish them until August.
So that brings us to the big project, Tales from the Sheep Farm, and the first book, Maybe the Bird Will Rise. Tell us about that.
The lead characters in Maybe the Bird Will Rise had been knocking around in my head for a number of years, actually, but I could never get the story to work quite right. One day, I finally had the idea to jump forward in time ten years or so and see what developed. And bam! There was my story.
While it is very much a second-chance romance, it’s not a romance novel. This book is about the obstacles Mack and Tess have to face and deal with as they figure out how to be together again.
And then Mack discovers long-hidden family secrets.
It’s those secrets that the crux of the series hangs on. The secrets are what pushed me to turn this into a multi-author project.
A multi-author project? Tell us more.
The series tag line is People are treasures too. That’s what the Mackenzie Treasure is—people. Specific people. When I realized I wanted to know their stories, I also realized I am not equipped to write them. These histories, fictional or real, aren’t my lived history.
Opening the series to people who can write these stories just made sense. Authentic, diverse voices telling stories of diverse people with this shared, albeit fictional, past. That’s one of the goals.
The challenge now is to find the authors willing to join something so unconventional. But they are out there. I’ll find them, or they’ll find me.
So you’re looking for historical fiction as part of this contemporary series?
Yes and no. I want both. After all, people tend to have children, and so on through generations. I want those stories as well. What does it mean to be a descendant of the Mackenzie Treasure? That opens societal issues—of race, of the legacy of slavery in this country—that just isn’t allowed to be given a voice in many corners of the publishing landscape. It’s time for that. It’s past time for that.
At the same time, and rooting us more firmly in the contemporary nature of the project, I want stories about and from other marginalized voices, not just my own. The disabled. Those who follow minority religions. People with multiracial backgrounds. The disabled, the neurodivergent, the LGBTQ+ community. People who do not have college degrees but have happy lives anyway.
Publisher’s Weekly says no one wants to read about poor people in a romance? Bring it. Let’s prove them wrong. Let’s create “Sesame Street” for us adults—where the diverse have voices and are seen and valued, but their lives and stories aren’t stereotyped or typical or not authentic.
These stories, if they aren’t related to the Mackenzie Treasure, should be set in modern-day Port Kenneth, my fictional city.
You’re a Pittsburgher. Why set this project in a fictional city when Pittsburgh has to face these issues, too?
Because I needed the spine of the story—Mack’s family history—to be set in the South, if you haven’t figured that part out yet.
There are a lot of Pittsburgh references in the parts of the series that I’m writing, however. Keep your eyes out for them. Some are obvious and point to events that happened here. Some are homages to things like sinkholes and PAT buses, and a certain influx of reptilian visitors we had in 2019. There are other references to Pittsburgh past and present; keep an eye on how things are named.
And it’s possible that the sensibility of Port Kenneth is more Pittsburgh than Tennessee. That’s fine by me. It’s who I am, and we write what we know even when we don’t think we do.
What’s next?
Well, more from me and the Sheep Farm. The second book in the series, Populated, is projected for a November release, and after that, I have four more books either finished or in draft form, waiting to be crafted and polished, and I have already begun talking to other authors about joining the project.
And editing. Always editing. I am a line editor first, and gloriously so.
If an author wants to know more, where can they reach you?
Anything related to the Tales From the Sheep Farm project can reach me on the farm—http://TalesFromtheSheepFarm.com.
I’d love to talk about the project, what you can bring to it, and anything else you’d like to know.
If you’re an author of fiction and want to talk about hiring me for editing, you can find me at West of Mars.
Any last words?
I need to give a public shout-out to the team who came together who gave me a dream day for my first professional author photo shoot. Erin at Rustbelt Mayberry Photography, Hannah at the Rainbow Room Spa in Ellwood City, and Rachel at Tall Pines Farm in Darlington, who let us use Tall Pines as the stand-in sheep farm.
These people may seem like they’re far away from Pittsburgh, but they’re Yinzers through and through. Really good people doing really good work… that’s a legacy of this city that we can all agree on, no matter how far from the city center we are.
After all, people are treasures too!
Maybe the Bird Will Rise publishes on September 26, 2023 and is available where books are sold.
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