Interview: Author John Copenhaver Talks Writing Crime, Teaching, and Queer Representation in Historical Fiction
I sat down with John Copenhaver to chat over Zoom about his latest book, Hall of Mirrors, and picked his brain on his experiences as a queer author in the writing industry, his philosophy on blending historical accuracy and creative storytelling, how he approaches teaching writing, and where he sees crime fiction heading in the next decade as more LGBTQ+ writers and writers of color have their voices heard in the genre.
John Copenhaver is an an award-winning author and educator from Virginia. He teaches writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a faculty mentor at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s creative writing MFA program. In addition to cohosting the House of Mystery Radio Show, he has three historical fiction crime/mystery novels published, with his debut novel Dodging and Burning winning the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery. His current project is a crime/mystery trilogy about Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, a young lesbian couple that solve mysteries in different decades of the mid-20th century. The first installment, The Savage Kind, won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery and its sequel, Hall of Mirrors, was released this June and has already received praise from People, Today, and more.
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How has your experience as a gay man influenced your writing and your position in the writing industry? Have you faced any barriers because of your identity?
The real barrier isn’t my identity as a gay man, but what I choose to write about in my work, that I include queer characters in the center of my books. When I was trying to shop around my first book, Dodging and Burning, various editors and publishers told me one of two things. One, this book is too mystery for a literary imprint, or they would say, this book is too literary for a mystery imprint. What I thought they were really trying to say was, this is just too gay.
I felt like there was and has been a resistance to publishing books with queer characters because the publishing industry thinks that only queer people want to read queer characters, and I think that’s a logical fallacy, a lack of imagination, and, frankly, morally weak. I give more credit to readers that they want to read characters that are both different than and like them. There’s been progress; I haven’t received that kind of resistance with my other books—mainly because I’ve found a good publisher, Pegasus, that is open to me centering queer characters—but I have friends that identify as queer who are told to cut things out or to tone down sex scenes. Keep in mind, they’d never tell a straight writer to tone down a sex scene. I think I would have received more resistance if I wasn’t as much of a straight-seeming, cisgender, white guy, but it’s mainly been from the content of my books.
How do you balance historical accuracy with creative storytelling, especially when writing in a time period when LGBTQ+ identities were not only marginalized, but often erased?
When writing historical fiction, there’s a lot of research that I enjoy doing, but it can be overwhelming. As a writer, you have to pay attention to what details serve the story while staying accurate to the time period and big historical events. In researching Dodging and Burning, I found tons of great, interesting information on the Second World War and war photographers, but when it came to researching what gays and lesbians were up to, it’s very thin; there’s very little. It was dangerous for them to record their lives. They didn’t want to keep records because it could be used against them.
Most records that were kept were newspapers, which treated queer people as freaks, morally degenerate, or mentally ill. It was rarely a positive portrayal. You have to dig a lot and, sometimes, fill in the gaps. I had to invent this club called Crocodile Tears that appears in Dodging and Burning and Hall of Mirrors because I needed a space for gay men and women to interact. You have characters of color mingling with white characters in the space, which was honestly rare because even gay bars were often segregated. It was important to have a safe space not only for narrative reasons, but because I believe that those spaces did exist in the time period. There isn’t always information, so that’s where fiction plays a big role.
In what ways do you think your novels contribute to the broader conversation about LGBTQ+ representation in literature?
My novels are in the crime fiction category; they’re mysteries and thrillers. My hope is that I’m showing there can be sophistication in the writing of queer lives in this sub-genre. Historically, for marginalized folks, there’s this prejudice that we are lesser as humans, which shifts over into our work, so people might think gay men can’t really write crime fiction. We proved that is biased, terrible thinking. I just want to write excellent crime fiction in my category. By having these characters populate the world, my hope is that people see that there’s more in my sub-genre that hasn’t been explored, and, by allowing crime writers of color or queer crime writers to write and promote their books, it will show there’s an appetite for those stories in fiction.
What is your approach to teaching students? Are there common mistakes you’ve seen made by students new to writing?
My approach is to tailor my instruction to what the student needs. I listen to what they want to learn about, and identify, perhaps, what they want to improve on, and then work with them to develop their craft. In terms of common mistakes, the one thing I’ve noticed these days more than anything is an interest in action and storyline, but not always character depth and building out deep, complex, emotional lives. I think that comes from watching a lot of TV or sound-byte entertainment. Fiction’s magic power is to go deep and help us understand the emotional complexity of characters, while also telling a great story. That’s more common in younger writers, while older writers think a lot about character, but where’s the story? That goes back to tailoring to what the writer needs, and I think that’s the fun and challenge of teaching.
What has been your experience attending and participating in different writing conventions and conferences? Do you have any upcoming appearances?
I’ll be attending Bouchercon at the end of August in Nashville, and that’s the biggest mystery writers convention in the U.S., if not the world. I’m part of an event there which is promoting awareness about book bannings, (and) I’ll be reading from a banned book. These conferences are so important for creating community amongst writers, no matter the genre. Next March, I’ll be the toastmaster at Left Coast Crime in Denver. It’s one of my favorite smaller crime-writing conferences, and I’m very excited to have such a big role in it. Definitely check it out.
How do you see the crime/thriller genre evolving over the next decade, particularly with more diverse voices being included as influences?
I think with more diversity comes more richness of a topic. Crime fiction has always been about seeking justice. When thinking about traditional mysteries by Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle, they’re structured in a way that suggests disruption to the norm, and the detective’s job is to restore order. When pulling at issues around social justice and equity, we may not be looking at restoring an old order, but building to a new order that pushes back against racism, patriarchal notions, misogyny, homophobia, and so on. Crime fiction can suggest new order. There are people who resist that and find it threatening, writers and readers alike. More readers than not are embracing and thinking deeply about that concept, and those are the readers I write for.
What are your thoughts on Generative AI and Language Learning Models being used in creative writing, and what ethical considerations do you think should be made when writers choose to use AI in their work?
I think AI has a potential to be a great tool, but a tool that we should be in control of and one that’s not in control of us. There are ways AI can assist writers, whether it’s researching, brainstorming, breaking through a wall when we don’t know how to articulate or imagine an idea. The problem is that we can’t then become lazy and rely on it to do the work for us. We ask it to do something, but then we have to be critical of what it spits back out at us, and then mold it and shape it to make it ours. If you tell it to write you a short story, and it spits out a horrible short story, which it will spit out a horrible short story, it sounds good enough, but it’s going to be empty.
There’s a soullessness to AI writing, and if you become reliant upon it writing for you, then you’re putting out soulless work. I don’t know why you would want to do that as a creative artist; there’s much better ways of making money. But there are other writers that are anti-ever using it, that using it taints your work, and I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of it either. It can help; it can be assistive technology, but you have to be in charge, telling it what to do and being critical of it. Don’t assume that what it puts out is correct or well-written. As an educator, I think we should teach students how to use it in an ethical way, similar to how we teach them not to plagiarize. I do have problems with feeding it copyrighted work. I consider that a copyright violation. That benefits the machine but does not benefit the artist, and I do have a hard line about that and think that should be regulated.
The third installment of the Nightingale Trilogy is yet to come, but do you see yourself exploring something different in future work? Would you stick to writing in the mid-20th century as a setting or break out into something a little more unfamiliar?
I always say that I’m accidentally a historical fiction writer. I didn’t set out to write it; I was drawn to the look and feel of the time period. Who knows what the future holds, but once I wrap up the trilogy, I’m moving onto ideas that are actually not historical. While there might always be a crime thread in my work, as an artist, I want to experiment with different forms, different voices, different time periods. I think there will always be a centering of queer perspectives and dealing with injustices and complex moral questions in my work, but how I go about analyzing and writing those may change, and I hope that readers will follow me along those lines.
John Copenhaver’s novels Dodging and Burning, The Savage Kind, and new release Hall of Mirrors are available now!
Featured image courtesy of John Copenhaver.
