Photo by Brian Oglesbee
Megan Staffel is the author of the new novel The Causative Factor. Her other books include the novel The Notebook of Lost Things. She lives in Brooklyn and in Western New York State.
Q: What inspired you to write The Causative Factor, and how did you create your characters Rachel and Rubiat?
A: The novel was inspired by a walk I took in October 2020 in a small state park south of Dansville, New York, called Stoney Brook. At its center is a deep gorge, created eons ago by the action of water on layers of shale.
It was a cool October day after a rainstorm so the stream at the bottom of the gorge was full of water. The lower trail, along the rocky stream bed, was closed and only the rim trail, up at the top of the gorge, was accessible.
At the highest point, I noticed that the chain link fence prohibiting people from climbing out to the precipice was only waist high and I thought that if someone were determined they could easily vault it. I wondered who would do such a thing.
The second bit of inspiration was a memory. Many years ago, a friend of mine injured his ankle in one of his daring, late-night exploits when he jumped across a chasm in an abandoned area along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.
That stuck in my mind and I began to think about how some people are risk-averse and others are the opposite, risk-seeking. My character Rubiat, a person who is at the mercy of impulse, falls into the latter category.
Rachel is a blend of myself when I was going to art school and wanted to be a painter, as well as my mother who was a well-established painter.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between them?
A: Rachel is initially repulsed by Rubiat, an argumentative classmate in her foundations class at art school. She finds him too loud, too much of a show-off, but when they’re paired in a class project, she changes her opinion of him and actually starts to feel such a strong physical attraction she initiates sex.
Over time, her opinion of him shifts back and forth between love and anger while Rubiat’s interest in Rachel is steady and only grows stronger.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen and what does it signify for you?
A: The causative factor is a term used by classical Chinese five element acupuncturists. I learned about it from my husband, who is a practitioner.
The acupuncturist tries to identify, among the five elements—water, wood, fire, metal, earth—which is the underlying factor that determines a person’s personality. It has colored the way I think about people, including my characters, and as a writer I believe it gives me insight into a character’s motivations.
Five element acupuncture is more prevalent in England than it is in the U.S., so I thought the instructor who is a visiting artist from England teaching at the school Rachel and Rubiat are attending would probably be familiar with the term and find it as illuminating as I do.
I used it as a title for the book because the project he assigns the paired students—to discover each other’s causative factor—is what sets everything in motion.
Q: The writer Marisa Silver says of the book, “Megan Staffel writes as gorgeously and movingly about the psychological legacies that inform our choices as she does about the way in which art and a deep attunement to nature allow us to create ourselves anew.” What do you think of that description?
A: I was pleased! She managed to touch on all of the novel’s themes in one sentence!
I especially appreciated her recognition that while practicing art was extraordinarily helpful for Rachel in the beginning, stability in the long term was the result of a deep connection with the natural world—walking, camping, observing—and, in the end, learning respect for the sovereignty of a wild landscape.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m looking forward to a quieter period after the book’s release when I can get back to a writing project I had only just begun when the flurry of the more practical writing and social media involvement geared to the book’s publication interrupted. The new project will be a novel and like this one, it will be based on a mystery.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: In addition to fiction, I have been writing a blog which I just transferred to a free Substack newsletter called Page and Story. It’s a monthly publication for writers and readers where I focus on a recently published novel or story I love and show how the elements of story craft make it a compelling read.
Anyone who’s interested can subscribe at this link: https://pageandstory.substack.com/?utm_source=global-search
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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