Q&A with Laura Venita Green

 

Photo by Sylvie Rosokoff

 

 

Laura Venita Green is the author of the new novel Sister Creatures. Also a translator, she lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Sister Creatures, and how did you create your cast of characters?

 

A: I started Sister Creatures in 2019 after several years of practicing fiction but never actually finishing a project. Very early on, I knew I would see this book through.

 

I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters, about who they were and what they were going through. Since I wrote most of this book during the pandemic, they became as real to me as most of my friends and family.

 

I’d turned away from strictly realist writing and allowed myself to write speculative elements and get weird, which seems to better suit my abilities and interests.

 

Each of the characters started out with their own individual story. Tess, in an unhappy marriage, moved to Germany with her family. Olivia fell in love with an older co-worker. Lainey felt torn between living her own life and caring for her sister. Gail met her doppelgänger in New York City. Thea, deep in the woods, kept shifting forms in her unquenchable desire for more.

 

Then I worked to understand how these women and their stories were related, filling in the blanks and fitting everything together like puzzle pieces. The first chapter is one of the last chapters I wrote. I think it really sings because I already understood where each of these women would end up.

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Oh, the title! Such a journey. When I started really understanding the shape of this novel back in 2020, I thought of it as The Strays. However, when I was querying agents in February 2024, the live action talking dog movie, Strays, had recently come out, and I no longer wanted to use that title.

 

For lack of a better idea, I queried my novel under the title Stuck. Then when I first met with my fantastic agent (Chad Luibl with Janklow & Nesbit), he was very enthusiastic about the book, but then said, “My only issue is, don’t you think this book should be called The Strays?” Ha!

 

My Publishers Marketplace deal report lists my book as Strays, but soon after acquisition, my editor at Unnamed Press, Chris Heiser, wanted to brainstorm for something more original.

 

I wrote down 25 options (ex. Thea, Jesus and Booze, For the First Time She Knew Love), and presented him with a few, including Women and Other Creatures. I thought the word “creature” nicely captured the odd and eerie tone of my book. Then Chad suggested Sistercreature (the title of my penultimate chapter).

 

Finally, Chris brought all the suggestions to his team, and they settled on Sister Creatures, which they felt sounded right for the book and the world it creates, and they saw it immediately on the cover.

 

Of course, now I can’t imagine my book with any other title. I think it does a lot of work and encompasses the whole cast the way The Strays did but is much more memorable.

 

It references the actual sisters in the book, the women called “Sister” due to their religious upbringing, the entity that shapeshifts throughout. All of the women in this book are sister creatures linked by place and circumstance.

 

Q: The writer Ann Napolitano called the book a “creative whirlwind that takes leaps with gusto to investigate whether we can carry the past with grace, or must sink under its weight.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Ann was my very first creative writing teacher back in 2012, and she taught me so much about craft, about hard work and persistence, and the value of honoring my own obsessions, no matter how strange. It’s been such a joy reading her books and watching her career take off over these many years.

 

It was incredibly generous of her to provide advance praise for my book (essential, especially for a debut author), and to read my book with such care.

 

I think this description is very astute. My book ranges from the real to the speculative and it’s difficult to categorize (depending on the reviewer, I’ve seen it categorized as literary, gothic, or horror).

 

And one major thing the entire cast has in common is their strong desire to move forward, to push beyond what their life has thus far afforded them, though each one is weighed down to varying degrees by their past circumstances and mistakes.

 

Q: The novel centers around a town in Louisiana--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: Pinecreek, Louisiana, is a fictionalized version of the Louisiana town where I grew up from age 8 to 18—Rosepine. The setting has proven to be incredibly important to my writing. It’s the place where my imagination naturally drifts when I sit down to write.

 

Even when I set a chapter in a different place, the setting informs my characters. Wherever they’re actually existing in the world, they’re still from a conservative area in the Bible Belt where everyone knows everyone else’s business.

 

Where the people are just as intelligent as anywhere else despite limited educational and cultural opportunities. Where people talk a certain way and are taught to think a certain way. Where there’s a lot of beauty and opportunity to connect with the natural world.

 

I lived in Texas for 20 years and New York City for the past six years, and yet neither of these places light up my imagination the way Rosepine does.

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a couple different novel ideas. One is set in the same place as Sister Creatures—Pinecreek, Louisiana—and follows a few of the minor cast members who never left this small town.

 

Another follows an entirely new cast and is set at a remote institute for artists and scholars tentatively set in the Catskills (I worked on this idea in 2024 with Blair Hurley through the Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop 10-Month Manuscript program, which I’d recommend to anyone who needs support in drafting a novel).

 

Both ideas are too early to delve into, but I find myself consistently exploring themes of obsession and betrayal, the risks of real human connection, the ways in which we become different people as we go through life, and the question of what we owe to each other versus what we owe to ourselves.

 

I’m pretty relaxed about making progress on these projects during this year of debut novel publication and promotion (I find that it’s important to cut myself some slack during this process). But on Jan. 1, 2026, I’m going to insist that I choose one and get back into my daily writing practice.

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I spent most of my first eight years of life living on army bases in Germany, and this informs my writing almost as much as Louisiana. It’s a fairly unique experience, entering the rural South from overseas, coming as an outsider into a place where most people are born and raised and stay for life.

 

In Sister Creatures, people speak German, try to learn German, translate German, become haunted by a disturbing German 18th century children’s book.

 

One thing I love about fiction is how you can put two seemingly disparate elements side by side, let your brain work out the connections, and in this way, make something wholly original. Plus, there’s some ineffable creepy, magical, glorious quality of both Louisiana and Germany that I find matches up quite well.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb