When you decide to become a novelist, what causes you to choose certain subjects and discard others? I think that much of what influences us is unconscious — preoccupations that steep in our minds for years before suddenly emerging in our work. For example, the first three and a half years of my life, I lived in a  1740s mansion  of twenty-seven rooms in St. Cloud, outside Paris. I only partially remember this mansion — the central marble staircase that I actually crawled up and down, but I am aware that this experience instilled in me the desire to live in a big house.

As to my writing, it’s only when I look at my two published works that I see that castles or manor houses are integral to the plots. In fact, in An Improbable Companion, a  mansion house is actually a character in the novel.

Magic is a second enduring influence. My family moved back to New York City when I was three and a half.  My second-grade reader was a book of fairytales, and one wonderful afternoon I started pouring through this book, the words no longer difficult abstractions to sound out but fascinating entries into magical worlds. I went on to read every book of fairytales in the Queens Public Library.

There was a period when I actively believed that my dolls awoke at midnight and played in my bedroom. This fiction lasted until I was nine when I reluctantly decided this probably was not happening.  But I  have always endowed things that I owned with personalities. The sense that inanimate objects, such as my dishes or my favorite clothes, had personalities and had to be befriended is with me still.

At age ten, I wrote and illustrated a book of fairy tales.

Telling myself stories out loud  as well as writing them down was something that a sometimes-lonely only child did to keep herself amused. My father said that in the mornings he would pass me  on his way to the subway, while I dawdled on my one block walk to PS 69 in Jackson Heights. 

“You’re going to be late, Steffi,” he would chide me, but I answered, “I’m telling myself a story and I have to see how it turns out.” I still tell stories, but now I do it in bars and storytelling events.

My father traveled to Mexico City constantly during my childhood in New York, and my mother and I often went with him in the summers. When I was twelve, he was transferred to the Mexico City, and  from twelve to nearly eighteen, we lived in Mexico’s capital.

Moving to Mexico introduced me to magic of a different kind — the magical realism of Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Jose Luis Borges, and a bit later, Isabel Allende. I didn’t neglect fiction about other alternate realities, delighting in “Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural”, and so many more.

But for years it did not consciously occur to me to write about magic or include it in my novel attempts. Then several things happened which reawakened my interest both in magic and in adding animals to my books. The first was author Jane Smiley. In 2000, she came out with a book called Horse Heaven. It’s about horse racing and has multiple characters, human, horse and dog. Ms. Smiley did not create magical horses. Each was a realistic animal, but she brought them to life and imbued them with such distinctive personalities that I was really enchanted. It remains one of my ten favorite novels. Immediately after reading it, I began imagining creating an animal character in my own work although it took me a long time to actually do this.

As to magical realism, it’s authors have long been revered. But I did not conceive of my first  magical realism novel until a chance trip to the movies.

“Stranger than Fiction” is the delightfully odd story of a truly ordinary IRS adjuster who suddenly wakes to hear a voice in his head describing his every movement in his life. In addition,  the man’s watch constantly tries to communicate with him. It eventually saves his life, although he never hears it. Sitting in that darkened theater I suddenly thought, “but what if he COULD hear the object? What would life be like for a person who could speak with things? And that, blended with my tendency to anthropomorphize objects, is how my novel The Lives of Things was conceived.

In 2022, my husband and I moved from the Chicago area to Upstate New York, a gorgeous mountainous region filled with historic homes. It’s no accident that my novel, An Improbable Companion is set there. 

As the plot  of An Improbable Companion began to emerge for me, the presence of a large and extraordinary dog insistently demanded to be added. I researched  what clever dogs can do and made my canine protagonist brilliant in ways that, so far at least, do  not seem possible in real life. But you never know. As scientists study animals in greater depth, most of them are revealed to be smarter than we ever imagined. One day my novel may not be seen as magical at all, simply ahead of its time in predicting the inner judgements of our canine best friends.