Happy book birthday to Poetic Justice, the latest title from writing duo Kathleen McFall and Clark Hays! 

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to sit down with Kathleen McFall, one of the genius authors behind novels such as The Cowboy and the Vampire, as well as a co-founder of Pumpjack Press. We got to talking about their latest release, how a writing duo writes, eco-activism, and their new collective publishing effort with Pumpjack.

This interview is the second in the Green Hearts series (which is in turn part of the Green Romance Marketing Collective) where I connect with romance authors who incorporate environmental themes in their work. Sit back and enjoy!

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LE: I am so delighted to have met you! 

KM: Thanks, glad to meet you, too.

LE: Your next book, Poetic Justice, launches on October 22nd.How does this title fits in with the Restaurantland series?

KM: Poetic Justice takes place in a fictional restaurant in Portland, Oregon in the mid 1990s, the Rose and Thorn. It’s inspired by a real place called The Old Wives’ Tales that no longer exists, but it’s the place where Clark and I met. He was a chef and I was a server. It was an extraordinary place, way ahead of its time. I was a single mom at the time. I went in for an interview and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t ever work nights.” In most places, that would’ve been fully disqualifying, but there it wasn’t. They said, “We’ll make it work for you.” It saved my life. Then, a week later, I met Clark. 

Like the real place that inspired the books, the fictional restaurant is a really funky, wonderful place where all kinds of quirky people work, and from that cast of characters, we draw a single love story for each book. The first book was about Kassi and Clay. Kassi is a single mom, and it was very loosely based on our story. The second book is about two characters, Roz and Hudson, who were introduced in the first book. 

Part of the excitement about setting a book in a restaurant is that it’s really intense. There are people bumping into each other in the kitchen, light touches, there’s flirtation. New people are being added all the time. There’s the post-shift drink and meals together. It adds to this constant intensity that lends itself really well to romantic stories.

LE: Talk to me about the nostalgia of a book set in the 90s.

KM: Romance is timeless, but the tools of romance change in every era. We’re currently in a very technologically-heavy era. Romance is linked with texting, with social media, with dating apps, and it’s pretty fast.

Back in the 90s, when those tools didn’t exist, romance was a little slower. You wrote letters to each other, you stuck poems in someone’s pay stub, or you left something on a napkin as someone was paying their bill. There’s a certain kind of appeal to that—a bit of an escape from the digital world, a slowing things down and getting to the essence of the romance. That doesn’t mean romance now is any less exciting or wonderful. But the 90s were the tipping point when technology was coming into being. We’re writing about these wonderful, quirky characters as they slowly begin to adapt technology. 

LE: Can you elaborate on the romantic allure of restaurants in books (which is obviously a thing!)?

KM: There’s something very seductive about cooking, about talking about cooking, the movements associated with cooking and bringing together certain ingredients, which really, in a way, is a metaphor for romance, and bringing all those ingredients together until you get just exactly the right outcome. 

LE: Tell me about the environmental activism elements in this book.

KM: In the 90s and early 2000s, there was quite an eco-activism movement in Oregon and the West Coast in general. A large group of people who were setting fires and committing property vandalism gained quite a bit of notoriety. Their goal was to wake people up to the dangers of climate change. Most of these actions took place at SUV dealerships. Clark and I care about these issues, although, of course, we’re certainly against what came to be known as eco-terrorism. Back in that era, I was a young reporter, and I became engaged in a story about these eco-activists. I was able to visit several of them in prison, and I had this enormous amount of research. 

Romance is timeless, but the tools of romance change in every era.

That’s the growth of our main character Hudson in Poetic Justice, who becomes implicated in that because of an adjacent activity, and serves in prison unjustly. [The book depicts] how the MC grows over time to recognize that it was not effective and what might actually be effective going forward. It’s got a real authenticity factor that I think is really grounded in what happened here, and I think maybe helps unravel a little bit about what it was and what motivated people at the time.

LE: Who does what of the writing in your writing duo? What is your process?

KM: The first book we wrote was called The Cowboy and the Vampire. At that time, we had a very fiery initial romance ourselves, and we had broken up and were determined to try again. We decided that the way to test the strength of our relationship was to write a book together. We set up a process that still works to this day, which is that we each write a chapter and then we switch back and forth. We have a basic outline, and we know where that chapter begins and where that chapter ends. We keep going back and forth like that, and then we swap the whole manuscript back and forth until we have a seamless voice between the two of us. 

We always kind of joke that between the two of us, we’re one good writer. We have different strengths that we bring to the writing process. Clark is really funny. He has an extremely good sense of humor and he’s just got a really clever wit that he brings to the writing. I tend to be a little more serious and I bring the more metaphysical, philosophical elements to the writing. We’re interested in having fun together and that in the end the book is exciting, entertaining, but also has a social justice underpinning.

LE: Why did you decide to start Pumpjack Press?

KM: Like you, we were traditionally published. The first edition of The Cowboy and the Vampire was published by a mid-size publisher. It was a pretty great experience. After the second edition came out, we wanted to learn to become experts in the tools of publishing and distribution and we did that with our own books. Poetic Justice will be our 12^th book.

But now we’ve reached a point where we have that collective expertise and we’re interested in expanding that to a cooperative publishing model that we don’t really see out there. We see the traditional publishing model, the lone self-publishing model, and the hybrid—where people pay, in my view, extraordinarily large sums of money to be published under someone else’s brand. The traditional and the hybrid models are very much, except for a few breakout exceptions, designed to make a lot of money from authors, not for authors.

We always kind of joke that between the two of us, we’re one good writer.

We thought that we would try to develop a fourth model, which is a cooperative approach in which all the rights and royalties remain with the authors. We have a community of authors working together, publishing as an indie publisher, but under the brand of Pumpjack Press. The costs associated with that are only for us to cover the costs of running the press. It’s not to make money off of authors—that’s our main core philosophy going forward. We’re interested in [a model] where we’re all sharing expertise with each other in order to amplify the visibility and potentially the career and sales of our authors.

LE: How many artists can you take on each year?

KM: We’re very much at the beginning. I could see us taking on 10 to 20 manuscripts in the first year and having it grow. It just depends on how it goes and what kind of additional staffing or other types of support might be needed to make it grow. We’re interested in seeing if the tenants of what I’ve outlined are feasible and effective. 

There are lots of different ways to become successful that aren’t part of the traditional model. And I think that’s where people of our size and our intent need to focus our energies—not trying to mimic something that we’re never going to have the scope or the resources to mimic.

LE: How many artists have already collaborated with you?

KM: We’re at four at this point, and there are several in the queue. Honestly, I think that the biggest challenge for something like this is author education. People need to come into a model like this and not say, ‘Okay, I’m going to sell thousands and thousands of copies.’ A lot of it just depends on luck. Everybody thinks that a great review and a particular publication will sell a lot of books. It’s word of mouth, and that’s a little bit more ephemeral in terms of how you generate that word of mouth.

LE: That seems especially true in today’s landscape where social media has become the vortex by which word of mouth is distributed. That’s a challenge.

KM: It’s a challenge also because people don’t really like to be sold to. You really have to find a third party—which I think is the goal of the collective—who say, ‘I love this book. Here’s why.’ The author saying, ‘Hey, please love my book’ doesn’t really work. 

LE: Exactly! What are your future hopes for the press? 

KM: I would love to see a community of like-minded authors supporting each other, and that the website and social media presence and the digital footprint basically is broad and comfortably able to share information about new titles, old titles, back lists. I’d feel good about that. It also can’t overwhelm my own creative work. I’d be equally happy if it’s just exactly where it is right now too, with just us publishing our own work and a few other colleagues. I think it’s about defining that this is a tool that helps us live a creative life, and hopefully it might help others live that creative life as well.

LE: Vanity presses don’t really care about quality. Hybrid publishers are a mirror rather than a model of support, and I think that’s important. This is an artist’s collective model.

KM: Exactly. The key part for us is that all rights and royalties remain with the author. We’re not seeking to have any long-term interest or profit interest in any author’s work. We want them to have all of that interest.

LE: Can you tell me about the next writing project for McFall and Hays?

KM: It’s the third book in the Restaurantland series, about a pastry chef who was just hired at the Rose and Thorn. Unlike many people, she learns her skills in a culinary institute, which has its own reputation in the restaurant circles. She’s involved in a love triangle with two other people, one of whom is a big shot in New York, working on what is the beginnings of the Food Network. The other is still working in Portland as a cook. The story is about how the three of them, and how—and who—she chooses in the end.

LE: That sounds absolutely fantastic! What is your projected timeline to get this out?

KM: Sometime in mid-2025.

LE: How can people get to know more about your books and Pumpjack press?

KM: Visit the website. There’s a description of the cooperative model, bio information about Clark and me. All the titles are there at the Pumpjack Press store, and are also available on sales platforms across the web.

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Get your copy of Poetic Justice at the Pumpjack store, Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your favorite book vendor.

The interview was conducted as part of the Green Romance Marketing Collective. Are you an author and interested in being interviewed? Learn more about the collective here.