Laura McHale Holland was so captivated by San Francisco’s gorgeous vistas and vibrant, free-spirited people during the 1970s that a planned two-week visit stretched into 30 years. This experience inspired her newest novel, Shinbone Lane, a place where magic blends with reality and secrets heal, haunt and transform lives.
A recipient of several independent publishing awards, Laura writes stories that bend reality, often featuring characters whose lives have gone terribly wrong but are ultimately redeemable. She now lives in Sonoma County, California, where she continues stretching reality at her keyboard, a pot of strong black tea always nearby. For more info about Laura, please visit her website.
About Shinbone Lane
For reasons they can’t quite explain, the lost always find themselves on Shinbone Lane…
San Francisco, 1974. Sixteen-year-old runaway Maddy is escaping the blame for a crime she didn’t commit. Miles from home, she is taken under the wing of the elderly Clara and her neighbor Ted, and soon finds a place among the kaleidoscope of personalities on the oddly named Shinbone Lane.
Ted’s three-story Italianate Victorian house overflows with travelers, free spirits, and artists. His backyard is a haven for all who are willing to see its magic. But burdened dancer Eloise Watkins can’t tolerate the transient “riffraff” in her neighborhood. Their frivolity flies in the face of her grief over a dear friend long lost and her daughter gone missing. And nobody understands.
But like all who tread on it, Shinbone Lane has secrets of its own. And like all secrets, they lie uneasily in the dark, until the truth emerges to lay the past to rest. At the intersection of magic and reality lies Shinbone Lane and its lively cast of characters who intertwine in the mesmerizing brew of life.
Would you rather own a bookstore or run a library?
I would love to own a bookstore with a cafe just like North Light Books and Cafe in Cotati, California. It was founded by two women who loved good books, good food made with local ingredients when possible, and community.
In addition to their range of tasty breakfast and lunch offerings, they hosted a weekly open mic, frequent author readings, and musical and other events that people would brave all kinds of weather to attend. No lie. One December evening, with torrents of rain pelting down, so many of us crowded in to hear a local singer perform that the floor became slick from our dripping umbrellas, coats and boots.
I was lucky to have had my first book launch party at North Light. They also featured my book alongside an assortment of traditionally and independently published books.
But alas, after decades in business, the women retired. They sold the business to someone who tried to keep it going but didn’t have their spirit or skills. She soon closed the cafe, stopped carrying books by local authors and focused almost exclusively on texts for the college crowd, which had been only one part of the business before. She moved to a sterile storefront near the Sonoma State campus and soon went out of business.
The old space was empty for years. I would stop and look inside when doing errands, and wish I had the means to open a bookstore and cafe right there to carry on the legacy.
An Acme Burger occupies the spot now. It has none of North Light’s charm, but it’s been in business for a number of years, so I guess it’s serving a different sort of need in the community.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it to be turned into a movie or series?
Definitely a series. I must confess I spend way too much time streaming content, primarily from Netflix and Hulu. I watch movies and documentaries, but I am drawn more to fictional limited series. You get to have extended time with the characters in a series, learn about their backgrounds and motivations, and see them in varied situations as the story builds to a climax.
I particularly like series in which the community itself is an important element and where some of the characters are endearing, the kind of folks I’d like to know. This allows for negative things to happen without dragging the story down because there’s a balance between good and evil.
I enjoy dark series like Untamed and those with less of an edge like Virgin River and Sullivan’s Crossing. Both of my novels, The Kiminee Dream, set in a small town in Illinois, and Shinbone Lane, set on a quaint, unpaved lane in San Francisco, are more about the community shifting and coalescing than one individual’s journey. I could imagine a series creator really digging into those settings and the characters living within them.
Who would you most want to read your book, living or dead?
My parents. They were both deceased by the time I was eleven years old. They never got to see my sisters and me through life’s traditional milestones—graduations, jobs, marriages, births of children, travel adventures. They didn’t get to help me through the many wrong turns I took in my youth and young adult years. They didn’t get to see me pull out of a negative, debilitating frame of mind and begin to enjoy life.
The thought of them holding one of my books in their hands hits me in the gut. I rarely wish for things that can never be, but sometimes these longings take hold.
One of my uncles lived long enough to enjoy my work. He relished my first book, Reversible Skirt, a memoir of my childhood years. He mostly read newspapers and magazines, but when he received my memoir in the mail, he stayed up all night reading it. That opened a dialogue about difficult early days in my family, and we were close until the end of his life just a few years ago.
Who is on your Mt. Rushmore of greatest/inspirational authors?
The list of authors I most revere shifts over time, so I don’t have a fixed Mt. Rushmore of greatest/inspirational authors. Once I love an author, I never stop loving them. But I continue to discover authors whose work feeds something in me or stirs my imagination in new ways.
Right now, Brian Doyle is on my list. His novel Chicago inspired me to write my first novel. His prose is lyrical and full of reverence for ordinary people and places. His blend of humor, spirituality and love unstated but ever-present was such a gift to read. I want to give readers the same kind of experience.
Claire Keegan is at the top, too. I return to her novella Foster often for inspiration. The text is pared down, yet so emotionally resonant. Her recent novella Small Things Like These is equally powerful.
Rene Denfeld also belongs on my list. Her novel The Enchanted left me breathless. It’s a haunting and deeply humane story set on death row. It’s narrated by a man who sees the world in strange and beautiful ways. If she’d never written another novel, she’d still be on my list. Luckily, she continues to write and manages to explore darkness with startling tenderness and lyricism.
Then there’s Eowyn Ivey, whose first novel, The Snow Child, was a Pulitzer finalist. I found it in a Little Free Library, and when I finished reading, I knew I’d keep it on my bookshelf for as long as I have a shelf.
The novel blends historical fiction with fairy tale magic. It’s immersive and laced with wonder, qualities that captivate me. Her second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, also impressed me. Her newest novel came out this year, and I can’t wait to read it.
Is there an idea that a non-writer has pitched to you that you have written or considered writing?
A few early readers of Shinbone Lane told me they didn’t want to leave the story and the characters behind. They asked for a sequel. I’d been drafting scenes for a new novel set near the turn of the 21st century in a small Northern California town, but the idea of a sequel intrigues me. I hadn’t thought of doing one.
Writing a sequel presents new kinds of challenges. I’ve begun drafting scenes for a sequel, and I’ll see this project through to a first draft. Then I’ll decide whether it’s worth refining through more drafts to become a publishable novel.
I don’t know yet whether I can meet the various challenges a sequel presents such as, how do you cover things that happened in the first novel so they’re not redundant to folks who read it but also provide enough information for folks who didn’t read the first one? How do you pick which characters to give the most attention to in the sequel? What sorts of new characters should enter?
That’s in addition to figuring out what should happen, why it should happen, and what the main point is, which you have to keep in mind when writing any story. I like the idea of taking on a new challenge.
I’m just in the we’ll see how it goes phase right now as I wend my way through the first draft. If I can get in gear, I could have a draft in about six months. With all the strife in the world weighing on me and most everyone I know right now, though, I may plod through the initial draft over the course of a year or more.
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