More than a few readers nominated Jameson Currier’s The Wolf at the Door for a 2014 LGBT Book Gem. I asked him to give us readers a little of the story behind the novel.
The Wolf at the Door, my novel set in a haunted gay-owned guesthouse in the French Quarter of New Orleans, was begun in 2003, after several visits to New Orleans, including participating in the annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival and taking innumerable walking tours throughout the French Quarter, Garden District, and local cemeteries. At the time I started writing the novel I was also writing several ghost short stories, all with gay characters, gay situations or gay themes. I read more than 1,000 ghost stories to understand the craft, technique, and style of literary ghost stories and to sharpen the themes I wanted to present in my own. What I liked about New Orleans was its rich sense of history in its everyday life. I finished my final draft of the novel on Sunday, August 28, 2005, the evening before Hurricane Katrina landed ashore in Louisiana. It was apparent to me in the ensuing days that this would be a manuscript that I would have to put aside because of the unfolding tragedy and aftermath of the hurricane. I continued to work on other ghost stories set in difference locales and these stories were collected as The Haunted Heart and Other Tales. By 2010, when I launched Chelsea Station Editions, a small press devoted to gay literature, New Orleans was back on its feet and I decided the first book the new press would publish would be The Wolf at the Door. [Read more…] about The Wolf at the Door
When I give readings and talks about The Boy I Love trilogy of novels, I am sometimes asked why, as a heterosexual woman, I wanted to write about homosexual men. I answer that it was accidental, a way into a plot: I’d started a novel and it seemed to me that it didn’t have enough drama, there had to be more conflict, more struggle and interest. It occurred to me that if the central character was a gay man then there would be more for him to overcome and therefore more for me to write about.
In 2010, I met writer, Victoria Zackheim, editor of The Other Woman, at a local writer’s conference. I was immediately fascinated by her book of essays and asked if anyone had considered editing an anthology on the subject from the male viewpoint. To Victoria’s knowledge, no one had written a follow up and she immediately gave me her blessings to edit the gay companion to her wonderful book.
When I started writing The Road to London, in the very same gay club mentioned in the novel, I was blessed with having no idea about what I was writing: while dancing away, words just started coming to me… I say blessed, because that may have felt like a rather daunting and, at times, ‘spooky’ experience, not knowing where you are going with a story, having no clue about what will happen to the characters and not having a ‘plan’ for her did not give me any control over her birth, on the other hand it gave me the freedom to follow the novel and not force her to fit in with my intentions. The Road to London wanted her freedom from the start. 
But can we find a time when and a place where LGBTQs were fully equal to the other humans they lived with? In the Western world we often look to ancient Greece and Rome for acceptance of LGBTQs. But when we confront the details, we find something other than acceptance and equality.