Q&A With Sharon Butala 

Mickey Mikkelson connected me with author Sharon Butala, who’s written over 24 works of fiction, nonfiction, essays, articles, poetry as well as 5 plays! Sharon’s recent release is the novel Struck In The Heart! 

Q: Welcome to Book Notions Sharon! Would you please give a brief description of your books beginning with Struck In The Heart?

A: I have always been a serious literary author until I wrote Struck In The Heart, and entered the ranks of the genre fiction writers, in this case, suspense and thrillers (not mystery though. My readers know whodunit). My hero, Rick Phillips, is not entirely a good guy, but he isn’t a fully evil villain either. He loves his family, especially his 13-year-old son and his little girl. Nonetheless, the plot and action of this novel mostly come out of his failures, weaknesses and immaturity. The setting is the Covid crisis where Covid becomes a character too (not just background). Rick takes his family from their home city, Radiance, to a place he and his wife believe will keep them safe from Covid: Rick’s mom and dad’s remote, very large and prosperous family farm where Rick’s secret life and the consequences of his previous actions begin to come home to roost. Deaths begin to happen – accident, murder, suicide – fear, and then chaos make their unyielding appearances. The family’s quick run back to the city only makes the situation worse. His son’s life is at profound risk. Rick struggles to rescue himself first, then his family. Is it too late? Or will he only lose everything he loves while he sinks deeper into crime and its endless consequences?

My other novels are mostly about the lives of the rural, agricultural people, especially the women, of the southern Canadian Great Plains where I lived (on a cattle ranch) for 33 years only ten miles from the Montana-Saskatchewan border. My nonfiction books are mostly about the history and the people and of the three prairie provinces. My last novel in this series is Leaving Wisdom  (Thistledown Press, 2023), and having said what I wanted to say, I turned to something different. Struck in the Heart is the first of these novels and my new novel I’m still working on is different territory too.

Q: How long does it take you to write your books, poetry and essays? What are important messages you hope readers take away from your writing?

A: It takes me on average about two years to write my novels and my nonfiction books. I no longer write poetry because when a good idea came to me, I hated to ‘use it up’ in six or eight lines when I could explore it deeply in a book-length work. And I didn’t have the gift of lyricism – or so I thought – that true poets have. This decision is a very old one. I ‘ve always been a deeply focused person – less now that I’m old, or perhaps it’s better to say that my level of focus is mostly deeper than most non-creatives. But unfortunately, age does take its toll and these days it is taking me longer to write a novel.

Essays take a few months usually. And I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I do mountains of research. Once I wrote a 27-page essay and then re-wrote the whole thing from an entirely different angle and reduced it to only 16 pages. Sometimes, with essays, that’s how it works. You have to write the pre-essay to get to the real essay – for me, anyway. I’m referring to This Strange Visible Air: Aging and the Writing Life (Freehand Books, 2021) and the essay, “The murder remains unsolved.” 

As an aside, I spent ten years of my life investigating and writing the nonfiction book, The Girl in Saskatoon (HarperCollins Canada, 2008) about the 1962 unsolved murder of a high school friend in Saskatoon that has always, and continues, to captivate the whole city. What I learned! About police and ‘the bad old days,’ about kids I used to know about lies and lying, about jealousy, about selfishness. The book title comes from a song Johnny Cash wrote and sang to the woman in question (she was being crowned by him as a beauty queen) and who, just a year or two later, at 23 years, was beaten, her face caved in and her skull also, raped, and buried in a shallow grave while unconscious but still alive.

I hope that my readers will take from my writings the idea that we are all only human, that the unspeakable is not unspeakable after all and that to write the ‘unspeakable’ as I am known for doing in my nonfiction and especially in my three memoirs (The Perfection of the Morning, HarperCollins, 1994; Where I Live Now,  Simon and Schuster Canada, 2017; How to Breathe Water, Freehand Press, 2025),  is to help others struggling with similar issues, to know that they are not alone, and not unsalvageable. And, along with Dostoevsky (if I dare mention his name at all when talking about my own work), I want to emphasize to the reader how important it is to examine your own life. How important it is to be truthful with yourself.

Q: Can you reveal any details about what you are currently working on now?

A: Sure. I’ve just finished the second draft of a long novel called Safe From All Harm. Since I started writing many years ago, I have been dogged by the accusation of being a ‘mere’ and wholly unfashionable realist. Hey guys, you never heard of Middlemarch? But in this new work, I’ve dropped the careful descriptive material that emphasizes the quotidian and turned instead, and with delight, to the great unknown in the midst of which we all live: the saints and angels, the gods and demi-gods of history, to coincidence and synchronicity. If I could have figured out how, I would have added the peculiarities of quantum theory and reflections on Einstein’s space and time ideas. I’m no mathematician or scientist so can’t fully understand those ideas myself, but oh – they are so interesting and bring me (at least) back to the Great Unknown. But the novel has regular characters (mostly) and a plot of sorts and realistic scenes. My idea is to suck readers in and then introduce the twists and turns. (I’ve probably made the novel sound more interesting than it really is. Sorry.)

Q: Sharon, would you please provide your social media links so that the readers of the blog and I may follow you and your work?

A: I have a website: http://sharonbutala.com There is a link there that sends any reader’s message to my personal email.

I’m on Facebook and that’s all. I do not have time to spend on various other social media avenues. I’m into writing, not technology. Although of course I want a gazillion readers, I leave that to the gods of writing. I just write and let publishers take care of the rest. Totally dumb, I know. But once you get old, any ideas about fame and fortune tend to fade at the same time as writing becomes more important.