We’ve been quiet awhile because we’ve been working on something big:

The New Deal.

It’s more contemporary than FDR’s version but perhaps just as groundbreaking: Janice Deal’s next book, a novel called The Blue Door.

Remember Strange Attractors, the collection of Jan’s linked stories we published last fall? In the heart of that book, two consecutive, powerful stories feature Flo and her teen daughter, Teddy. A troubled girl, Teddy commits a violent crime that upends her mother’s life as well as her own. When Teddy is sent off to juvenile prison, Flo too has to flee their Illinois town. (Teddy’s father has long been out of the picture.)

The Blue Door picks up the thread some years later. Having served her sentence, Teddy is wandering the country. Flo too wandered a bit before settling in the Southwest to attempt a new life. Occasionally Teddy sends a card, but communications between mother and daughter are rare.

Abruptly, though, Teddy announces that she’s coming for a visit, and that’s a challenge for Flo because she no longer knows what she can offer as a parent. Can she cope with this strangely violent child, now an adult? As Flo hikes dusty roads in search of her missing dog, past the strip malls and industrial parks of the American landscape, she’s also searching for everything else that has disappeared from her life.

Like Strange Attractors, Jan’s new book finds extraordinary depths in ordinary, unpretentious people. Yet The Blue Door does more than carry on the story of Flo and Teddy. It leaps beyond realism to mix in mystical elements—symbolism, mysterious folktales remembered from Flo’s mother, even a private language that Teddy invented as a child. It’s a radical adventure for the reader, both compulsively readable and meditative—a rare combination.

When can you see The Blue Door? The official publication date is “Sometime in Spring 2025.” Be patient, all right? In the meantime, bookstores and reviewers are welcome to request ARCs.

Other News

Author appearance: This Thursday, 8/8, Janice Deal will be appearing with Ellen Akins at Honest Dog Books in picturesque Bayfield, the smallest city in Wisconsin. Info here.

Submissions: Our submissions portal is open again, until we reach a total of 40 new proposals. Already some of the new submissions look intriguing!

Contributions: Production and marketing of The Blue Door will be financed in part by tax-deductible donations via our relationship with CultureTrust of Greater Philadelphia. We’ll be offering some cool incentives for contributions. Stay tuned for more on this opportunity.

Walking prompts: Our website now includes four sets of prompts to accompany Ways of Walking, our collection of essays on the discoveries people make on foot. Each set, inspired by one of the essays in the collection, offers ideas for personal walking adventures. These can be used or adapted by writers or by anyone else who can get out of the house once in a while.

A series? We continue to think about creating a series of books, both fiction and nonfiction, related to walking. And because The Blue Door features Flo taking a long walk of personal discovery, we may have already started.