Levine

If you visited the Cloud Room co-working space on weekends over the past few years, you might have spotted Stacey Levine, the writer and long-time Capitol Hill resident who this month learned she was one of four finalists for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel Mice 1961.

“Every weekend, I would go there and work on this novel,” said Levine. “I wrote most of it over eight years at the Cloud Room. On the way, I’d pass all these people eating dinner out and having fun, and I was very grumpy because I had to keep working on the book.”

Those years of hard work paid off. In addition to the Pulitzer nod, The Washington Post favorably reviewed Mice 1961—describing Levine as a “gifted performance artist of literary fiction—part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower” and the novel as “a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I’ve never seen anywhere else”—and included it in their list of 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2024.

A Cold War era novel set in South Florida on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Mice 1961 follows three unforgettable characters: the orphaned siblings Jody and her 18-year-old younger sister Ivy, nicknamed “Mice” and cruelly bullied by teenagers for her albinism, and their housekeeper, Girtle, who sleeps behind the sisters’ couch and narrates the novel. Jody, Mice, and Girtle are surrounded by odd neighbors, all preparing for an elaborate neighborhood potluck.

The novel is witty, with Levine’s prose evocative. She describes Mice as a “white-pink creature” with “milkscape” features—“peel-thin ears,” “jittering eyes,” and “cream-orange-tipped white lashes, much like two thin, tidy rows of camel hair.” Mice’s “bottomless absence of color” renders her “a shadow in reverse.”

Levine, who also teaches composition, creative writing, and poetry at Seattle Central College, has published three novels and two short story collections, earned a PEN Fiction Award and The Stranger Genius Award for Literature, and was twice named a Washington State Book Award Finalist. She spoke to CHS during a phone interview the day after the Pulitzer honors were announced.

Congratulations. When did you first learn your novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction?

Thanks! I was in my office at Seattle Central College. Karen Maeda Allman, former events programmer at Elliott Bay Books, posted something general about “Tessa Hulls, Stacey Levine, and Pulitzer Prize.” It didn’t make any sense to me. I hadn’t heard anything from the Pulitzer Prize Board. I still haven’t. I think maybe they’re known for being silent once they make their decisions.

But I couldn’t believe it. It was one of those things. I told my co-worker, another instructor at  Central, and she stood there mystified with me. It’s kind of hard to digest. It’s great and comes with a bit of stress.

You’ve earned awards before. Does this feel different? “Pulitzer Prize Finalist” tends to follow a writer. It looks good on a book cover, right?

I understand it’s a big honor, but it feels far away. I’m slow. There was a Washington state writer named Judy Doenges who, back in the day, had a novel reviewed by The New York Times, just out of the blue. She said there was her career before and after she got that recognition from the people back East. As for me, I don’t know what would come of it.

Do you have a sense of why this book got the attention of The Washington Post and the Pulitzer Prize Board? Is there something about Mice 1961 that’s different than your other books?

The book is based in reality versus a setting of bent reality. Our culture is mad for so-called true stories, which is a crock because invented stories are also true at their core. Mice is based in a historical moment around the time of the Bay of Pigs during the Cold War. Many commenters on that Washington Post book review were history buffs who, right out of the gate, were arguing and talking about the standoff between the U.S. and the Soviets, which dovetails with the Kennedy Administration. They are fanatic about that era’s politics. I’m interested in it, too. Maybe that’s why it got their attention. Also, the writing, sentence by sentence, was very labor-intensive because I worked really hard to express underneath the plot what it feels like to live life for these characters.

Your novel has many interesting characters, especially the orphaned sisters Jody and Mice. How did the idea for Mice 1961 come about?

The initial idea did not have two sisters. Most of it came from working with the writing the way a person could work with clay. You just keep moving it bit by bit and making shapes. The writing process itself dictates the direction the narrative takes. Initially, Jody, one of the sisters, was really out-there crazy. Then I made her less crazy and her situation more understandable. She has this really dependent adult sister with albinism that she has to be responsible for. The sister has a terrible and cruel nickname of “Mice.”

I got the idea while looking at some pictures of someone I knew on Facebook. The way he was dressed reminded me of a Cuban revolutionary. I had been drinking a lot of coffee when it hit me—a story about people being passionate about what they believe is best for their country, even if they’re wrong-headed. Of course, that’s us today, too.

Sun & Moon Press and Clear Cut Press published your earliest books. Verse Chorus Press reissued some of those earlier books and published Mice 1961 last year. Small presses have played a big role for you, right?

Yes. Verse Chorus Press was a publisher of mostly books about music, but they liked the voice-driven stories I’d written—that means a character’s interior life and voice are in the foreground and the plot is pushed to the background, or barely there.

Verse Chorus Press used to be in Portland, but now it runs from Hamburg, Germany. The publisher worked closely with Mike McGonigal for a long time on Yeti magazine, which mostly covered art, lit, and music, underground and overground. Those two had a business connection. The people who started Verse Chorus Press previously ran Puncture, a Portland cutting-edge music magazine in the early aughts. Puncture and Yeti published fiction, and as we ran in similar circles, I wound up sending them an excerpt from my novel Dra— and that’s how our relationship came about. Very Northwest homegrown. At the same time, my first two books were published by Sun & Moon, a boutique press from Los Angeles that has now morphed into Green Integer Books. It’s great how art thrives like weeds in environments hostile to real creativity.

What’s next for you?

I’m supposed to have a book come out next year with most of my short fiction, old and new, plus two plays and two comics I made with Seattle’s great graphic novelist David Lasky. I’m trying to get going on a new novel, but that hasn’t happened yet.

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