Released earlier this year, Dr. Paul Schleifer’s The Missing Teacher follows ninth-grader Kemp Maloney as he navigates the obstacles presented by a new school, jealous soccer teammates, and a missing English teacher. When he isn’t scoring goals or searching for his missing teacher, Kemp finds time to explain why vanilla ice cream is underrated (“the single most versatile dessert ever invented”), distinguish between being a “smart kid” and being a “nerd,” and discover how “Sapientia” is just as important as “Fortitudo.”

In the following conversation, Dr. Schleifer reveals his son’s role in helping him complete the project, why the novella is and isn’t a mystery, and whether or not his main character would read a book like The Missing Teacher.

Jonathan Sircy: You’re an English professor by trade. What’s easier: writing a novella or interpreting a novella?

Paul Schleifer: For me, reading and critiquing a novella is easier. I found writing my first novel difficult. I cannot tell you how many times I started working on a novel and quit after only a few chapters because I just wasn’t happy with where it was going or I wasn’t sure what I needed to do. I think a lot of it was just a lack of confidence. With The Missing Teacher I was really helped by the fact that I was using it as extra material in my creative writing class. And since my son [Kit] and his girlfriend [Lyssa] figured out that I was writing it, there was some real pressure from them to go ahead and finish it. But even with that pressure it took over two years to finally finish something that is probably no longer than A Christmas Carol.

By contrast, reading and critiquing someone else’s work is less personal. If someone doesn’t like my interpretation of, say, A Christmas Carol, it’s like, “So what? So we disagree?” But if someone doesn’t like my novella, that’s like someone not liking my kid, almost. I suppose good advice for writers is, “Don’t take criticism personally,” but I just feel different about something I’ve created. I have had several stories rejected by magazines, and I’ve had articles rejected by conferences and journals, and, for me, the former is a much harder pill to swallow.

JS: Why did you start writing The Missing Teacher?

Paul Schleifer: In my creative writing class, I have the students submit their work to me weekly. Then I create a document of all that week’s submissions for the class to critique (they have to critique two of the submissions), but I have the students choose pen names so that they (hopefully) don’t know who submitted what. I decided to add my own writing as a way of making figuring out who wrote what (a game they enjoy playing) a little bit more difficult. This would actually have been Spring, 2019. During Spring, 2021, I had Sarah Watkins sitting in, and she also submitted.

Why did I choose a YA detective story? I’ve always been interested in detective stories, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I think that image of Kemp being fouled in a tryout situation just popped into my head and kind of got the ball rolling (so to speak). So some of the students in the class assumed that Kit was responsible for it, but he denied it (as I recall). And I think I had that hard-boiled-detective voice in my head for years, because of Parker, et al. (think of the voice over in the theatrical release version of Blade Runner), and I wanted to play with it a little bit.

JS: The conventional writing advice is, “Write what you know.” How applicable is that statement for you and The Missing Teacher?  

Paul Schleifer: There are a lot of elements in The Missing Teacher that are things I know about. I played soccer in high school and college, and I’m still a dedicated soccer fan (Chelsea Blues, Philadelphia Union, SWU Warriors); I have had a referees badge and still have my coaching license. I am, of course, an English professor myself, but Kemp’s father is probably my father more than he is me, and my dad was a Lutheran pastor. The name, by the way, is kind of a blend of a famous medievalist, Kemp Malone, and my faculty advisor during my first two years at Davidson, Sam Maloney (nickname Shoutin’ Sam because he had such a big voice). Maloney was a religion professor. I grew up in Pennsylvania, but not up near Williamsport; I grew up in Bethlehem, an hour north of Philadelphia. And, of course, the world I grew up in was far different than the world Kemp Maloney is in. Also, and I suppose this is relevant, from the age of 12 I had just my dad, though it was separation and divorce, not death. Still, I suppose that experience of coming home to an empty house and reading notes from a father with evening meetings manifests itself in the novella somewhat.

BTW, I did take karate lessons, but it was an adult, and it was to do something with my own kids. I never had a teacher go missing. I knew nothing of computers growing up, though I am obviously familiar with them now.

So I guess it’s a combination of things I know, things I can imagine, and maybe a little bit of things I’m afraid of.

JS: As I read the novella, I kept thinking its subtitle was, “A Kemp Maloney Mystery,” when it’s really “A Kemp Maloney Story.” Was I kind of right: is this a mystery novella? Why/why not? 

Paul Schleifer: So I guess I’m going to be an English professor for a moment. To me a mystery novel conforms to the genre invented by Poe and Doyle and refined by Christie and Sayers. There were writers who actually came up with rules for the genre. The intent of such a novel is to challenge the reader to figure out whodunit. I think The Missing Teacher has a closer affinity to the detective novel, the genre invented by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler and continued by Ross McDonald, Mickey Spillane, and Robert B. Parker. Then again, it’s really hard to think of a ninth-grade boy as a “hard-boiled detective.” And I wanted Kemp to be a soccer player, a student, and perhaps mostly a kid. So the mystery, if you want to call it that, is a big part of the story, but the story is, I hope, more than just the mystery of what happened to Mrs. Carter.

So I guess [the novella’s] a combination of things I know, things I can imagine, and maybe a little bit of things I’m afraid of.

Paul SChleifer

JS: What’s the relationship between the kinds of books you like to read and the novella you’ve ended up writing? 

Paul Schleifer: My reading is somewhat eclectic. I read some non-fiction: recently I’ve read The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony. I’m a big fan of Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and Daniel Kahneman, among others. I also read a lot of fiction, and I read science fiction, detective fiction, and urban fantasy; I used to read a lot of fantasy as well, but in recent years, not so much. And I really like the blending of such genres, like Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick, both of which combine science fiction with the detective genre. So in a way The Missing Teacher is like a YA version of one of the kinds of fiction that I like; I can imagine a kid reading my novella and wanting to read more detective fiction, and then eventually finding Robert B. Parker.

JS: Who is this novella’s ideal reader? 

Paul Schleifer: My brother Jon has taught elementary school for a long time. He says that there is plenty of reading material for boys in the primary grades, but once you get to middle school, most of what is published seems to be oriented towards girls. Tween and teen boys just don’t read. But is the lack of material a cause of boys’ not reading or a result of boys’ not reading? My ideal reader, my target audience, is that middle- to high-school boy. Of course, I’ve had several people tell me already that they enjoyed it even though they are not in the demographic I’m aiming at. I hope lots of people will enjoy it.

JS: What’s something you learned about the writing process as a result of writing The Missing Teacher? 

Paul Schleifer: One thing I’ve learned, or maybe it’s just been reinforced, is that everybody, even someone with a Ph.D. in English and years of teaching grammar and writing, needs lots of proofreaders, and even with lots of proofreaders, there is no such thing as perfectly clean copy. It’s actually embarrassing when your son, a psychology major, is correcting errors you’ve made in your manuscript, a manuscript that you yourself have read and revised a dozen times. In addition, it’s enormously helpful to have a group of people who are willing to read your book because they want to be helpful. Kit and Lyssa both read it even though I doubt either is a big fan of detective fiction. So find beta readers.

JS: Will the next Kemp Maloney story be longer or shorter? Why? 

Paul Schleifer: I think the tendency for series is that individual works do tend to get longer, but not just longer; they also get more complex. So I am working on a sequel, another Kemp Maloney Story, and it will be longer. Part of that is, as I suggested, that it will be a bit more complex.

As I think about it, perhaps another factor is that I am introducing new characters into Kemp’s life, but I don’t want to abandon the characters I’ve already introduced. So now I have more characters who are asking for some page time.

JS: Last Question. Do you think Kemp would read something like The Missing Teacher?

Paul Schleifer: When I was in fourth grade, my dad’s church sold the parsonage and gave him a housing allowance to find a new house to live in. That summer we moved about three miles out of the center of Bethlehem, where I had no friends. Some days I would actually ride my bike (no helmet, of course) downtown to play with friends or hang out at what is now called Friendship Park on North St. (I think we called it Tower Park back in the day because there was a water tower there). But if it was raining, I really couldn’t go anywhere. I did a lot of reading that summer. Of course, we didn’t have cable TV or streaming services. Mornings were for game shows and afternoons were for soap operas during the week.

I can picture Kemp having a similar experience moving to Cranfield from Chicago. He obviously had no way to get back to Chi-Town, and he wouldn’t have known anybody in Cranfield. So if a copy of The Missing Teacher was available, I can see him reading it. Of course, his old man would have been pushing a copy of Piers Plowman, in the original Middle English, at him, right?