Mike Steele: 'Not Lucille' and Complex Friendships (ADHD, Deafness)

~ An Interview with Meg Eden Kuyatt ~

Creative James Press, 24 June 2025

Meg: Not Lucille is such a joy of a book, with Lucy's coming to terms with her neurodivergent "quirks" in a world that doesn't always understand why certain things are hard for us. She definitely gave me some Anne of Green Gables energy! . . . I'd love to hear you talk a bit about discovering Lucy as a character, and how she connects with your own personal experiences.

Mike: Lucy's very much inspired by my grandmother, who was talkative, filled with energy, and unafraid to share her opinions. Like Lucy, she was a redheaded Italian-American. My grandmother would've been about the same age as Lucy during the time of Not Lucille. No doubt, my grandmother was in trouble just as much as Lucy, too. Writing Lucy was easy: all I had to do was imagine my grandmother at 10 years old, and then write.

It's funny you mentioned Anne of Green Gables. I've always loved that story (and it was my grandmother who introduced me to it), but Anne never came to mind when I was writing Not Lucille. From other readers, I've heard comparisons to Ramona Quimby and Little Orphan Annie. I'll happily accept the Anne comparison, as well.

It seems like most of the literary characters that have ADHD are boys, which makes sense because boys are far more likely than girls to be diagnosed with the disorder. With Lucy, I wanted to showcase some of the traits that are more common in girls with ADHD, like daydreaming and hyper-talkativeness.

Meg: Not Lucille is historical fiction, taking place in the Great Depression in an immigrant community . . . Could you say a little bit about historical fiction, the Great Depression, and disability particularly in this time?

Mike: I set Not Lucille in 1930s Chambersburg, NJ, a neighborhood of Trenton, back when it was almost exclusively an Italian-American area with a large immigrant population. My mother's side of the family is from there, and I grew up just outside the city.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing people of all ages refer to a park in Chambersburg as "the Deefies." I thought it was such a strange nickname for a park, and I wanted to learn more. My grandparents told me the park used to be a campus for a school for the Deaf.

I've done a ton of research, but nobody seems to know where the word Deefies came from. I can only assume it's somehow connected to the word deaf, and that it originated as a pejorative, though I've never heard any negative connotation associated with the word. Most Trentonians today probably have no idea the park has anything to do with a school for the Deaf. This could get us into a whole discussion about the evolution of language, but that would take us way off-topic.

When I learned that a school for the Deaf used to be in Chambersburg, I wondered if the disabled students boarding on the closed campus had much interaction with the surrounding Italian-American community. I thought it would have been interesting if my grandmother had snuck onto the campus as a little girl. I wondered how she would've interacted with Deaf kids who didn't communicate the same way she did. It became the premise of Not Lucille.

I spent nearly 10 years thinking about this premise before I'd outlined a full story and was ready to draft. . . . Because the setting is so close to home, and because my grandparents grew up during the Great Depression, the period felt real to me from their stories. I hope contemporary readers can find connections with the period, and I hope lovers of historical fiction enjoy the trip in time.

Writing about disability in the 1930s required a ton of research. I had to dig to discover what daily life was like at a school for the Deaf in the 1930s. So much useful information came from videos with firsthand accounts. Before writing Not Lucille, I had no idea that starting in the 1860s and for the next one hundred years, the Oralism movement was prominent in Deaf education. Students were discouraged from using American Sign Language in favor of speaking. And in the 1960s, a philosophy called 'total communication' became popular in Deaf education. It favored students learning to communicate through whichever means they could individually master (including American Sign Language).

In terms of ADHD, research was just beginning in the 1930s, and most of it was happening in Europe. There wasn't any treatment. Here we are almost a century later, and there are still so many people who think it's not a real disorder.

Meg: Lucy finds companionship in a d/Deaf girl named Florence. I love how, while they have different challenges, they are both being silenced or stifled and have to learn how to navigate that in a healthy way. They connect and encourage one another. What lead you to discover Florence as a character?

Mike: I didn't have any sense of what Florence's personality would be like before I began writing. I knew I wanted a character similar in age to Lucy but different in many ways. Florence's personality developed as I wrote.

One of the biggest challenges was trying to accurately portray a Deaf character while not being part of the Deaf community myself. I'm very aware that there are conflicting opinions in the Deaf community surrounding hearing authors who write Deaf characters. Though I wrote Not Lucille in the third person, I tried very hard to ensure the story is from Lucy's perspective.

As a hearing person, I can describe what it's like to know a Deaf person, but I wouldn't attempt to write from a Deaf perspective. I also worked with two sensitivity editors in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities to keep depictions of Florence and deafness accurate and respectful.

Meg: I hear you're also a playwright! Tell us about the difference between these mediums, and what drew you to the novel for Lucy's story?

Mike: I've wanted to be an author since I discovered The Baby-sitters Club in third grade. Specifically, I wanted to be a middle-grade author. I've always been drawn to stories for that age group. I like to say I became a playwright by mistake. I grew up performing musical theater and landed a gig directing high school plays when I was in college. I thought it would be a one-time thing, but it lasted eight years.

One summer, I couldn't find a play that was right for my students, so I sat with my brother (who's a professional actor), and we wrote one. The show was a hit, and we were lucky enough to have publishers interested in the piece. My brother and I wrote more plays together, and I wrote a few on my own. 

Not Lucille is my first attempt at a middle-grade novel. It wasn't too challenging, shifting from plays to narrative fiction. I haven't had formal training in either, but I've seen a lot of plays and read a lot of books. The bulk of what playwrights write is dialogue. It's up to actors to take that dialogue and show audiences what the characters are feeling. With narrative fiction, the author has to be the playwright and the actor, weaving a fully fleshed out character for the reader through dialogue and description.

It might sound strange, but when I think of story premises where kids are the central characters, I think of them as narrative fiction. When I think of stories where adults are the central characters, I think of them as plays. It probably has to do with my love of middle-grade fiction and my love of plays (and the reality that most commercial plays are designed to appeal to adults). When I was developing the story for Not Lucille, it was never anything but a middle-grade novel to me.

Meg: Besides being an author and playwright, you are an elementary school librarian. What sort of needs do you see in your student readers, especially ND readers? What do you wish other authors knew when writing for students like yours?

As a school librarian, I'm lucky to know every student in the school. My students have a variety of interests and learning needs. Some prefer fiction, some non-fiction. Most students are drawn to specific genres, but as a whole, they read across all genres. They love horror and fantasy and humor and stories written in verse or as graphic novels. Some love picture books, even when they're supposedly too old for them. Some don't want to touch fiction. Unfortunately, elementary literacy curriculums are not designed in a way that values the interests of all students. Curriculums largely favor narrative, realistic fiction. It leaves huge swaths of students frustrated with what they're forced to read (and I say this as someone who loves narrative, realistic fiction).

Neurodivergent students tend to get very interested in specific topics, authors, and series that appeal to them as individuals. Those with ADHD, specifically, do well with texts they don't have to consume linearly to comprehend. Non-fiction is a great option for readers with ADHD because the text structure often has information chunked under headings, in charts and tables, and in pictorial form. Readers don't have to read every word on a page to understand the meaning of what they do read. They can jump around a page, skip pages, and read out of order, and they still learn.

Graphic novels are also popular with these readers. I suspect it has to do with the limited text and the opportunity to take in information from images. The artistic styles found in graphic novels also tend to break standard illustration conventions, with panels of different sizes, images bursting out of the confines of panels, and depictions of hyper-exaggerated emotions. Readers who struggle to focus get constant surprise.

Meg: If you could say in one sentence what you want readers to take away from Not Lucille, what would that be?

Mike: We all have our quirks, and sometimes our quirks clash, but we must still try to understand one another. (It's a run-on sentence, but I'm long-winded. I guess that's one of my quirks.)

Meg: I love how a difficult teacher, Ms. Gillingham, turns out to be an ally in the end.

Mike: I always wanted Miss Gillingham and Lucy to connect near the end of the story. Writing Miss Gillingham was so much fun. You really root against her and then realize she's more complex than you first thought.

Meg: Relatedly, Lucy is told to "stifle herself"—which felt complicated to me as a reader. . . . What do you think Ms. Gillingham means? And if we were to follow Lucy after this story ends, how do you think she'd take Ms. Gillingham's advice?

Mike: In fifth grade, my school librarian told the entire class that we needed to stifle ourselves. None of us had ever heard the word before. Coincidentally, stifle was one of our spelling words the following week. The word has stuck with me ever since. . . . When Miss Gillingham tells Lucy to stifle herself, she wants her to stop calling out in class.

I don't think Lucy ever stops calling out. Maybe she tries harder as she gets older . . . She probably grows up and fights with friends. She annoys her family, but they love her anyway. I'm not sure she's better equipped to handle these challenges, but she's better equipped to accept herself for her flaws.

Meg: What advice would you give educators working with neurodivergent students?

Mike: Focus on what's amazing about them. Accept them for who they are. Make sure they know you accept them. Have patience with them. Have patience with yourself.

Meg: Is there anything you wish I'd asked, or that you'd like to add?

Mike: You asked so many great questions . . . An interesting literary tidbit about Chambersburg is that it's the setting for adult author Janet Evanovich's contemporary Stephanie Plum series. I held off reading the series until I'd finished writing Not Lucille because I didn't want the world of my story to be colored by Janet Evanovich's descriptions. I read the first Stephanie Plum book this past summer. It was hysterical, and so different from my own story!

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Mike Steele is an elementary school librarian and children’s playwright with eight plays published and licensed for production. Not Lucille is his debut middle-grade novel. In his spare time, he likes to attend musicals, create mixed-media artwork, and win prizes from claw machines. He lives at the Jersey Shore with his tabby cats, Karen and Sox. If you spot him in the wild, he usually has a bubble tea in one of his hands.

 www.mikesteeleonline.com @msteelewrites

Meg Eden Kuyatt is an autistic author who teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World,” the forthcoming “obsolete hill” (Fernwood Press) and children’s novels including the Schneider Family Book Award Honor-winning “Good Different,” and the forthcoming “The Girl in the Walls” (Scholastic, 2025). Find her online at megedenbooks.com.