Meet Kira Jane Buxton

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kira Jane Buxton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kira Jane below.

Kira Jane, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

It took around twenty years of professional rejection, in first an acting career and then a writing career, before I became a published author. I’m an artist who believes in big dreams, and I was lucky to have had my artistic interests and tendencies nurtured as a child. I was read to when I was little–an experience so vital for a young person to expand their understanding of the world, inspire creativity and encourage empathy. I loved to imagine inhabiting the worlds inside the pages of the books I read. Both my parents fostered the idea that I could follow my interests and curiosity and create the life I wanted for myself, even if it didn’t conform to the expectations of others. They did warn me that a career in the arts wouldn’t be easy to ignite, and they were right. But the years of rejection were not wasted. On the contrary, those are the years I honed my writing skills, gained life experience that I could draw upon for my fiction, where I developed my funny bone, and where I learned how to pick myself up, dust myself off and learn something from any experience. Looking back, I can now see that some of the most painful rejections turned out to be blessings–there was something better ahead. And sometimes a “no” is not a “no”, it’s a “not yet.” Or a “not here, but somewhere much, much better.”

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

My name is Kira Jane Buxton and I’m an author. I write humorous novels that are love letters to the natural world. My novel Hollow Kingdom was an Indie Next pick, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Audie Awards, and the Washington State Book Awards, and was named a best book of 2019 by Good Housekeeping, NPR, and Book Riot.

I adore animals and have befriended a wild crow who follows me on walks around the neighborhood. My brand new novel will hit the shelves on January 28th. It’s called Tartufo (“truffle” in Italian) and it is about a village that is in debt and in dire straights, when the village truffle hunter finds the largest truffle on earth–which might be a blessing or the foulest curse the village has ever seen.

I love creatively conjuring worlds for a reader to get lost in. And maybe to find a little treasure to take away from when they savor the last sentence and close the book.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Writing a novel is a long and precarious process. It takes a lot of faith in an inkling of an idea (that you might have no idea how to develop in the beginning). It seems a bit cheeky of me to compare novel writing to running a marathon having never run one in my life, but I’m going to be bold and do it. Three qualities that I have aspired to all of these years are holding onto hope (to keep believing that the story you are telling is worth the work), finding joy (remembering to have fun as you write, because a book is a distillation of energy and what goes into it will resonate with a reader), and persistence (keep moving forward with new stories so that you never have all your eggs in one basket and you are constantly stoking your creativity).

My advice for new writers is–remember to have fun with it! Read voraciously and support other writers. Take classes at recommended writing schools and make friends with fellow scribes there–community is everything. Writers spend a lot of time alone and need friendship in other writers to share experiences and support one another. You can do this.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

I had a tough year in 2024. I experienced an overwhelming amount of loss and was drowning in grief. I am still processing that grief. But I read and wrote less in 2024 than any year I can remember and that has felt like some sort of failing. It is not a failing, I recognize, but rather a necessary time to come to terms with great loss, a thing that takes patience and time. I am practicing self compassion and trusting that there will come a time, hopefully soon, when I am writing and reading as voraciously as I would like to. I am gathering good books to look forward to starting. I am paying attention and being present to every day experiences, looking for little glimmers of inspiration. Or funny moments or unusual phrases that may pop up and spark a situation or a character interaction in my creative mind. Writing takes commitment, and creative expression is a muscle that gets stronger the more you work at it. When other writers ask me about writers block, I advise them to be patient, to keep showing up at the page and dreaming about their story until those sparks fly. So I must advise the same for myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kirajanebuxton.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kirajanewrites/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kirajanebuxton/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiraJaneWrites?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Image Credits

Photo credit for professional author photos: Stanton J. Stephens. The one professional photo of me with long hair–credit: Laura Zimmerman