Set in depths of the Depression, Janis M. Falk’s meticulously researched novel Not Yet Lost (She Writes Press, September 2025) tells a little-known Detroit labor rights story of women organizing at oppressive factories where they hand-roll cigars. During a time when their choices were bad and worse, this is an underdog story of a woman who must find her voice in order to lead a labor movement, despite her husband’s violent efforts to silence her.

Ellen Silberman: Not Yet Lost is set in Detroit, a city associated with the auto industry. But you focus on the fight to unionize the city’s lesser-known cigar factories. What was your inspiration?

Janis Falk: I was doing genealogy research in the Poletown neighborhood of Detroit, where my father grew up, and I ran across a story about the treatment of women in the cigar factories. I was incensed. I mentioned the history to my husband. He said, “Yeah, my grandma worked in one of those cigar factories.”

I was born and raised in Detroit. And I had been wanting to write a book about my hometown to showcase what Detroit was like in its heyday, because it was like the mechanical version of Silicon Valley. It was the place to go. It was the center for arts.  It was a Mecca for people all over the world to come and work and get a better life working in the factories.

Those two ideas came together in Not Yet Lost. 

What was your writing process? How did you get from inspiration to your first published novel?

I did everything I could to learn the craft. When I lived in Chicago, I took classes at Rebecca Makkai’s Story Studio. I’ve taken classes in Door County, Wisconsin, where I live now. During COVID, I took online classes from places I wouldn’t normally have access to, including the New York State Writers Institute, where I was one of two people over the age of 30. The class was great.

When I was submitting to agents, I got lucky. An agent took the time to give me feedback. They said, we love the story, love the characters, but it’s overwrought. I hired a developmental editor to address that agent’s feedback.

Your historical reach is clearly very deep. Can you talk about your research process? For instance, how did you learn about the Black Legion, the Ku Kux Klan-like organization that pulls the character Alex into their orbit?

I first learned about the Black Legion in Terror in the City of Champions by Tom Stanton, who coincidentally is also Detroit Polish. I watched the 1937 movie Black Legion, starring Humphrey Bogart. It’s kind of a kitschy movie, but it gets the point across. I also found details in old Detroit newspapers and PhD theses looking back at right-wing politics of the past to learn about the present.

The most surprising moment came when I found my uncle’s name in Stanton’s book. Apparently, he was a teenage Detroit police officer when he got involved with the Black Legion. To get out, he moved to Rockford, Illinois. An uncle by marriage, I never met him. Thank goodness.

What was the hardest part of writing Not Yet Lost?

My biggest challenge was trying to avoid the data dump. I learned so much and I wanted to share it. I thank my writers’ group for curbing that impulse. They kept saying, “Janice, you’re in the history lesson again.”

Our website is called Dead Darlings, so we always ask: What were your dead darlings?

There were a couple things about certain characters that maybe I should have cut, and I just didn’t. I just couldn’t. I probably could have cut a little bit of Basha’s backstory. And I probably could have cut a little bit about Alex’s origins story where he was the Cossack in Russia. But I just liked those. Alex was based on my grandfather. Alex and Florence’s son Lucien was based on my father. So, I wanted to include stories I knew about the real people—like Lucien cooking baked potatoes in the alley.

I don’t know that I did kill any darlings. I think I kept them for better or worse.

What advice do you have for other authors?

Try very hard to keep the book your own. I noticed, not only in my writers’ group, but also with editors, people will perceive your book through their own filters. I was glad I went with She Writes Press because they made editing suggestions, but in the end, they were very supportive of me telling my own story.

Janis M. Falk raised her family and pursued a business career in Chicago and now is an author and organic farmer. Born in Detroit, Janis is a graduate of University of Michigan and Northwestern University. She and her husband, Jim, combined two 157-year-old log cabins to build their current home in Door County, Wisconsin. Not Yet Lost  is her first novel. You can find out more about Janis on her janisfalk.com on Facebook or Instagram