Partners in the Arts: Novelists Jessica Handler and Mickey Dubrow are a storybook couple

Imagine you are visiting a city and taking a ghost tour. A specter walks up, taps you on your shoulder and asks you to travel back in time to solve her murder. A mystery with a side of history. What aspiring sleuth could resist?

So unspools the plot of a collaborative novel-in-progress from Atlanta-based husband and wife Mickey Dubrow and Jessica Handler. 

“In Ghost Tour Mystery: St Augustine, a married couple goes back to the 1880s in old Florida to figure out a crime,” says Handler.

She and Dubrow write alternating chapters, with Handler voicing the wife and Dubrow the husband, for some lighthearted he said/she said contrasts in storytelling. It makes for a methodical but gratifying tango on the page, the authors say, that has only reconfirmed what they knew early on: Handler and Dubrow, who literally finish each other’s sentences, were made for each other.

Handler, 66, is the author of the forthcoming novel, The World To See, and the novel, The Magnetic Girl, which The Wall Street Journal called one of the 10 books to read in Spring 2019. She is also the author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and the memoir, Invisible Sisters, named one of the “25 Books All Georgians Should Read.” 

An alumna of Paideia, she grew up in Atlanta and attended Queens University of Charlotte and Emerson College in Boston. 

“It’s not that I set out to write about women, but it just happens to be a theme in my texts,” she says. “I tend to write about what it feels like to be a woman or girl; what our culture thinks of us; what female identity means.” 

For his first novel American Judas, Dubrow, 68, won the 2024 American Legacy Book Award in the category of Science Fiction: Parallel Universe/Alternative History. He is also the author ofThe Magic Maker, Bulletproof and Always Agnes. For 30 years, he wrote television promos, marketing presentations and scripts for various clients including Cartoon Network, TNT Latin America and HGTV. 

He grew up in Chattanooga and has a BFA in graphic design from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

“I write thrillers with an element of literary science fiction that moves the story along, an approach similar to the one Kurt Vonnegut took,” he says, noting his last book, The Magic Maker, revolves around a helpful rabbi with supernatural powers. “For me, everything has a moral center to it. All religions urge us to take care of each other, and that’s the bottom line of most of my stories.”

The two met in 1996 when they were both working for Turner Broadcasting in the building known as The Mansion. Handler was post-production supervisor for the documentary unit, and Dubrow was a promotions writer/producer for Cartoon Network Latin America. They exchanged glances, clocking each other. “He was good-looking,” she says. “She was gorgeous,” he interjects. Finally, a mutual friend introduced them. 

“Jessica mentioned that she didn’t want to work in television anymore, and I offered to give her advice on how to change careers,” Dubrow says. “At that point, I’d changed careers three times.”

Their first date was a beer at the Vortex. All went smoothly until the end when Handler realized her car had been burglarized. “They took a nice leather jacket I had and some cassette tapes that had real meaning for me,” she recalls.

She impressed Dubrow with her steeliness. “At first she cried just a bit, then she shook it off and said, ‘I can handle this,’ and very coolly reported it to the police. She showed me how tough she was.”

Adds Handler, “We were old enough at the time to know what we wanted, and we just knew.”

They have been together ever since, in a boheme homeplace in Ormewood Park feathered with literary laurels and no kids but plenty of cats and books and art and music. Handler, who still has the aura of the punk-rock chick she once was (“My hair was briefly aubergine,” she says), is also a musician who sings and plays drums. Her musical stylings can be found on her website. Dubrow, who dreamed of being a cartoonist, still draws.

Collaborating on Ghost Tour Mystery: St. Augustine has highlighted their very different but weirdly complementary strengths as artists.

“Mickey is the ultimate plotter,” Handler says. “He does extensive outlines and character sketches and lays it all out before he ever starts to write. He’s good at multitasking, at leaping from project to project. Whereas I am very slow and take one thing at a time.”

“As a promo producer in television, I was always juggling a lot of things at once,” Dubrow explains. 

Handler enjoys diving deep into the past with historical research and hopes to make Ghost Tour Mystery a series that visits other cities and other time periods. 

“Jessica has a knack for fleshing out characters with telling detail,” her husband says. “For example, she asked of one character, ‘What would her wedding song be?’ I answered ‘Sweet Caroline.’ Details like that help convey a picture. Jessica always knows the right question to ask.”

Together, they have found dialogue. 

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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines such as Atlanta, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal and Country Living. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.