The Watchung Booksellers Podcast
Watchung Booksellers' community of writers and readers dive deep into what they do for the love of books.
Watchung Booksellers is located in the heart of Montclair, NJ, a literary beacon filled with writers, journalists, publishers, and avid readers. Each year we host hundreds of author events and every day the most interesting and dedicated readers walk through our doors. Their insights and enthusiasm have inspired us to share our conversations with book-lovers everywhere. We invite you to listen and be a part of our community!
The Watchung Booksellers Podcast
Episode 10: From Readers to Writers
In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, authors Laura Marx Fitzgerald and Lily Braun-Arnold discuss how their passion for reading led to writing careers, and how they found inspiration and mentorship along the way.
Guest Bios:
Laura Marx Fitzgerald is the author of two art mysteries for kids, Under the Egg and The Gallery, and the picture book Wild for Winnie. She is currently at work on her first novel for adults, a work of historical fiction also set in the art world.
Lily Braun-Arnold is a sophomore at Smith College studying English. When she isn’t writing, she can be found playing trombone in her school’s wind ensemble or daydreaming about living in outer space. She worked at Watchung Booksellers in high school and continues to help out when she’s home on breaks. Her debut novel The Last Bookstore on Earth will be released in January 2025.
Books:
A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available here.
Lily's Spotify Playlist for the Last Bookstore on Earth.
Resources:
The Limbourg Brothers at the Met
The Limbourg Brothers Belles Heures
Michelangelo and Raphael Rivalry
World Book Club Barbara Kingsolver episode
Register for Upcoming Events.
Books:
A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available here.
Register for Upcoming Events.
The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ.
The show is edited by Kathryn Counsell and Bree Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Kellenyi and Derek Mattheiss.
Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica.
Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff.
Thanks to all the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids’ Room!
If you liked our episode please like, follow, and share!
Stay in touch!
Email: wbpodcast@watchungbooksellers.com
Social: @watchungbooksellers
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Marni: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Watchung Booksellers podcast. I'm Marni and I'm here with Kathryn. Hi Marni. Hi everybody. Today we're talking with readers turned writers, two local authors who read so much and spent so much time around books that they made the leap to writing them. Most writers are readers, of course, but there are plenty of us.
Marni: And we do write in other ways, but actually pursuing it as a career is another thing altogether.
Kathryn: So today we're happy to welcome authors Laura Marx Fitzgerald and Lily Braun Arnold. Interestingly, Laura's book Under the Egg was an inspiration for Lily's soon to be published book, The Last Bookstore on Earth.
Marni: Speaking of reading, what are you reading this week, Kathryn?
Kathryn: Well, I just started The Collector by Daniel Silva. It's in paperback now. It's part of his Gabriel Alone spy thriller series and I was just very excited because he's coming to Temple Ner Tumid to launch his next novel, A Death in Cornwall, on July 9th.
Kathryn: It's really good and it's very exciting and this is the 23rd book. Book in his series and the 24th one is A Death in Cornwall. So tickets are still available, you should grab those.
Kathryn: How about you Marni?
Marni: I just bought a copy of The Witchstone by Henry Neff. It's brand new, it just came out. It's his debut adult novel and I'm super excited.
Marni: I'm going to bring it on vacation and I can't wait to read it.
Kathryn: Super cool.
Kathryn: We will list these books along with the books that our authors talk about on our Watchung Booksellers podcast page at watchungbooksellers. com. But for now, let's get the conversation started.
Kathryn: Laura Marks Fitzgerald is the author of two art mysteries for kids, Under the Egg and The Gallery, and the picture book Wild for Winnie.
Kathryn: She is currently at work on her first novel for adults, a work of historical fiction also set in the art world.
Marni: Lily Braun Arnold is a sophomore at Smith College studying English. She is the author of The Last Bookstore on Earth, releasing in January 2025. When she isn't writing, she can be found playing trombone in her school's wind ensemble or daydreaming about living in outer space.
Marni: She worked at Watchung Booksellers in high school and continues to help out when she's home on breaks.
Kathryn: Enjoy the conversation, and we'll be back afterward to fill you in on what's coming up in the store.
Laura: Hi, I'm Laura Fitzgerald. I am a writer of children's literature and moving into adult literature. And I'm here with
Lily: I'm Lily Braun Arnold. I'm also a writer of mostly YA science fiction. Yeah. Amazing.
Laura: And we know each other ish? Yeah. But not I never, okay. As writers.
Lily: So this is a little bit embarrassing, but I read Under the Egg when I was, I'm gonna say 10 or 11, and it was immediately my favorite book, and so I actually didn't put the connection between you and the author of the book until I realized that it was a local author, and I, you know, went home to my dad, and I was like, oh, did you know that And Marni goes, we know her.
Lily: Like, we met her. Why are you being ridiculous about that? But that was a mind blowing moment when I realized they were one in the same. Yeah, I had a
Laura: very similar experience where I knew your parents, I'd been to your house, you and my daughter were in the same, uh, theater program. And I would see you at the bookstore, which was one block away from my house, all the time.
Laura: And I would ask you about where you were going to college, or what books you recommended. And then only much later found out that you had written a book yourself, which is super exciting. So yeah, it's fun to know each other as just humans of Montclair. Oh yes,
Lily: absolutely. Yeah, the internet, interconnected web of Montclair.
Lily: Totally.
Laura: Well, I have a question for you. Oh, absolutely. Which is, it sounds like you were a huge reader growing up.
Lily: Absolutely.
Laura: And I have a feeling that you sort of half grew up at Watchung Booksellers. Yeah. Yeah, in the way that my kids did too. And so, my question is what took you, what moment took you from being, An enthusiastic reader to a writer.
Laura: Not just a writer of someone's essays at school or journals or whatever, but someone who thought, okay, I'm going to do this myself.
Lily: Yeah, no. So I moved to Montclair. My family moved to Montclair in 2014, I think. And so that's really when I started going to Watchung booksellers. And I was like, Oh, I want to work here one day.
Lily: And then I did. And that was awesome. But yeah, I probably have to give credit partially to the pandemic, partially to being like locked in a house. So I was. Oh, I started writing so many things, but now I have so much time, it would be ridiculous if I didn't finish something for once. But also, I had my godfather's partner.
Lily: He is an author. He writes kids books, and he took me up into his attic, which was like this writing heaven, basically. Post its all over the walls, sort of cinematic in the way you'd expect, you know, an author's office to be. But, yeah. I went in there and he was explaining to me, Oh, this is the family tree that I created because all the stories are interconnected and these are my piles of research and I have a bed in the corner because sometimes I just sleep in here because I'm so, you know, connected with all of it.
Lily: And so that's sort of when I realized. Writing is so much more than just like putting words on a page, which is what I'd been doing before then. And so sort of realizing that allowed me to get more into the actual, I guess, craft of writing, rather than just putting words together. But sort of building on that, I was wondering, Under the Egg was your first book, then you were at the gallery, and then you just came out with a picture book recently.
Lily: But I was wondering, what was it that made you decide to write? Under the Egg. Like, what was the inspiration for that? Where did that idea come from? Because it's such, it's such a great book. One of my favorites of all time.
Laura: Thank you. I, it's funny, you know, I didn't always think that writers should write for themselves and when I meet people who love Under the Egg, it's always like, oh yes, you're just like me at that age.
Laura: I can recognize myself so I always know who's gonna like it. I had been working full time my whole life, you know, I worked in advertising and marketing and, you know, For the first time when my son was born, he took a lot of my time because he was my second kid, and he went off to preschool, and suddenly I had time in the day where everything wasn't crowding out things in my brain.
Laura: And I found that with my son. The creativity of work, because I am a copywriter, I write for advertising, with the creativity of work taken off the table, it's like all the creative energy of my brain needed somewhere to go. And all of a sudden, and people would ask me because I was an English major, you know, would you, oh do you want to write?
Laura: I was like, oh my god, I could never write a novel, I would never, no I'm not a writer, I'm not a writer. Not in that way. And then suddenly I wanted to write a book and I started asking around to people who I knew who were in the industry, you know, I have this idea, you know, maybe it could, there could be something there and I got some nice direction and then fundamentally I just realized the only thing that's going to turn this into a book is to turn it into a book.
Laura: I also love historical research. I'm a huge history nerd. And so it also just gave me an excuse to do all kinds of historical research. I remember that year we were living in Brooklyn and I got this notice from the Brooklyn Public Library that said I was a power user because I had checked out, I had checked out a thousand books on my card.
Laura: So that was just a matter of like, Gathering all of these historical bits and pieces and then also wanting to replicate some of my favorite books that were all for adults, actually. I don't know why I decided to do it for kids, maybe because I had kids at that time and I was reading a lot of their work.
Laura: But there were certain books like Possession by A. S. Byatt, which is one of my all time favorite books, which is about a historical mystery around poetry as opposed to art. And I just thought, oh, I want to write a book like that. I want to be able to do that. And so it sort of gave me the inspiration and also the model on which to build what I was trying to do.
Lily: So I grew up in the Greenwich Village, and so a lot of what you were writing about sort of rang true to me as someone who just moved from there. Like, I was right around the corner from Jefferson Market Library and stuff like that. Why New York City as a setting for a story like this?
Laura: So I wanted the setting to bring together, well one because I lived there, one is because I lived there.
Laura: I lived in Brooklyn. I thought it would be set in Brooklyn but ultimately I felt that historically it needed to happen in the city and also because it would allow all of the strands to come together. So I wanted it to be somewhere that Someone could have had a house and we all know that house that you've seen in the village or other parts of the city where you're like that house is owned by a movie star and the one next to it is falling apart.
Laura: How can that be? Only in New York City. And so I wanted it somewhere where that could happen, where the same house could be in a family for generations, which could happen there. Where someone could be able to go to a world class museum, which could happen there. Or someone could go to a world class auction house, which could happen there.
Laura: And then I also wanted to weave in, I think New York is such a great place for these sort of haphazard communities that you build. Where you have your coffee guy. and you have your diner guy, and you have the woman who runs the shoe store, and you have this relationship with them that's very much based on this proximity of bumping into each other.
Laura: And then last but not least, my all time favorite thing about the city, and at least is true of Brooklyn, I don't know if it's as true of Manhattan, but I assumed it was, was this sort of curb alert world where you put something on the curb and you get to the corner and you look back and it's gone. Oh
yes.
Laura: So I liked the idea that there was a sort of scavenger aspect to this book as well. You know, you just reminded me of one other thing. I remembered that when my, when my son was born, I didn't have the mental capacity to really get into like in depth adult fiction. And so I re read all of Little House on the Prairie, which I loved growing up.
Laura: And I had this thought of, you know, what would it be like if Little House on the Prairie was in New York City today? That sense of, you know, survivalism or, you know, living off the land. Like, what does living off the land look like in Greenwich Village? Absolutely. So that was also an inspiration for it too, is I wanted it to be somewhere that You could be horror, and yet, if you had a stable place to live, you could sort of patch it together.
Laura: And that's what the city did. It brought all this together.
Lily: Yeah. No, my dad's very much so a fan of, like, if there's nice furniture on the site, we're taking it, and I'm always so embarrassed. I was like, oh, someone from school is going to see us, and it's going to be so, but no, that absolutely happens still in the city.
Lily: Definitely.
Laura: I love that. So when you were reading growing up, who did you find as an inspiration for then moving into YA sci fi?
Lily: I always have loved really weird books. There's this one called Zorgamazoo that I read when I was in fourth grade and I was telling someone at the bookstore about it and they didn't believe me that it was a real book because it is really, really weird.
Lily: But it's all in poem form, so every other line rhymes. It's all one long poem. And it's about a girl and her, she's being taken care of by her aunt. And her aunt wants to give her a lobotomy and replace her brain with cake. And that's the plot. So she's running from this aunt and it's, it's so, so good. But also, sort of reading books like that, where there is just this weirdness, but everyone sort of accepts it as something that's really normal.
Lily: That was something that I always loved reading as a kid. And then also It's very Alice in Wonderland, isn't it? Yeah, very Alice in Wonderland. But also the idea of Kids and teenagers they can handle some dark stuff. There's this other book that I read called the Cavendish home for boys and girls That was really really weird.
Lily: And I was like, how do we allow kids to read this? You know looking back on it now, but that one it's this boarding school And if you are deemed as a lesbian You don't behave well or you don't have good manners, you're taken in the middle of this night to this home and it's so creepy and the home's like made of beetles and they're, you know, it's basically traumatic for everyone who goes, but just sort of allowing kidslet and young adult and stuff like that to hold these more macabre ideas is something that I've always really, really loved, so obviously I love writing about the apocalypse, which is a darker topic.
Lily: I had a professor ask me, why do you like that? Like, it's really dark doom and gloom to sort of put yourself in that space all the time. And I actually find it really comforting, in a way, because I think if you have a story in a space like this where everything's gone and everything's horrible, it's like the worst thing you can imagine.
Lily: And you have, like, hope, and you have love. And I find it really comforting. It's like, if these characters can get through the end of the world, I can get through my midterms, you know? So stuff like that. And I think, sort of, Taking those really weird, dark stories that I read as a kid and sort of applying that, you know, these kids are going through some really rough stuff, but they're still kids and there's still that aspect of life goes on.
Lily: And so I think that was something that was really important to me.
Laura: I'm only halfway through your book, sorry. It's hard for me to put everything in, but my favorite part of the book is the way that you weave in actual titles, sometimes as references But sometimes as a prop, like, you know, something just, yeah, a weapon, something to step on.
Laura: And I love that you mentioned, I think it's called Canicle of Liebowitz, is that what it's called? Which I had never heard of before. I went to a bookstore, and I don't even remember where, and they had one of those things where they wrap the book in paper. Yeah, the blind date with the book. And that was one of the ones I picked up, and I actually didn't finish it because I didn't like it enough to finish it.
Laura: But it has really stayed with me as an idea, as a, the structure, all of the things. So that's actually one of my favorite things about your book, was where you talk about having 300 copies of The Giver, but no one wants that. No one wants to read about the apocalypse when you're living in the apocalypse, which is so funny.
Laura: But you know, Canicle of Liebowitz, Was a book that I didn't really like but I learned a lot from. Are there books that you can think of that you learned from or you can't shake and yet you didn't actually enjoy reading them?
Lily: Absolutely, there are so many, so many. But something that I was doing when I was writing is I wanted it to sort of seem like a reading list.
Lily: Like all the books that I had in there, I wanted them to be ones that I could stand by and recommend. Yes, you feel it. Yeah, exactly. So Under the Egg is actually in there. I'm not sure if you've gotten there yet. It is, but also, just every book in there is something that I've read, except for Canticle of the Woods.
Lily: I've never read it. Well, you
Laura: referenced that you didn't read it. I've never read it, and
Lily: because for, so at Montclair High, you have to pick a senior thesis book. And that's one of the options, and I brought it home to my dad, and I said, Oh, it's about the apocalypse, like, this is so up my alley, I'd love to read it.
Lily: And he goes, When I was seven years old in my class, you know, we were supposed to read it and it was horrible. And I, so all of that was, it was true to it, but I do think there are so many books could barely get through that I loved thinking about afterwards. Emily St. John Mandel is one of my favorite authors of all time.
Lily: Yeah, I totally agree. Station Eleven, one of my biggest inspirations. Read it during the pandemic, which was a crazy thing to do, but I love, love that book, but one of her other books, more recently, Sea of Tranquility. Yes. I didn't enjoy it as I was reading it. Same. But then afterwards, I was thinking about it, and I was like, this is a really interesting idea, you know, of, of all of these different timelines sort of collapsing in on each other, and, and everything sort of cyclical, I thought that was a really interesting idea, and that's one where afterwards I sort of had to change my, how much I liked the book because I kept thinking about it.
Lily: Another one is this Really, really creepy horror book, or I guess novella, called Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, and it's by Eric LaRocca. But it's told completely over email, and I read it in one sitting, and I sort of sat back and I went, What did I just read? You know, did I enjoy that? Did I not?
Lily: But it's the type of thing where there's this one line in it called, What have you done today to deserve your eyes? And that's something, that's an idea that I'm walking around like, oh, this guy's so pretty today. And I'm like, what have I done today? I deserve my eyes. So yeah, and they're also books that I've read for school that I didn't love, but have taught me a lot about writing.
Lily: Like Madame Bovary was one that I read recently for my first year seminar at school. And that one, it was, you know, I understand why it's a classic and I enjoyed it, but it wasn't mind blowing. But there's this one scene where they're confessing their love for each other, Madame Bovary and one of her lovers that she's seeing.
Lily: And they're at a farm festival, some sort of, and this guy is talking about manure and like the award for best manure in the, you know, French countryside. And so it goes back and forth between the two conversations of, Oh, you know, I love you so much and I can never live without you. And this manure was the best one ever created.
Lily: And so that's something I've definitely stolen of taking a really important conversation and interweaving something that's really, really mundane and boring. I think that's so interesting and so genius. And that's definitely something I've taken away from that.
Laura: One thing I really like about your book is the way it weaves between present day, fills in the gaps of like, well, how did you get here?
Laura: And what's your sort of, no, I keep saying you. And it's a girl in a bookstore. Liz's backstory. But then also these stories that she's collecting as well, and the threat of humanity that it ties together, and yet they're all somewhat random, in a way that feels as random as people are. But I like that there is that weaving back and forth, and you don't feel like it's just totally linear, and yet you feel like you're being propelled forward.
Laura: And so, well done.
Lily: Oh, I like
Laura: that a lot.
Lily: Now, so you wrote Middle grade, and then now you wrote a picture book that came out recently and now you're working on adult. Yes. What has it been like sort of maneuvering through the different age categories and what are sort of the big differences in how you, obviously there's going to be differences between adult and picture book, but what's the differences in, in the way you approach it?
Laura: So I do think that in writing middle grade, I was trying to recapture or recreate works that I had loved. So. A lot of people have said, Oh, it reminded me of, you know, from the mixed up files of Basil Frankweller. It entirely on purpose. It was about trying to capture that sense of or recreate or renew that sense of being a kid in the city without parents, but also connecting to art.
Laura: I have a master's in art history. And one of the things I did a lot when I was living in the city and now is take my kids to art schools. I took The Met to other museums and I had, you know, scavenger hunts that I would create for them of like, find a picture of a cat, find a landscape that's where you want to go on vacation next.
Laura: I would have all these sort of elaborate ways for kids to interact with the art as a way of tricking them into caring and learning about art. So that was how I started, was wanting to tell these stories in ways that I think were connected to the ways I had fallen in love in the past and the ways that I had connected my own kids to them.
Laura: I want to do another book, I want to do another middle grade, I want to do another, uh, art based book and there was a show at the Met and it was of a medieval manuscript and it was by these painters called the Lindbergh Brothers and what's really wonderful about medieval manuscripts especially by the Lindbergh Brothers is that there's so much story in every illustration or illumination as they called them and so I got really excited about it and I started researching the Lindbergh Brothers.
Laura: I discovered that they're in the midst of this The work that they did and the relationship they had with the duke who was the patron of their work, there was a six year old girl who played a role in the work that was being done. So I was like, oh great, here's the anchor of my next middle grade story because she goes on to marry one of the brothers, etc.
Laura: The more I got into it, the more I realized that the story I wanted to tell Was really not for kids. The girl was kidnapped at the age of six by the Duke so that she would be forced to marry his painter, who was his favorite painter and then you're like, well, what's that about? Then I thought, well, maybe it's not sort of sexual in nature, maybe it's just about, you know, her dowry, which is exactly what it was about.
Laura: But also I decided I wanted there to be a love affair between the duke and the painter. And the more I got into it, the more the themes became adult
themes.
Laura: But I didn't want to abandon it. And then the deeper I got in, I also realized that what this book was was a book of hours. A book of hours is a prayer book because you're supposed to read certain prayers at certain hours.
Laura: But really what is in this book and in these illuminations is an exploration of what it means to be alive and what the short hours are about on earth, which was quite heavy. So it started as just being like, do I really want to talk about like love affairs and potential pedophilia? No, I don't. But really what it evolved to and what I'm working through now and I'm about.
Laura: 80 percent of the way done with this book is that it's really just more about the adult themes of knowing what it means to know that To face mortality. Yeah, and you know, there's the very famous Latin motto that, you know, life is short and art is long. You know, what does it mean when you know that you won't be here forever?
Laura: Maybe the art will. It just felt heavier.
Lily: Yeah, maybe too much for an
Laura: 80 year old. Too much, for sure, for sure. So, but it also feels like, you know, Exciting. I feel like I sort of got my writing legs under me in writing my first two novels. And I felt like, okay, now I know what to do. And I also know how to make it different.
Laura: My picture book is just very different. My picture book was like, I woke up one night or I woke up one morning. I had an idea. It was inspired by my son. My son is on the autism spectrum. And it's very hard when you are a kid who's neurodiverse and you're in a neurotypical classroom. And it's always about how can you accommodate the kid to fit the classroom.
Laura: Yeah. And I was like, but how could we maybe accommodate classrooms to fit the kid?
Yeah.
Laura: For everyone's benefit. Yeah. So that's, that book is called Wild for Winnie. Yeah. And it was written really honestly just because I wanted to put it out in the world. It didn't matter. It wasn't meant to become a bestseller or, you know, change the world.
Laura: But it's been nice seeing it really connect to people, particularly in the autism and neurodiversity community who really get it. That's awesome. Yeah. So have you started working on something else? I know, and then I'll get back to like your process, but you're in school full time, you have many, many restrictions, there is not a current pandemic
Lily: happening to open
Laura: up your schedule.
Laura: So what is your writing process like now?
Lily: Yeah, so I used to sit down and write a book over the summer. I did that three summers in a row. So the one that is Getting published. This is the third one that I finished. Third time's the charm. Yeah, the things that I wrote when I was 15, 16 should never see the light of day.
Lily: So I'm happy about that. But yeah, so now it's a little bit different because I don't have that plethora of, you know, summers are for getting internships and sort of working on After college stuff, whereas when I was in high school, everything was a little bit on pause, and so I felt like I had an excuse to be like, yeah, I can sit on my porch and write for a month and it'll be okay.
Lily: But now, I sort of just jam it in wherever I can. Seven o'clock to midnight, that's a big time for me. Yeah, so like after dinner, if I don't have rehearsal, if I don't Sometimes I have a night class. If I don't have that, then I'll just sit and I'll write. Normally, if I get an idea, it'll come at about 11. 59 and I'll stay awake for longer.
Lily: But yeah, I mean, I, I'm gonna write something else. I don't know what that's gonna be yet. I have some ideas, but something that I, is sort of a big question for me is, Whether I want to stay in that sort of apocalyptic area where if I want to branch out and then also well they like the apocalypse so much is that even something I should think about doing?
Lily: But yeah no I do have some ideas some of them more More valuable than others, I'll say. But, yeah, I'll probably start working on that, I guess, this summer when I have a little bit more time. But, yeah, what was it like for you writing another book after you'd already written one? Sort of coming up with an idea.
Laura: It was actually really challenging because I knew in writing Under the Egg, I loved the relationship between Bodhi and Theo, and I was like, well, look at this, we have a little dynamic detective duo, and they're gonna go into the future, and Theo has this job at Cadwallader's as an intern, and you know, they're gonna stumble upon all these other art mysteries, and they're gonna solve them together, and my editor at the time said, no, we don't really want a second.
Laura: It was a two book deal, and they were like, we don't really want a second book about the same character. We want a new standalone book. Oh, okay. All right, well, great! I'll go find a new idea. So I had this idea. I've, one of my all time favorite books is The Name of the Rose, and I've always wanted to write about medieval history and monasteries and the libraries and what books are hidden in there, and so I came up with an idea that was going to be halfway Half modern day and then half historical and it was gonna, it was gonna trade off chapter by chapter until you come to the solution of the mystery at the end.
Laura: Very excited. Outlined it. Wrote the first 50 pages. Booked my tickets to France to go look at monasteries for a week. And the day before I left for France, I got a note back from my editor and that was, what else do you have? Oh no! No thank you. What else? No So I went to look at monasteries anyway, just because that's my thing.
Laura: And so then that was hard, and then it became like a question of like, well, what am I writing? Am I writing for myself? Well, no, once you have a two book deal, you're writing for someone else. You're writing for what the publisher wants. You're writing for what they think their audience wants. You're writing for what they think the readers of Under the Egg want.
Laura: And so, we sort of went around and around, because I, what I felt is that what they will want is a reproduction of what they loved about the first book. And as a writer, what you want to do is something different. So we kind of went back and forth, and then finally I said, listen, I need to write a history.
Laura: Really where it was getting hung up is they wanted a contemporary story. And I just was like, I need to write a historical. Like, this is where my heart lies. It's always going to be in history. And either we write a contemporary story with the same characters and let them solve a historical mystery. or I write new characters but in a historical setting.
Laura: And so they said, do that. So that's how I landed there. And then it was harder because I think a lot of times too, I remember hearing somebody say, everyone has one novel in them because everybody can, that first novel is like all your little bits and pieces that you've been saving. And you put them all in that first book.
Laura: Stew, and then you open the refrigerator for the second novel and you're like, oh, so you have to go out and like forage for new stuff. It was definitely harder. It wasn't pouring out of me. I had to really like push myself to get there. But once it was done, I was so immensely proud of it and I felt so good about it.
Laura: And even though it was harder to get there.
Yeah,
Laura: so in that way, I think that the second book gave me a lot of confidence as a writer because it said you can start from not having the full fridge. You can start from not having a whole fridge full of leftovers and you can go find the story and go out and and piece together the story and you can do it again and you can do it again and you can do it again which is ultimately what you want to do if you love writing.
Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. Do you think that you will move into other genres? Like I know that you love theater, I think you wrote a play, is that right? Went for your senior option. Yeah, I did. Yeah. Do you see that your work could take you into other genres or fields?
Lily: Yeah, that's sort of part of what I'm trying to piece through.
Lily: Obviously when you're 17, 18, 19, you're writing a book, you can't really write a book for adults because you're not an adult. Right. You know, that's why I find it hard to You know, if I tried to write a story about a 24, I can't because I've never experienced what a 24 year old I could write middle grade, I could write about a 16 year old, but I just haven't experienced that yet.
Lily: So I do have to probably age a little bit before I start because there's that weird gray area in publishing that would be new adult. Yeah, that's sort of coming back because there's some romance that's in there, but Sort of from 18 to 21, it's sort of a gray area there as far as protagonists go. But, so, age category wise, I'm probably going to be in YA for the time being.
Lily: Part of what my editor and my agent really liked about this book was that it was so based in a bookstore. And that was something I really liked. I'd been basically writing the same book over and over again until I got it where I wanted it to be. And so there were three different books, but it's, it's one book.
Lily: I wanted to write about an apocalypse, I wanted to write about sisters, I wanted, you know, there to be romance, and really the missing piece was the bookstore. So when I started working at Watchung Booksellers my junior year, like that became very much so, oh, this is the thing that ties it all together, this is why it matters.
Lily: And so, yeah, a lot of the feedback that I got was, I really like the fact that it's clearly the space that you know a lot about and you care a lot about and Also that other people care about and so for the next book, whatever it may be, I'm trying to figure out, oh, there has to be something else that I'm really passionate about that I can write about because I can't write another book for a book, like that's, you know, at that point we're beating a dead horse.
Lily: And so I've been trying to think about, I do do a lot of theater, I write plays, I love reading plays. I have a play that, not this weekend, but the weekend after is that I've written that's happening at my school, which is exciting. But, yeah, I'm trying to think, oh, maybe I could do a theater based, because that's something I love.
Lily: I would love to do a music based mystery. I've toyed with that about, I guess, medieval music. Do you write music? I do, I do. But, like, Gregorian chants and stuff like that because there's some really, really dark ones and interesting stuff. And so, and also the world of music and concert music and classical and how sort of scary and messy that can be.
Lily: And so that's something I've toyed with, but yeah, really it's been finding what that thing is that's gonna anchor the story. And for you, for some of them, it's been art because you love art and so I'm trying to find what it is that can sort of carry the next one. So. It might be theater. It might be theater now that I think about it.
Lily: But yeah, it might be film. It might be writing. Could be interesting. Yeah. But that's, that's sort of what I need to figure out first and then I'll be able to write something. It's
Laura: around other art forms though. It sounds like that's the job.
Lily: I love any sort of creating anything, you know, whether it be drawing or painting or singing or playing the trombone or, you know, whatever.
Lily: That's really, really enjoyable to me, so it probably will be based on something like that. But that sort of ties in with something that you were saying about the medieval manuscripts and how the idea of art lives forever and we, and so I think part of it is I love to have this sort of toying with mortality and like who remembers us when we're gone.
Lily: There's this book that I read and it's called This Is How You Lose the Time War and it's really weird and you're gonna start reading it and you're gonna go, I don't know what's going on, but you have to keep going. And it's about This idea of these two warring timelines and these two different groups and they're trying to change the timeline to match what they think time should be and so it's these two agents and they're writing letters back to each other, but I think that's a really interesting idea that I'd love to play with but also the idea of just creating as a way to keep your legacy alive like when the last person forgets my name then You know, so I think that's also something that I'll hopefully continue to explore.
Lily: Yeah, whatever comes next. Yeah,
Laura: I feel very similar in that I think what I come back to over and over and over again in my life is an interest in how art gets made. I found that, so when I was doing my master's in art history, I hated it. It was like two years of like, what am I doing this for? Because it was very formalistic and it was like, Let's sit in a dark conference room and let's look at slides and let's look at like this thumb that Michelangelo drew and did he know that Raphael drew that thumb and let's compare the thumbs and I was like this is not at all what turns me on about art but when I went to a museum I would just come out so inspired and alive and what made me realize what I loved about art was the show Antiques Roadshow so I don't know if you've ever seen it so what is so great about Antiques Roadshow is that you have three stories in every single segment.
Laura: So you have the story of the person who has the object and how it got there, which always has a story like, oh my great uncle bought it, he met a guy and the guy said he had this thing and he bought it but he threw this other thing in for free and the thing that he threw in for free is actually the thing.
Laura: Then there's the story of like, oh, Well, this thing was created by this artist that no one's ever heard of and they had this really interesting legacy, et cetera, et cetera. And then the third story, particularly with painting, is the story of what is happening in the painting and why was the artist interested in that thing.
Laura: And so those three levels of narrative behind art was always really interesting to me. And what I find that I keep going back to as well is because I work in advertising, everything we do. It's collaborative. There's no individual, single contributor in advertising, nor is there in most art forms, and for sure theater is just like that, right?
Laura: You have like, you need a whole team, a whole crew, a whole cast, a writer, a director, a dramaturge, a musical director, not to mention just the guy who flips, you know, the switch on one thing at the right time, on cue. So I think what's so interesting to me is re examining this idea, which I think is particularly true for women in art.
Laura: Re examining this idea that there's this single person, who's usually a man, who is a brilliant genius, who is just out there on their own, seeing all, having a visionary approach to art, and then just executing it completely on their own. When really, there is, even for a single artist, there's so A whole slew of people behind them, giving thoughts, giving criticism, mentors, agents, editors, you know.
Laura: There are always people, wives, you know, boyfriends. There are always these people who are affecting the art and guiding the art and shaping the art. But usually it's just sort of one person's face attached to the art. So I think that all of that is really interesting to explore.
Lily: Sort of on that idea, who are the people that you think have like shaped your art in that way?
Lily: Yes. You know, the people that you would consider mentors, co conspirators, whatever you'd like to call it.
Laura: I think most of the people who have affected my art are the writers that I read. I was at a writer's retreat. And somebody said, what are you writing? I said, historical fiction. And everyone at the table was like, I love historical fiction.
Laura: I love historical fiction. And yet what they were writing was YA, sci fi, fantasy, romance. Like none of them were writing it. So I thought it was interesting. Why does everyone love historical fiction? And think about how much of your childhood reading was historical fiction. Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely.
Lily: For school and yeah.
Laura: Yeah. So, so much of what, if you're a passionate reader, so much of what you grow up on, is historical fiction. So I think about writers that I grew up with like Laura Ingalls Wilder. He had a huge effect on me in terms of wanting to understand what does it mean to eat breakfast in 1800 whatever and you're on a prairie.
Laura: And you're in a covered wagon. That kind of question was really interesting to me then and is still really interesting to me now. The other writers that have been hugely impactful on me are Hilary Mantel, who wrote the Wolf Hall series. For the way that she created such a crafty, modern character. And yet it feels wholly of its time.
Laura: So you read it and you don't feel like it's like thee and thou and what's now. You know, you feel like you're reading a modern character and with a modern sensibility and a modern wit. And yet you also feel like you were absolutely in the Tudor era. So I think that's really phenomenal. And I'm also really blown away by authors like A.
Laura: S. Byatt who wrote Possession, which I really recommend you read if you haven't. And. I just read this incredible book called Northwoods by Daniel Paulson, David Mitchell. I'm really impressed by writers. who can recreate historical genres or different types of writing in their writing.
Yeah. So,
Laura: that is one of the things I liked.
Laura: It wasn't exactly that, but I liked that in your book you have the present, you have the past, but then you also have this other type of genre in your book as well. That's something that's really inspiring to me. Something I'm working on.
Lily: I
Laura: haven't cracked it yet, but I'm still working on it.
Lily: No, because in the gallery, you were talking about Hilary Mantel, and you have such a strong voice in there that feels so steeped in the time I was reading it, and I was like, I totally understand exactly what type of person this was in this period, you just did such a great job of capturing that through language.
Laura: Thank you! That's a huge compliment to me. You know who I think is one of the most impressive examples of that is Charles Frazier, who wrote Cold Mountain. Mm hmm. And he's also been a real inspiration to me. He spent 10 years writing that book. So I feel like if I can write my book in five years, then I'm like twice as fast as he was.
Laura: And it was a brilliant, brilliant book. But what I loved about it is that, again, it feels like you are in the Civil War era. It feels very modern. The writing is beautiful. But he layers in enough time specific language. So he'll say like, you know, she grabbed a curdle to stir the, you know, whatever she's making.
Laura: And you don't know what a curdle is, but you're just like, but you understand contextually Some sort of out of date kitchen utensil that takes you directly into that place, that time, and the way that And yet doesn't take you out of the place. It doesn't make you think, like, what is he talking about? So I thought he was really, really masterful.
Laura: And I do remember listening to an interview with him and he said that his grandmother grew up in Appalachia and that was the language she still used. So a lot of that language, he wasn't going into, you know, books of Civil War cookery the way I would. He actually, it was very natural to him because it was very natural to his grandmother who used to tell him these stories of, you know, what it was like growing up in Appalachia at the turn of the century.
Laura: So yeah, that's the dream is being able to. Recreate the voice, but not so much that you are pulled out of, or it's overwhelming, or it feels like I heard a Christina Baker client say something about, like, you do all the research, you pour it all into the book, and then you start pulling it out.
Lily: Yes, absolutely.
Lily: Where it becomes,
Laura: you know, too overwhelming. And then she also said that about the, like, ye olde language, or like the language of yore. You try to, like, capture this older style, but then you try to pull it back from one, you know?
Lily: Absolutely, yeah. My Got a little bit tuned to the science part of the science fiction at a certain point at the end because, you know, I'd get notes from my agent that would be like, hey, because there's obviously some acid rain involved in the plot, how would it make sense that this would happen and this would be affected and this wouldn't be affected?
Lily: And so I was like putting paragraphs in about pH levels and the requirements for, and my editor saw it and was like, What is this doing here? You know, I think you can trust the reader a little bit more than have to be like, well, the pH level required to go through X material is different from Yeah.
Laura: But I did all that research!
Laura: But I worked really hard on it, yeah. I got so into it, yeah. I didn't have to think like, okay, interesting to me, interesting to nobody else. Yeah,
Lily: exactly, exactly. It's better just to have that as a foundation and then everything else will You don't have to
Laura: And sometimes it peeks through. Sometimes it peeks through in a way that the audience can tell that it's behind the door, but they don't have to see that it's behind the door.
Laura: Besides your godfather that you mentioned, do you have mentors who have guided your work? I
Lily: mean my dad, he's sort of my beta reader, like if I was to say I had a beta reader. I'd print it out, I'd give it to him, he'd circle it with red pen, but other
Laura: than that Is he a passionate reader or is he a passionate
Lily: reader.
Lily: He's a passionate reader, his mom was an English teacher Okay So he knows what it's like to be red penned by a parent, so it's a little bit scary, but Other than that, I have a really, really wonderful agent who believed in my work When I was a kid I feel like it would have been very easy to be like, Hmm, this is a weird story about, you know, romance at the end of the world and I'm just gonna pass on it.
Lily: But I did a lot of work with her, which was really nice. And then otherwise, a lot of my ideas and mentorship have come from either teachers that I've had who were like, Hey, I see something here. You should keep going. So a lot of people at Montclair High who were really great and sort of urged me to keep going in that regard.
Lily: And then just, you know, The books that I read, I sort of can pinpoint a couple where it shifted the way I thought about writing and the way I thought about my own work. Like, after I finished the first draft of The Lost Bookstore, I read Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin. And that was something.
Lily: Fantastic book, her new book. Interesting Facts About Space came out recently, and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy. It's on hold at the bookstore for me. But her writing is so odd. You're reading it, and you're going, This is weird, but I love it. So that sort of allowed me to go in and approach the way I wrote things With a little bit more fun, like people can, because if the character is weird, it makes sense that the way the story is written is weird.
Lily: Same with A. S. King, who is big in the YA space, but her books, my favorite is probably Still Life with Tornado, which has the incredible line, nothing's original, and then so like everything's sort of riffing on everything else. But she also wrote Gloria O'Brien's History of the Future, which is such a great weird book about some people who drink a petrified bat and they can see the future when they look at people.
Lily: But just like Embracing the weirdness of your writing and letting it shine through, through the, the prose and the voice is something that was really important. And then, other than that, books that I've read that have been sort of really, I guess, mentor y in that way is Neil Shusterman's books. He's big in the YA space, especially with dystopia, stuff like that.
Lily: He has this book called Dry, which is, what if California actually ran out of water? Like, what would happen then? And so, he always has these really great characters in his story. But overarching above the entire plot, the entire concept, are these big ethical questions about, like, what it means to be human and, and having those in these YA books was always something that was really important to me and something that I took from it.
Lily: And then also, there's this series called the Illuminae Trilogy and it's by Jay Kristoff and Amy Kaufman and it's all found documents. And that was something that I thought was really interesting and definitely was an inspiration for this because having, you know, journal entries and stuff like that throughout the story, but it's only.
Lily: You know, security footage, text messages, emails, stuff like that. And it's this big, giant book and there are three of them and it's probably 600, 700 pages and you're just reading through all these and that's how you get the story.
Yeah. And
Lily: so I think that was, you know, what does it mean to write a story?
Lily: What is it, what does a story look like? Is there something that a story has to look like? Period. I think those would probably be my biggest, I guess, mentors as far as that goes, yeah.
Laura: If you like that, I recommend it. And the book Northwoods, which I just read by Daniel Paulson, which they have at Watchung Bookstores.
Laura: Especially if you're in college in Massachusetts, it all takes place around the same area where you are. And it is chapters of historical fiction that start right after or right around the time of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. With a couple of sort of runaway lovers who run into the woods to live off the land outside of society.
Yeah.
Laura: And then it goes, you know, 50 years into the future, another 50 years into the future with each chapter following along. But in between each chapter is some sort of primary source, in quotes, you know, like where it's a real estate listing, it could be a tavern song, it could be a true detective article about a murder that happened, and it ties all the pieces together and it's so creative and so fun to read but also just really beautifully written.
Laura: Yeah.
Lily: No. Sort of building on that with, Neil Shusman has a series called The Unwind Trilogy. Maybe there are four of them now, and I've read all of them and they're fantastic. But the things that sort of splice up the different, because it's told through multiple perspectives, but in between there are A lot of, like, campaign materials and articles and quotes from speeches and stuff.
Lily: But it's, it's a dystopian novel about reproductive rights. And so, it's about, you know, a second civil war has been fought over reproductive rights, and sort of the outcome is that children aged 13 to 18 can be unwound.
Which means, like,
Lily: if your parents are like, oh, hey, you know, you're, uh, Delinquent child, that's what can happen.
Lily: But what I find so, so, um, powerful about what he does in his is some of them are made up, but some of them are real. Right. And some of them are from now. Right. I think the last book was published in maybe 2017, so some of them are from when those books were being published and you're going through. And you can tell because there'll be like a link.
Lily: Yes. Go and look at it, and that was something that, you know, when I was reading through and you're seeing all these things that seem so crazy and fantastical, and then you read something and you go, that happened, that's, that is especially powerful to me. Yeah, I think it's so interesting when people sort of splice those things through the narrative, it's really interesting.
Lily: Yeah, I love that.
Laura: Yeah. I wanted to share one story. Yeah. With you that may, I was thinking about as you were saying that you wrote two novels and then the third time's the charm. I think there's such a feeling as a writer that when you write something and you, especially if you complete something and it doesn't go anywhere, it feels like wasted time or energy or like there's some sense of loss around it, like you lost that time energy you could have been putting in somewhere else.
Laura: And I was listening to This podcast, the BBC World Book Club, which is amazing. They were interviewing Barbara Kingsolver and she said that she always writes her way into the novel. So it always takes her, she said, about 200 pages to figure out what her novel is about. Which for me would be a novel. It's terrifying.
Laura: Right, it's totally terrifying. And so they asked her, does it feel frustrating to throw away all of those pages? And she said, no, I just think that I start on page negative 200 and I write to page one. Yeah. And so I really loved the way she framed that and it made me reframe in my own mind. Yeah. Any sort of tangents, or, or directions that don't seem to go anywhere or little black holes, that there really are part of the process.
Laura: They are part of. They are productive, they are constructive. Ultimately leading to the place where you wanted to go. It's just page negative 200. Absolutely.
Lily: That's such a great idea. Yeah.
Marni: Thanks, Laura and Lily. Laura, we are excited for you to leap into writing for adults. And Lily, we can't wait for your debut to come out in 2025.
Kathryn: And before we go, I want to highlight a few of our upcoming events. Next Tuesday, July 9th, we are so excited that master spy thriller novelist Daniel Silva will be here.
Kathryn: He's launching his latest Gabriel Alon novel, A Death in Cornwall, that very day. He's only doing a handful of events on the East Coast, so don't miss out. Get your tickets as soon as you can.
Marni: Then 11th, We welcome Joyce Maynard back with her latest novel, How the Light Gets In. She'll be with our own Alice Elliot Dark, and they're sure to have a great conversation.
Marni: And don't forget to register for Montclair Public Library Foundation's send off party for Janet Torsney on July 25th. It's going to be a karaoke party. It's a fundraiser at Tierney's here in Montclair.
Kathryn: You can find out more about all of our upcoming events in our newsletter, show notes, and at watchungbooksellers.
Kathryn: com. Recording and editing at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, New Jersey. Special thanks to Timmy Kellany, Bri Testa, and Derek Mathias. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica. Art and design by Evelyn Moulton. And research and show notes by Carolyn Shurtleff. Thanks to all the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids Room for their hard work and lovely books.
Kathryn: And
Marni: thank you for listening. If you enjoy the podcast, please like, follow, and share it. You can follow us on social media, at Watchung Booksellers. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to us at To WB Podcast at watchungbooksellers. com.
Kathryn: We'll see you next week until then for the love of books, keep reading.
