LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with internationally bestselling novelist Tess Gerritsen, author of the popular Rizzoli & Isles crime series, subsequently adapted as a television show on TNT. Earning her medical degree at UC San Francisco, Gerritsen was a physician for a number of years, before making her book debut in 1987 with the romantic thriller, Call After Midnight. It was the first of thirty-one suspense novels—more romantic thrillers, as well as medical thrillers, police procedurals and historical thrillers—many of them bestsellers. Gerritsen’s work has been translated into forty languages, with more than forty million copies of her books sold worldwide. She won a Rita Award in the suspense category in 2002 for The Surgeon, and a Nero Wolfe Award in 2006 for Vanish. In 2023 she published The Spy Coast, the story of former spy Maggie Bird, whose attempts at a quiet life are disrupted by her past, and who successfully outwits the enemies who want her dead, with the help of her friends in the Martini Club. The Summer Guests, the second book in The Martini Club series, is due out from Thomas & Mercer in a few days. Gerritsen sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her new book.

Although you have written many different kinds of suspense novel, your The Martini Club books are your first foray into espionage fiction. What prompted you to write The Spy Coast in the first place, and how did the character of Maggie Bird first come to you?

The Spy Coast was inspired by a peculiar feature of my small Maine town. I discovered that a large number of retired CIA employees live in this community. In fact, on the street where I once lived, there was an OSS retiree to the right of us, and a CIA retiree living a few doors down to the left of us. What drew former intelligence professionals to this part of Maine? I’ve heard a number of different explanations: That it’s far from any nuclear targets. Or it was a place for CIA safe houses. Or it’s a state where people mind their own business. I also wondered what life is like for an ex-spy. Do they get together with their former colleagues? Do they have book clubs? I’d see gray-haired people in the grocery store and post office, and I wondered about their past exploits. Surely they had stories to tell! Then one day, a character’s voice popped into my head. She said: “I’m not the woman I used to be.” And that’s how Maggie Bird was born, a woman whose voice was full of regret. A woman who’s now invisible to the world because she’s no longer young.

The Summer Guests is your second book about the Martini Club. Are there challenges in writing a sequel? How have your characters grown or changed?

The challenge is in keeping your characters moving forward emotionally. They can’t be static, or the series loses steam. What makes it easier, though, is the fact I know these people. I know how they’d react, what they’d say, how they’d rise to a new challenge. There are several new developments in The Summer Guests. Maggie is finally open to falling in love again, now that she realizes her oldest friend and fellow spy Declan has always pined for her. Another big change is in Jo Thibodeau, the local police chief, who is slowly starting to accept help from this circle of spies. In the first book, she had no idea who these people were; now she knows, and she acknowledges that they’re always going to be a few steps ahead of her. That budding partnership has been fun to write.

The books in your series are set in small-town Maine, a state where you yourself have lived for many years. How much of the town of Purity and the surrounding area is inspired by real locales?

Geographically, Purity is very much like my real town, with a stunning seacoast and lakes and ponds and the hordes of tourists that show up every summer. It’s also a town with a certain amount of conflict between native Mainers and those who’ve come “from away.” But fictional Purity is smaller, with a smaller police force, and I’ve made it just a bit more remote than my own town.

Your series has been compared to The Thursday Murder Club books, which also feature a cast of older sleuths (one a retired spy!) and their interaction with local law enforcement. What makes older sleuths and spies so interesting? Is it their experience? Their longer back stories, or potential wisdom? Are they more fun to write?

I hadn’t read The Thursday Murder Club books when I wrote The Spy Coast. The reason I was drawn to write about older people has more to do with growing older myself. I couldn’t have written these books thirty years ago; I needed to experience the phenomenon of becoming invisible and feeling as if society viewed me as less and less relevant because I’m older. I wanted to write about people my age, and how we still have valuable contributions to make, and yes— we’re still ready for adventure! The fun of writing about these characters is watching how my retired spies can outsmart Jo, who’s much younger, and how they’ve acquired not just wisdom with age, but also some well-earned cynicism.

Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Do you know the outcome of your story from the start? Is everything mapped out ahead of time, or are there surprises in the course of getting the story written?

I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer, which means my first drafts meander all over the place until I figure out where the story is going. The Summer Guests was inspired by a detail shared with me by the adult daughter of a former spy—that her family settled in this community because her father was working here on the CIA project called MKULTRA. That made me dive into MKULTRA, its history and ultimate scandals. I knew that would be one of the threads of the story. But the real heart of the story is about wealthy
summer people who come to Maine every year, bringing their secrets and their conflicts to our state. I knew it would start with a missing teenager. I knew the police would drag the local pond (thinking the girl had drowned) and instead find the skeleton of a long-dead woman. That’s all I knew about the plot, so I had to hang on tight as the twists and turns revealed themselves while I wrote.

What is next for you? Will there be more stories about The Martini Club? Are there other books in the works that you can share with us?

I’m writing the third in the Martini Club series. It’s called The Shadow Friends, and it focuses on Ingrid Slocum, one of the members of the Martini Club. She’s now living in Purity, happily married to her husband Lloyd (a former analyst). Then two people are murdered, with echoes of a long-ago operation in Ingrid’s past, and Ingrid’s ex-lover shows up in town. Suddenly Ingrid finds her marriage and her peaceful life under threat.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

In my reference area, I have shelves and shelves of textbooks on medicine and forensics, CIA memoirs and books about spycraft. I also have a pretty eclectic collection of other nonfiction, with a focus on anthropology, archaeology, and comparative religion. Finally, I have loads of novels by fellow writers—books that I admired and want to keep around as inspiration.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

Since the current political situation is very much on my mind, I’m reading a truly eye-opening book by historian Colin Woodard called American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. It explains the history behind why the United States continues to be so difficult to unite.

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with filmmaker and author Rosanne Limoncelli, the Senior Director for Film Technologies at the Kanbar Institute and at the Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center, both part of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has written, directed, and produced documentaries, educational films and short narrative films, and has taught writing and filmmaking for more than three decades. Limoncelli’s first book, Teaching Filmmaking: Empowering Students Through Visual Storytelling, was published in 2009. She has published short stories in the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Suspense Magazine and Noir Nation. Her debut mystery novel, The Four Queens of Crime—offered in our January Early Reviewers batch—is due out next month from Crooked Lane Books. Limoncelli sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her new book.

The Four Queens of Crime follows a woman detective chief inspector in 1930s London who enlists the aid of four famous mystery writers—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham—in solving her case. How did the idea for the story first come to you?

I love reading biographies of my favorite authors because I always wonder what experiences from their lives might’ve made it into their books. I love the psychology. Reading about Agatha Christie led me to the other three and it fascinated me that these four women were the bestselling authors of the 30’s. How amazing was that! The lives of Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham were just as fascinating, and of course I started wondering if they had ever met and that led me to, what if they did meet and got involved in a murder case? Would there have been a woman DCI they could’ve collaborated with? And then I found Lilian Wyles, the first woman DCI at Scotland Yard. And miraculously, she had a memoir!

Were you an admirer of these four authors’ work, before beginning your book? Which one is your favorite, and why?

That’s too hard a question! I think that sometimes I’m in the mood for one author over another, and they constantly switch places for number one. I love Christie’s puzzles, Ngaio’s characters, Allingham’s language, and the patter between Sayers’ protagonists. In the book they talk to each other about writing and how different they are from each other. That was one of the fun things about writing them as characters. I will say that for each author I have my favorite titles in all formats, hard cover, kindle and
Audiobook, and I go back to them often, not just for research reasons, I need to keep in touch with the main characters like they are real people in my life.

What sort of research did you have to do on your four queens, in order to incorporate them as characters in your story, and what were some of the most interesting things you learned?

I’m a research nerd, and I went way overboard researching all four authors, consuming all their books, plus articles, biographies, documentaries, movies and tv shows of their work, and the time period, 1938. I’m lucky that my husband has always been into the history of World War Two so we watched a lot of feature films and documentaries from and about that era. The four queens all came alive for me quickly, mainly through their biographies. I found it interesting to notice the differences between the four writers, as well as their similarities. For example, they were all big lovers of Shakespeare, they each had very different writing styles, they all grew up so differently. Agatha was home schooled, Dorothy was one of the first women to get a degree from Oxford, Ngaio was a painter and travel writer before she wrote mysteries, and Margery grew up surrounded by writers. I got very interested in the accuracy of their real lives pertaining to my story, figuring out the possible real time they could’ve spent together. The spring of 1938 would’ve been the last chance for them to meet before the war, since Ngaio Marsh returned to New Zealand shortly after that spring. I also noticed that they all had a change in their writing careers right about that time, so I imagined that the experiences on that weekend of my imagined murder changed them personally to bring about that literary change.

What influence has your career as a filmmaker had on your mystery writing? Would you say you were a visual storyteller? Do you see the scenes and characters before writing them?

I do think I see scenes and characters before I write them, which actually can make it more challenging for me because I forget I have to translate my visual imagination into text so I often leave things out without noticing. An early reader will mention they’d like more description of a certain place or person, and since I see it so clearly in my mind, I have to remind myself that no one else can see it, that I actually have to put it into words! But what is the same for me, in writing films and writing fiction, is the story structure. The logic and sequence of what happens and what should happen next is my favorite part and I make charts and spreadsheets and notes and lists obsessively before writing a project and throughout the whole process. It’s the puzzle of the story that I love the most. Building it up, breaking it down, deciding on the clues and all the information that leads to the climax and makes for a convincing ending, sorting and resorting every detail until it makes sense to me and I’m satisfied with it.

You have written short stories, films, and an academic text, but this is your first novel. Was the writing process any different, when working on this kind of text?

Technically this is the fifth novel I’ve written, just the first one to be published. (Keep writing out there, writers!) Each project is a bit different for me, but one thing that was quite similar in this project and the academic text (which stemmed from the dissertation for my PhD) was the research. In both cases I didn’t know exactly what I was going to write, at first, but I kept reading what interested me and taking lots of notes and underlining sentences, and marking sections with Post-It notes and noting links of websites and movie clips, then when it had gathered a certain satisfying accumulation, I stopped. I looked at everything I had gathered, all the notes, and sections, and visual images, etc. and it all seemed to magically come together thematically and emotionally. Like I was making a collage that found its shape from my subconscious. I think that the story starts to form itself in the back of my mind, while I’m gathering the research, and the story writing is easier after that once I get down to it.

What’s next? Will there be more stories featuring DCI Lilian Wyles? Might there be a film adaptation?

I am working on a sequel that takes place two years later. The war is raging and there are different problems to solve. This story is still a murder mystery puzzle, and Lilian Wyles leads the case, with help from the four queens, but it has a bit of a spy thriller spice added to it. I’m constantly inspired by the parallels from that time and our current day issues, there are so many similarities. As far as a film adaptation, I’d love to adapt The Four Queens of Crime into a feature or a tv series, we’ll see what happens!

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

Besides the Four Queens of course, because they fill a lot of my shelves! (And by my “shelves” I mean paper books, E-readers and audio books.) A sampling of other books on my shelves include: P.D. James, John Irving, John Le Carré, Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and I’m a science fiction fan also, Octavia E. Butler, William Gibson, N.K. Jemisin, and Ray Bradbury.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I just finished reading every Mick Herron book in the Slow Horses series. The TV show is great and the audio books are also very well done. I just read Still Life by Louise Penny who is amazing! I can’t wait to read all of her work. I just started All Systems Red by Martha Wells. I will definitely be reading the whole Murderbot series. When I am trying to make a lot of progress with my writing projects, I have to ban myself from reading because I won’t get enough writing done or get enough sleep!

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with poet and book publicist Kim Dower, who has worked with authors from Kristin Hannah to Paolo Coelho through her freelance literary publicity company, Kim-from-L.A. The City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood from October 2016 – October 2018, she is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including the bestselling I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom (2022), which was praised by The Washington Post as a “fantastic collection.” Her first collection, Air Kissing on Mars (2010), was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative… seamlessly combining humor and heartache.” Her work has appeared in literary publications such as Plume, Ploughshares, Rattle, The James Dickey Review, and Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.” Her newest book, What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria, will be published later this month by Red Hen Press. Dower sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her work, and this new book.

What She Wants is your sixth poetry collection, and addresses the theme of obsessive love. What was the inspiration behind the book? Did it begin with a specific poem, a personal experience you wanted to explore, or something else?

I was reading an article (can’t remember where!) and came upon the word “Limerence.” I thought it was a beautiful sounding word, and it’s meaning, the state of being obsessively infatuated with someone, usually accompanied by delusions of or a desire for an intense romantic relationship with that person, fascinated me! I became obsessed with a word that meant to be obsessed!  I realized I had many finished poems and many in the works that fit into this category, so I built a collection based on this idea and the four stages of limerence: infatuation, crystallization, deterioration and ecstatic release.

What makes poetry unique, as a form of literary expression? Is it just the structure that makes it different from prose, or does it communicate in different ways?

Because poetry is the most concise form of language, good poems will stir our emotions with a clarity and intensity that immediately takes hold in the reader. There’s an emotional honesty in poems that connects poet to reader to create a shared experience. It has been said that prose is like walking and poetry is like dancing. A single, short poem has the power to simultaneously comfort and terrify. The poet W.H. Auden says, “poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and this is true for the poet as she writes and the reader as well.

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? How does a poet begin a poem?

I don’t know how all poets begin a poem, but I begin one after being stirred or moved by something, something personal or something I’ve read or overheard. Or something I think is funny. I often read a news headline or hear something on the radio as I’m driving that immediately says THIS IS A POEM! I was once driving, listening to the local news, and the headline, talking about a new public school decision was, “They’re Taking Chocolate Milk Off the Menu!” I pulled over and wrote a poem with that title. Later, after it was published, Garrison Keillor read it on “The Writer’s Almanac.” Poems are everywhere and I use everything I see and hear as a prompt – whether it’s something whimsical that strikes me, or something more profound like hearing a dead parent speak to me.

How has working with so many different authors, through your activities as a publicist, affected your writing?

The only way working hard at a “day” job has affected my writing is I’m very focused when I sit down to write. I’ve learned how to separate the two kinds of work and my brain and mind like knowing and appreciate the difference!

You were Poet Laureate of the city of West Hollywood for two years. What sort of things did you do as a poet laureate?

It was so much fun creating different activities, readings and events and introducing people to poetry who otherwise never thought about it. My favorite project was creating a collaborative poem with people in the city. The City of West Hollywood is committed to the arts and supported all of my ideas. We designed a large pad with three prompts and I spent a few months asking strangers at local bookstores, cafes, parks, to participate in reading a prompt and writing some lines. People really enjoyed it and I created a powerful poem consisting of all their lines called, “I Sing the Body West Hollywood.” We made posters. We celebrated!

Who are some of your favorite poets, and how has their work influenced your own?

I have so many favorites and so many whose work has influenced my own. More than influence – whose work has given me permission to build my own voice. I love Frank O’Hara – New York School of Poets – who’s influenced my “conversational” often breezy style while still packing a punch! William Carlos Williams, whose poetry has taught me to strive to make each poem a “fine machine.” Erica Jong, Sharon Olds and Kim Addonizio, for their passion, beauty, perceptions; Thomas Lux, Ron Padgett, Stephen Dunn, for humor mixed with deep emotion and insight. W.H. Auden for his style. This list could go on and on.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

I have hundreds and hundreds of books! I love all kinds of fiction, biographies, memoir, but upstairs, in my “Poetry Palace” I have only poetry – books I’ve kept and carried for 50 years – from college through today. I have a marvelous collection from Shakespeare to contemporary poets. Occasionally, just to calm myself, I will sit on the floor and take a random book off the shelf, read one or two poems, and place it back. This morning, for example, it was Diane di Prima’s book, The Poetry Deal. I read from it aloud. Now I can go on with my day.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I’m re-reading Vivian Gornick’s amazing, gorgeous memoir, Fierce Attachments, about her relationship with her mother. It’s a classic and each time I read it I discover something else – not only about her – but about myself.

I’m also re-reading Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St Vincent Millay, a great poet and a fascinating star of poetry.

My poet friend, Nina Clements – who was also a Librarian – sent me a book called Monsters by Claire Dederer, which I’m enjoying, about the link between genius and monstrosity. How do we balance our love of some artists knowing the awful things they’ve done. This is a subject that constantly fascinates me.

And I’m slowly reading and loving the poems in Kim Addonizio’s new collection, Exit Opera.

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with author and attorney Lori B. Duff, who had a thirty-year career as a lawyer and municipal court judge before turning to writing. A blogger and columnist as well, she has served as president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Her humorous essays have appeared in newspapers, on blogs, and in published collections such as The Armadillo, the Pickaxe, and the Laundry Basket (2015), You Know I Love You Because You’re Still Alive: Confessions of a Middle Aged Working Mom (2016) and If You Did What I Asked in the First Place (2019). She has now turned to fiction writing, and her debut novel, the courtroom drama Devil’s Defense, was published last month by She Writes Press. Duff sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about this new book.

Devil’s Defense follows a small-town lawyer who finds herself drawn into a case representing a client she doesn’t particularly admire. How did the idea for the story first come to you? Were there specific social or legal themes you wanted to explore, or did they develop naturally?

I was watching the confirmation hearings of a politician who shall remain nameless. This guy was an arrogant, entitled guy with only a passing understanding of consent. Several thoughts struck me at once while I was watching this, including— 1) I was tired of arrogant, entitled guys like that getting positions of leadership and I wanted to understand why; 2) Probably this guy had handlers who had prepped him for this hearing and he was too egotistical to follow their advice. I pictured them watching this at home cussing him up and down and I thought of how many times I’d coached a client and they refused to listen to my advice to their own detriment; 3) What goes on in the head of these guys? What makes them tick? So the character of Coach stood in for this guy, and Jessica is the one trying to make heads or tails of him. In addition to exploring those issues, I wanted to portray what happens behind the scenes in these situations. How you can’t necessarily blame the lawyer for what they’re being paid to say, and how the system only works when everyone has adequate representation.

Your career in the law must have been an influence when writing the story. Were there any incidents or aspects of the story taken from real life? Was there anything that was new to you, or that you had to research for the book?

If the adage “write what you know” is true, then that’s exactly what I did. My career was obviously an influence. I know what happens when clients and lawyers interact and clash. I know what happens in a courtroom. I did not use any of my clients’ stories in the book—I want everyone I’ve ever represented to know that I will always maintain their
confidentiality. That said, when you’ve been practicing law for 30+ years like I have, there are going to be things you say and hear all the time. I did have to research the back child support issue. I’ve never had a legitimation case where the child was that old, so I didn’t know how the law would handle it. The cases Jessica cites are real cases. I also looked up some things like the weather on particular dates, and what songs were in the top 40 at a particular moment in time.

Your heroine lives in a small Georgia town, just as you do. What realities about small-town life in Georgia does your story reflect? Do you feel the story would be the same, if set in a different part of the country?

Absolutely not. The fictional Ashton, Georgia is just as much a character in the book as any of the people. There’s a particular way that southerners talk and view the world, there are southern foods and places. I had to argue a lot of it with my editors, who weren’t southern. For example, a number of scenes take place in a Waffle House, which has its own culture. Apparently, the dictionary and style manuals say that fried shredded potatoes are written “hash browns”. But the Waffle House menu has it at one word—hashbrowns. So I insisted that we spell it the southern, Waffle House way. But there’s more to it than spelling. The weather affects the way people act. The expectations that you will speak kindly to people you can’t stand. The way a majority of the population looks at everything through a religious lens.

Devil’s Defense was your first novel, but not your first book. Were there differences between writing a novel, when compared to writing essays or other shorter works? Were there specific challenges, or things you particularly enjoyed about it?

I enjoy a good challenge, so there’s a good bit of overlap between the challenges and what I enjoyed about the process. I can dash off an 800 word essay and be done with it. But a novel requires not only more time but keeping more balls in the air. You’ve got to remember everyone’s height and eye color. You’ve got to remember how many days pass between one event and another. And who knows what and when and how they figured it out. In writing dialogue, you have to keep everyone’s voice and vocal quirks straight. This one cusses a blue streak, this one never would—he always uses slang, her language is more formal. The best thing about it, though, is that you really get to explore a topic. I started out wanting to know what made this kind of arrogant, entitled guy tick, and by the end I understood him. I had to understand him in order to make him three-dimensional. One of Jessica’s big faults is that she sees the world the way she wants to see it instead of the way it is, and it was fun to watch her open her eyes a little.

Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Do you write in a particular place, or at certain times? Do you map out your story ahead of time, or let it develop organically?

The first productive half hour of every day is spent writing. Usually that’s at my desk in my home office (formerly known as my son’s room) or my law office. Sometimes that’s the only writing I get done, and sometimes I manage to sneak in a little more. I type 100 words a minute, so I can get a lot done in a half hour. I ‘write’ a lot while driving or in the shower or standing on line, so by the time I get to my laptop I’m simply transcribing what’s already in my head. I don’t outline. I generally have a broad idea of where I want to go, but the details get filled in as I go. I’ve been a trial attorney for thirty some-odd years, and I think there’s a huge link between the way you tell a story in a courtroom for a jury and the way you tell a story in a novel. I’ve learned in trial work that if I write out my questions, inevitably the witness will answer one in a way I didn’t/couldn’t predict and then the next question on my list makes no sense. So I have a general idea of what I want to get out of a particular witness, but if they make a left turn, I follow them and try to nudge them in the direction I want them to go a different way than I’d planned. A good trial attorney has to be able to think on her feet. Writing is similar. I start out thinking, I want this character in this scene to do X. But if I’ve done a good job in creating the character, they are a person unto themselves and I can hear their voice in my head. When it comes to actually writing the scene, something may happen or someone may say something that provokes them to answer or respond in a way I wouldn’t have planned. So I have to adjust accordingly. Sometimes writing feels like I’m simply transcribing what the voices in my head say.

What can we look forward to next from you? Devil’s Defense is described on the cover as a “Fischer at Law” novel—will there be sequels?

Yes, there will be sequels. The second, Devil’s Hand, is slated for release on October 7, 2025. In it, Jessica represents the abused wife of a county commissioner. She has to deal with the backlash from representing someone who is accusing a muckety-muck of wrongdoing, and also try to understand the values of the religious community around her, which are in great contrast to her own. In the meantime, her estranged father comes for a visit and she has to deal with her own domestic issues.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

What isn’t on my shelves? I think that’s a shorter list. Nothing is more attractive to me than a well- organized bookshelf, and I have them all over my house, organized by genre, then author, then chronologically. I know there’s a trend now to organize books by color, and while that looks nice, I don’t know how you’d ever find a book again. I am a voracious reader. I keep track of what I read, and I just finished my 111th book of the year (I’m writing this on November 19th). I refuse to be pigeonholed by genre. I’ll read anything that is interesting and well-written. Fiction, non-fiction, biography/memoir, science fiction, fantasy, romance, literary fiction, horror, young adult, you name it. I also try to make sure I read authors who fit into categories I don’t fit into, whether that’s race or religion or culture or sexual orientation or neurodiversity or anything else. One of the greatest things about reading is that it can help you understand the world around you. If I’m only reading things by people who have the same perspective I do, then I haven’t learned much. I also love a good series. There’s nothing better than falling in love with a character and/or a world and then being able to visit them again.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I just started reading Eleanore of Avignon by Elizabeth DeLozier. That’s my ‘bedtime book’ that I keep on my nightstand. I’ve got an advance reader’s copy of What is Wrong with You by Paul Rudnick open on my Kindle. And my audiobook du jour belongs to a series I’m re-reading—the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris, which is one of my favorite pieces of mind candy, and I’m going through it this time for craft purposes, because I’m learning how she picks up story lines from past books without being tedious. The book I’m up to is Dead Reckoning which I think is the 11th in the series. Anyway, all three of those books are great, which is nice. I don’t always get the trifecta. As for recommendations, lately I’ve been recommending The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton and the Emily Wilde series by Heather Fawcett to everyone. Love those books.

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with author Andrea Jo DeWerd, who, in addition to her career in publishing and as an independent book marketer, recently saw her debut novel, What We Sacrifice for Magic, released by Alcove Press. DeWerd worked for more than a decade in the marketing and publicity departments of a number of Big 5 publishers, including Crown, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and most recently, the Harvest imprint of HarperCollins. In 2022 she launched her own marketing and publishing consulting agency, the future of agency LLC. Her authorial debut, published in late September, is a fantastical coming-of-age story following three generations of Minnesota witches during the 1960s. DeWerd sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about this new book.

How did the idea for What We Sacrifice for Magic first come to you, and how did the story develop? Did your heroine Elisabeth come first? Was it always a multi-generational family story in your mind, always a witchy tale?

I was trying to write a very different book about the American Dream, and my own family’s experience with it. My grandfather’s family were Dutch immigrants in Minnesota. My great-grandfather and his cousin operated several feed mills and fish hatcheries. The next generation, my grandfather and his brothers, all became doctors. I was fascinated by this story, and by what happens after the American Dream is achieved—what happens to the next generation? But it was too close to home for me to write in the years after my grandfather passed away.

What We Sacrifice for Magic grew out of the question: what were the women doing while the men were building their empire? I started to imagine a world in which the men ostensibly held the power, but beneath the surface, it was really the women pulling the strings; a world in which the women could be running a full-on witchcraft operation out of the side door of the kitchen while the men were off fighting their wars and building their supposed influence.

Elisabeth’s voice came to me first. I started to hear her voice, and the first thing I knew about her was that she was ruled by water. From there, I explored how she would’ve come to be that way, who would’ve taught her about her power, and Magda, her grandmother, her teacher, emerged pretty quickly.

Your book addresses themes of familial history, obligation and conflict, and the individual’s struggle to both belong to and be independent of the family circle. How does the witchy element in your story add to or complicate those themes? How different would your story be if the Watry-Ridder women weren’t witches?

In many books with magic, the magic acts as the deus ex machina that lifts the characters out of their unfortunate situations. Magic breaks oppressive forces in many ways. For Elisabeth, magic is what is holding her back, her burden. Aside from that magical burden, Elisabeth would still need her coming-of-age journey. I believe that even without magic, Elisabeth would’ve always felt separate from her family. She needed to learn who she is on her own, away from the reputation of her family and the name she was born to.

Without magic, this story becomes a much more familiar one. Anyone who has ever dealt with the pressures of a family business knows what it feels like to be torn between wanting to forge your own path and getting pulled back into the family responsibility. Adult children who take care of their aging parents know that tug-of-war as well. I think we all feel family pressure in some way or another in our lives, and beneath the magic, that is what I wanted to explore in this book.

What We Sacrifice for Magic is set in your own home state of Minnesota, and opens in 1968. What significance do the setting and time period have to your story?

The setting came to me first. Elisabeth, ruled by water, was always going to be from a small lakeside town in Minnesota. The town of Friedrich was inspired by my own beloved Spicer, Minnesota, where my family has had a cabin on Green Lake since 1938. The lake felt so integral to this story and this community that the Watry-Ridder family serves.

Moreso, this family had to come from a place that was rural enough for them to fly under the radar, a pastoral community that just accepted their local eccentrics, and even came to depend on them. I was also fascinated by the sort of gossip that happens in a small town. In a closeknit community, it’s impossible to walk down the street without everybody knowing everything about you, who you’re dating, etc. I wanted to see Elisabeth and her younger sister, Mary, engage with that gossip, and it certainly shapes them as they’re growing up in Friedrich with the sometimes unwanted attention.

More broadly, 1968 was a time when many young women were starting to have more choices in their education and the opportunity for careers outside of the home, in many parts due to contraception. Those choices were not available to Elisabeth—she is stuck in this small town, tied to her community, as she watches her high school classmates going off to their next chapters.

What influence has your career in publishing and book marketing had on your storytelling? Have you been inspired by any of the authors whose books you have promoted?

I started writing this book when I was working full-time as a book marketer at Random House. I had been a creative writing minor in college, but I wasn’t really writing in my first 8 years in New York while I was in grad school and volunteering and focused on other things. I was inspired to start writing again in earnest when I would be in meetings with these amazing authors like Catherine Banner and Emma Cline, who were both a few years younger than me. I thought if they found time to do it, why couldn’t I? On the flip side, I was working with Helen Simonson at the time, who said that she didn’t really get to start writing until her kids were grown and out of the house, and I thought, “I’m single, I don’t have kids, what am I waiting for?”

I was also greatly inspired by Laura Lynne Jackson’s books The Light Between Us and Signs. Her first-person account of how close we are to the spirits on the other side very much influenced my own personal spiritual beliefs, some of which are woven into Elisabeth’s outlook and her experiences with her guide from the other side, Great-Grandma Dorothy, and the energy healing work that the family does.

Tell us about your writing process. Do you have a particular place you prefer to write, a specific way of mapping out your story? Did you know from the beginning what the conclusion would be?

I wrote at least 50% of this book long-hand in a journal. I write in the morning in bed before the rest of the world comes crashing in, i.e. before I look at my phone or email. My phone stays in the kitchen until after I’m done writing for the day. Once I got further into the story, though, I switched to drafting on my laptop when I was really building momentum.

I don’t believe you have to write every day. I have a day job! I write maybe a few days a week, and this book came together 100 words at a time. I would write a single paragraph in the morning before hopping in the shower and heading into Random House. My writing group talks often about setting realistic goals because the minute you set a lofty goal and miss that first day of “write every day,” it makes it that much harder to get back on track.

I barely outlined this book. This was very much a discovery writing project, but when I got into revision, I reverse-outlined what had happened so far in the book so that I could confidently write my way through to the end. I didn’t know the exact ending of the book until I was about ⅓ of the way through. I remember emailing my writing group one day to say, “I think I just wrote the last line of my book.”

For revision, the book Dreyer’s English by friend and former Random House colleague Benjamin Dreyer was essential to me. It was very helpful to read books like his as I was enmeshed in the revision process.

What can we look forward to next from you? Do you have other writing projects in the offing?

I am working on something completely different next! I am finishing a first draft this fall of my second novel, a contemporary Christmas rom-com set in southern Minnesota. There’s Christmas cookies, a local hottie, and a girl home from the big city. I’m approaching this book a little differently—starting with an outline!

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

I am very much a mood reader and I read just about every genre out there. I love sci fi and fantasy or romance for a quick vacation read. I try to keep up with the new, big literary novels. I have my section of craft books, like Big Magic and Bird by Bird. I have sections of series that I’m hoping to finish one day, like Outlander. I’m always reading our clients’ books for work. I have a celebrity chef’s memoir and a performance and productivity expert to read next for work. But truthfully, my shelves are full of books I haven’t read that have come with me from job to job. I have classics, I have the hot releases dating back to 2010, I have signed copies of books I’ve worked on, like Educated and Born a Crime. I also have an amazing cookbook collection from my time working in lifestyle books, lots of Mark Bittman and Jacques Pépin and Dominique Ansel.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I just finished the new Louise Erdrich novel, The Mighty Red. She’s my favorite author and as a contemporary Minnesotan author, she has had a huge impact on me as a reader and a writer. I think Erdrich most accurately captures contemporary women—and the myriad ways the world disappoints us—like no one else I’ve ever read. I make a point to buy the new books by Louise Erdrich and William Kent Krueger, another Minnesotan author, in hardcover from indie bookstores when I’m back in MN. If you haven’t read Louise Erdrich before, one of my favorite books is The Round House. I recommend that book to everyone.