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Green Apple Books: A Thousand Small Improvements

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by Scott Lambridis

I arrived at Green Apple Books as they were opening for the day. Staff were rolling carts of sale books onto Clement Street, those irresistible sidewalk stacks I had to convince myself to ignore. 

Inside, the store feels a little like an oversized San Francisco apartment that somehow kept expanding over the years. The floors change beneath your feet. Hallways narrow and widen. Odd-sized stairs appear and disappear. The layout twists and turns in multiple dimensions, unified only by the bookshelves and, perched high on top, a dizzying array of art and strange artifacts. There’s a sense that if you turned away for a moment, something might shift.

Pete Mulvihill, one of the store’s owners, led me through the maze. We settled into a pair of chairs upstairs in the philosophy section, appropriately under reconstruction. Green Apple is, at its core, the result of steady adaptation. 

The original owner opened the shop while working for United Airlines, running it only on weekends at first. “This used to be an apartment,” Pete told me. “He just gutted it and put in bookshelves. Cut a hole in the wall.” Over time, the store expanded into neighboring spaces, something that would be far harder to do today. 

From the beginning, the philosophy was to respond to readers. “Sell more of what’s selling,” Pete said, recalling the founder’s advice. 

But that instinct has always been in tension with something else: curation.

“Bad books hide good books,” he said.

Green Apple is legendary among hardcore readers for its collection. Every time I visit, the shelves overflow with titles from my to-read list, and even the briefest of browsing yields new gems. Featured sections like Customer Favorites, the Green Apple Hall of Fame, and 50 Years of Green Apple show the glory of not just their lineage but the taste of the curators. 

That’s the point. If you have to sift through noise to find something worthwhile, the whole experience breaks down. 

That balance between responsiveness and discernment is shaped as much by economics as by taste.

Books have fixed prices. Margins are thin. Rent and labor costs in San Francisco are a constant challenge. “If publishers gave us five percent more,” Pete said, “there’d be twice as many bookstores.” And Amazon, of course, is always there, training customers to expect speed and discounts that independent stores simply can’t match. 

So survival comes down to all the other decisions. 

Used books help, though they require more labor, each one bought, evaluated, and priced by hand. Staff curate deeply, sometimes sourcing titles from overseas or working directly with tiny publishers. “We’ll go out of our way for something special,” Pete said. “Even if I have to put it on a credit card.” 

The store also thinks beyond the transaction. Pete helped found San Francisco’s “Local First” initiative, built around a simple idea: shopping locally keeps money circulating locally. Studies showed that roughly 62% of a bookstore purchase stays in the community—compared to effectively none with Amazon. Green Apple has leaned into that ethos, supporting neighborhood events, street improvements, and the kind of independent commercial fabric that Clement Street still manages to sustain.

And then there are the thousand small experiments. 

Some are subtle, such as shifting shelf space, refining sections, adjusting inventory. Others are more direct. Pete described one recent success: “a staff member suggested ‘dad-style’ baseball caps, and they sold so quickly that we ended up ordering 1,000. It’s fun spotting them out in the world.”

Events are another piece of the equation. While the Clement Street store hosts smaller readings, much of Green Apple’s programming now happens at its second location across Golden Gate Park, a space designed to hold larger crowds. For even bigger events, they’ll even go offsite. As a result, the store can host everything from intimate conversations to major literary events such as a feature with Ocean Vuong. Sometimes things get weirder. Pete told me about one appearance by Dave Eggers, who once offered relationship advice from a booth. On another occasion, he gave haircuts to a couple of brave volunteers.

“That big event pays for the little poetry reading where two people buy a book,” Pete said.

It’s all part of the same system: a store constantly adjusting, constantly redistributing energy from one part of the business to another.

“It’s the opposite of death by a thousand cuts,” Pete said. “It’s a thousand little improvements.”

It’s the perfect description. Not just of how Green Apple survives, but of how it feels to walk through it. 

Scott Lambridis is a novelist based in Bellingham, Washington. A former indie press founder, performance series organizer, olive farmer, and progressive rocker, he studied neurobiology at the University of Virginia, earned an MFA from San Francisco State University, and read a book from every country in the world. His debut novel, St. Ulphia’s Dead, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on July 7, 2026. Learn more at scottlambridis.com 

The Margery Crandon–Harry Houdini Feud, Belief, and Certainty

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by Maryka Biaggio

Margery Crandon

In the 1920s, America’s fascination with the supernatural collided head-on with a rising faith in scientific proof. Few clashes captured that tension as vividly as the feud between Margery Crandon, a celebrated Boston medium, and Harry Houdini, the world-famous magician turned debunker. Their battle was never just personal. It exposed something enduring about us: how badly we want certainty—especially when facing the unknown.

Crandon, known to believers as Margery, rose to prominence by producing dramatic séances. Bells rang, tables moved, and a mysterious substance called ectoplasm appeared in darkened rooms. For supporters, these phenomena were evidence of life after death—comforting proof that loved ones were not truly gone. Skeptics saw them as clever tricks performed under conditions designed to suspend disbelief.

Enter Houdini. Having mastered illusion himself, he felt a moral obligation to expose mediums who claimed paranormal powers. His crusade intensified after the death of his mother, a loss that sharpened his resolve rather than softening it. Houdini wanted answers, too—but answers that could withstand light, scrutiny, and repeatable testing.

Their conflict peaked when Margery’s abilities were examined by the Scientific American journal. The tests were contentious, the observers divided, and the conclusions inconclusive. Believers accused skeptics of bad faith; skeptics accused believers of wishful thinking. Each side claimed reason, evidence, and integrity. What no one could agree on was what proof should look like.

This stalemate reveals a deeper truth. When the stakes are emotional, as in grief, hope, and fear of death, certainty becomes a psychological need, not just an intellectual goal. For Margery’s followers, certainty came from experience: I felt it, I saw it, therefore it’s real. For Houdini, certainty came from method: If it can be controlled, replicated, and explained, then it’s real. These are not merely different standards; they are different ways of coping with uncertainty itself.

The feud also shows how certainty can harden into identity. To doubt Margery was, for some, to threaten the comfort of belief. To accept her claims was, for Houdini, to betray reason and enable exploitation. Once certainty becomes moralized, dialogue collapses. The argument stops being about truth and starts being about loyalty—who you stand with, not what you can show.

A century later, the Crandon–Houdini feud still feels familiar. We see the same dynamics in debates over science, politics, and technology. We crave firm ground in a shifting world, and we often choose the kind of certainty that best soothes our anxieties.

The lesson is not that skepticism or belief is superior, but that our hunger for certainty shapes how we interpret evidence. Recognizing that impulse—our own as much as others’—may be the first step toward a more honest engagement with the unknown.

My novel Margery and Me explores all this terrain, and I invite readers to consider their own views on belief and certainty as they dip into the story.

Maryka Biaggio is the author of Eden Waits, The Point of Vanishing, and The Model Spy. Her novel with Regal House, Margery and Me, releases in the summer of 2026. Maryka’s fiction has won several accolades, including the Willamette Writers Award, an Oregon Writers Colony Award, the Historical Novel Society Review Editors’ Choice, La Belle Lettre Award, the U.P. (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) Notable Books Award, and a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant. She served on the Board of the Historical Novel Society North America Conference since 2015, and she lives in Portland, Oregon.

That’s My Story – Maryka Biaggio

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RHP staff had the pleasure of sitting down with Maryka Biaggio, author of Margery and Me, to talk about her path to publishing as well as her approach to the writing craft. We are delighted to share her answers with you!

When did you start writing?

I started writing in grade school. I found a short-story contest advertised on a matchbook and told my mother I was going to enter. Being busy with cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry for a husband and five children, she said something like, “That’s nice. Now get out of my way.” I submitted a story and anxiously waited to hear back. They never responded, and I hadn’t saved a copy of the story, so who knows what it was about—probably something about the hijinks my siblings and I got into when left on our own. [See photo, right, of my siblings and me making a pyramid.]

Do you ever use your cell phone to compose your work or track your ideas? Are there any author/writing apps you recommend?

I absolutely adore Scrivener, a writing tool that lets me put everything I need in one place—not just the chapters, but character sketches, photos of important places, website addresses for essential information, and even marketing materials. You could say it keeps me from straying too far from the novel in progress because it allows me to put all my resources in one place. And I also have Scrivener loaded on my phone, which is great on those occasions when I’m out and about and have some idea I want to record lest I forget it.

What is the most cringe-worthy thing someone has said when you tell them you’re a novelist?

“I’ve always wanted to write a novel. When I find the time, I’ll bang out a bestseller. How hard can it be?”

There’s a fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, in the links between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?

A good author has to be a little crazy. How else could they stand to spend endless hours putting words down on a page and hoping that the story they build will actually find its way out into the world? It’s a rough business, and I can encourage only those with thick skin and lots of perseverance to undertake the writing of a novel.

How do you develop your characters?

I find I have to write my way into my characters. I’ve chosen quite an array of real people as subjects—ranging from a nineteenth-century con woman to a model-turned-spy during World War II. I couldn’t be more dissimilar from those two characters, both of whom were gorgeous and wily, so I often spend weeks, sometimes months, trying to find the voice. But when I’m on my morning walk or baking a pie, and the character starts talking in a way that sounds like how I’ve imagined them, I know I’ve found their voice! It’s as if, after a great deal of mulling and research, my subconscious finally comes through for me. That’s the magical part of writing. [See photo of The Model Spy book cover, left.]

Maryka Biaggio is the author of Margery and Me, releasing from Regal House Publishing on April 21, 2026.

The Bookworm: Special Home to a New Jersey Community’s Reading Life

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by Donna Baier Stein

Some bookstores sell books. Some bookstores embody history.

The Bookworm does both.

Tucked into the heart of Bernardsville, New Jersey, this independent bookstore is far more than a retail space. It’s a community thread spanning generations of readers, families, and stories. And its continued thriving life is no accident; it’s the result of loyalty, commitment, and a deeply intuitive understanding of the people who walk through its teal painted door.

The shop started out as the Bedminster Bookshop before being moved to its current home on Claremont Avenue more than four decades ago. In 1985 it was sold to Mary Ann Donaghy, When she passed away, the future of the bookstore was uncertain — it might simply have disappeared.

Instead, Vera Marowitz, who had worked as a bookseller alongside Mary Ann, volunteered to buy it, determined that the store — and what it meant to Bernardsville — would be preserved. This wasn’t a job change. It was a continuation of a life-long love of books.

Residents of Bernardsville responded with relief and gratitude.

A Fourth-Generation Bookstore

When I asked Vera about the store’s relationship with the community, the answer was immediate: really good.

One local family has even shopped there for four generations — grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, and now great-grandchildren. That kind of loyalty doesn’t come from sale prices or algorithms. It comes from trust that you and your book preferences are known. From booksellers like Vera who remember what you loved last year — and what you might love next.

It’s easy to see why this is the heart of the store’s success and longevity. Staff like Jessica Sarlin pride themselves on understanding readers’ tastes—and will sometimes steer customers away from books that won’t be enjoyed. The fact that that level of candor is more important than simply ringing up another sale has led to a loyal, long-time customer base.

The Importance of Quiet

As soon as you step inside the store, you’ll experience a welcome calm and quiet.

There’s no noise from an in-house café, no piped-in music. Years ago, classical music from WQXR played softly, but when the station changed format, the store let the sound go. The quiet remains, making the Bookworm a lovely space for browsing.

Authors, Schools, and the Wider Literary World

The Bookworm doesn’t host many in-store author events, largely because of space and the unpredictability of attendance — an all-too-real challenge for small bookstores. Instead, they partner with venues and organizations throughout the state.

They regularly sell books for authors appearing at the Mayo Performing Arts Center, including frequent appearances by David Sedaris. They also provide books for author visits to schools in many towns. Authors appearing at the annual Junior League luncheon and the Bernardsville Public Library benefit from the store’s support as well.

Today’s Bookstore Challenges

Like every independent bookseller, The Bookworm faces the pressures of online retail, ebooks, and audiobooks. One solution is their partnerships with Libro.fm, which allows customers to support the store even when purchasing audiobooks.

But the greatest challenge may be less visible to anyone walking into the store: selection. Each season brings thousands of new titles from publishers. Choosing what to stock requires hours of from Vera as well as her intimate knowledge of what her clientele want.

The Secret to Success

Talking with Vera, it’s easy to see what matters most to her as an indie bookstore owner: her relationships with her customers and being able to choose the books they will most want to read.

The staff read widely, write reviews, and offer guidance based on reading the books themselves.

The Bookworm proves that an indie bookstore can still thrive — not by competing with algorithms, but by offering what they cannot: memory, conversation, discernment, and human connection.

It’s a place where someone might remember the book you loved ten years ago. Where a reader can grow up — and grow old — alongside the same shelves.

And that is a story well worth keeping in print.

Donna Baier Stein is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright whose work has been featured on NPR, PBS, Washingtonian, Saturday Evening Post, and O Magazine. She is the author of The Silver Baron’s Wife, Sympathetic People, Letting Rain Have Its Say, Scenes from the Heartland, and Courtesan to the Buddha, forthcoming from RHP in Summer 2027. She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet Journal. 

That’s My Story: Regal House Publishing (RHP) Interviews Novelist James Janko

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We were delighted to sit down with James Janko, the author of The Wire-Walker, to talk about life, literary pursuits, languages, science, and the value of meditation.

RHP: When did you start to write?

Janko: I was a truant in high school, but I began writing a novel my junior year. I stuffed hand-written pages into an empty tinker-toy box until it was full. I have no idea what my novel was about, but my older sister, who never missed school, read a chapter or two and said, “This is sick.”

My early efforts aside, I am a person who must write. In 1974, while living in New Orleans and working as a flower vendor on Bourbon Street, my health broke down and I was in severe pain. Three years earlier, I had returned from the Viet Nam War, where I was a combat medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III. Nowhere felt like home after the war, so I bought a backpack, a fishing pole, and wandered the country. Hitching rides was easy for a white male in the 1970s, and finding work—I wasn’t choosy—seldom took more than a day or two. I picked strawberries in Willamette Valley in Oregon, drove a truck during a Nebraska corn harvest, a taxi in Chicago, and so on. I lived the life of a drifter, but the war followed me, more intimate than a shadow. I remember lying in bed one night, hurting all over, when I heard a voice inside me: You must write. Write something, anything. Otherwise, you’ll die.

RHP: Has your education helped you become a better writer?

Janko: After my vagabond days ended, I went to college on the GI Bill and received a B.S. in Conservation of Natural Resources from UC Berkeley. The program revived me, breathed new life into me, and sparked my creativity and love for the earth. One class in particular––Ecosystemology––had a direct influence on my first novel, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo, which highlights the environmental consequences of war. For our final exam, Arnold Shultz, a delightfully unpredictable professor, led us outside of our cramped classroom and onto the campus. Each student was free to walk about for a time, then choose one square inch of earth to write about as an ecosystem, that is, to write about the relationships between organisms, about what sustained this patch of earth. I remembered, as I was writing, that a Cobra gunship, one of the most effective killing machines of the Viet Nam War, could put a bullet in every square inch of a football field in less than a minute. And at the same time, on a blue morning in Berkeley, I learned and am still learning about the complexity of life in minuscule, one inch containing innumerable organisms and inseparable from the ebb and flow of life, inseparable from the rest of the planet! I believe what Walt Whitman believed: “…a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.”

RHP: Are you fluent in any other languages? If so, do you find that knowledge has any effect on your writing? Is it important for people to learn other languages? Why?

Janko: I can’t say I’m fluent in Spanish, but I’m competent enough to appreciate the untranslated poetry of García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado and many others. The sounds of Spanish are sometimes supple on the tongue, sometimes fierce, and I hear, especially in Lorca, rivers and stones, love songs, castanets, and the wails of birthing and dying. What is more important in writing, meaning or sound? I don’t know, but I doubt there can be any profound meaning without close attention to sound.

I speak rudimentary Khmer, my wife’s language, and I can read and write Arabic at a first-grade level. I take great care when I write a word in Arabic. I pay homage to those long ago who invented the word, the meaning, the sound. I pay special attention to words of the earth and the elements. I can read and write in Arabic rain, waterfall, river, lake, and sixteen other words associated with water. The language finds a home in my body, the rhythm of my heart. How can this not be a boon for the difficult task of writing?

RHP: There’s a fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, in the links between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?

Janko: My best writing comes when I sit in a room, door closed, a cat or two at my side, and imagine my way into the lives of others.

I once said to my wife, “Forgive me if I seem distant. Sometimes I go far away when I write, but I go far away to come closer to you and the world.”

She replied, without hesitation: “Why are you nuts?”

RHP: How has Buddhist meditation supported you in your efforts to write?

Janko: I often meditate before I write. Silence is my first language. Nearly everything in the modern world encourages us to be occupied, to be addicted to our phones, to hitch a ride on the endlessly spinning hamster wheel called social media, to waste our precious lives on chats and messaging and online profiles and calculations for deepening our influence so that one day—this is the pipe dream of many writers––we’ll go viral, reach the masses, sell millions of books.

Buddhist meditation is revolutionary. There is no ambition, except to cultivate kinder and more compassionate ways of living and being. I believe there’s a deep kindness in most of my writing, and this is especially true of The Wire-Walker, whose narrator, Amal Tuqan, is the most loveable character to ever come my way. She found me in the silence, or we found each other. Amal understands the circus of life and the requirements of her profession: “The work of a funambulist is to walk in the sky on a rope, a wire, a prayer.”

James Janko is the author of the novels, What We Don’t Talk About, The Clubhouse Thief (recipient of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award for the Novel), Buffalo Boy and Geronimo (recipient of The Association of Asian American Studies Book Award and the Northern California Book Award), and The Wire-Walker, which was a finalist for the 2023 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, a finalist for the 2023 Dzanc Fiction Prize, and was awarded the Juniper Prize by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2021. Excerpts of The Wire-Walker appeared in the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of Nimrod International Journal. Janko’s short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Eureka Literary Magazine, among others. His story––“Fallujah in a Mirror”––won First Place in the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award and appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of The Iowa Review. Janko is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction.

Letting the Story Lead: Valerie Nieman and Upon the Corner of the Moon

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by Valerie Nieman

Writers are not our characters, most times, though these characters may draw upon our lives, our experiences, our quirks.

Macbeth and Gruach, the main characters of Upon the Corner of the Moon, definitely are not “me” except that I was drawn to the story and felt the urge to tell it – an urge that stayed with me for almost 30 years.

I first came across the facts about the historical Macbeths when I was researching an earlier novel. I did not realize how thoroughly this story had been reversed: Macbeth was a rightful king based on Celtic traditions and ruled for 17 years, being called “The Righteous” and “the ruddy king of plenty.”

How did he become a villain?

Macbeth was cousin to Duncan, and yes, he did kill him – but in battle when Duncan invaded his territory. Duncan’s son Malcolm Canmore eventually claimed the throne through primogeniture and the Celtic system of electing kings was erased. Chroniclers grafted Macbeth’s story with various legends to shape a monstrous, murdering usurper. Shakespeare found this tale in Holinshed’s Chronicles, shaped it to please King James and included the witches that so fascinated the king.   

As to “Lady Macbeth,” we know little more than her name and her father’s name. We do know that she was married to a man called Gillecomgan, also killed in battle by Macbeth, and then married Macbeth. I had to do a great deal of speculation in building a plausible life for her but drew on scholarship from a number of areas including archaeology of the Picts and the study of ancient goddess religions.

This book is the first of two telling the story of the historical Macbeths, hewing to the record where it exists and speculating to fill in the gaps. The Last Highland King will come out in 2027.

My earlier book with Regal House, In the Lonely Backwater, featured the distinctive voice of Maggie, who owes a lot to the solitary girl that I was, simultaneously lost and found between the wonders of the natural world and the books she carried everywhere.

I grew up in New York State, near the headwaters of the Allegheny River. My parents owned fields and woods that I knew well before I learned to read. I fished with my dad and wandered a patch of old-growth forest. Books sustained me — Twain, Poe, and Tennyson in addition to Shakespeare, all in the tall bookcase upstairs – along nature guides, and A Girl of the Limberlost that featured another rural wanderer. Like Maggie, I brought back my finds and interpreted them, generally to amused interest.

After high school and a few erratic years where I took jobs in factories and donut shops while in community college, I slid south along the Allegheny’s path to find myself at the other end of that river system, attending West Virginia University on the banks of the Monongahela. Propelled by the desire to write, I’d determined to become a journalist, as a blue-collar kid lacking mentors to help me along the path toward becoming a novelist and poet.

For nearly twenty years, I worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in the northern coalfields of West Virginia, covering everything from train wrecks to murders to acid spills in the rivers, along with government beats and the “hook and bullet” column that let me hang with scientists at the Department of Natural Resources. During that time, I homesteaded a hill farm with my then-husband, building a house and barn, planting an orchard and organic garden — and, of course, wandering with my dog and gathering wild foods and always writing.

My first poetry chapbook and my first novel, both deeply engaged with the natural world, came out in 1988. Neena Gathering, a post-apocalyptic tale based on the landscape around that farm, was long out of print before being brought back as a classic in the genre. Like In the Lonely Backwater, it features a teenage narrator, though at its debut, Young Adult was not yet a thing and it was listed with general SF paperbacks. I still love that book, and it has many fans who’ve applauded its reissue.

Things change. The marriage ended and I found myself with a small farm I couldn’t manage and the editorship of a newspaper destined for sale. I headed to the Piedmont of North Carolina for a job with the News & Record, living outside of Appalachia for the first time in my life. The move brought new adventures, from getting my MFA at Queens University of Charlotte, to the publication of more poetry and fiction, to learning how to sail. A 25-foot Hunter docked at Lake Kerr was direct inspiration for Maggie’s world of the marina and the landscape of the farms and piney woods of the coastal plain.

I had the pleasure of working with Kevin Watson at Press 53 for all three of my full-length poetry collections and my novel Blood Clay, set in North Carolina. I was delighted when West Virginia University Press, which had also released my short fiction collection, decided to publish To the Bones, a horror/mystery set in the coalfields. It was acclaimed as “a parable of capitalism and environmental degradation” and in the sequel, Dead Hand, Darrick and Lourana flee to Ireland in search of answers to questions raised in the first book.

And then my Queens classmate Pam Van Dyk made me aware of Regal House, and I met Jaynie Royal and all the wonderful folks at my most excellent publisher!

Another marriage came and went, and I found myself freed to wander more widely. Solo hiking was pure pleasure, even when I was quite lost on the trails near Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, slogging through the rain along the Great Glen Way in Scotland, or following the music in Donegal and Dingle. Trailheads beckon me, from the Mountains to the Sea trail in North Carolina to the coastal vistas of San Francisco Bay.

Along the way, I’ve published poetry widely, in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Chautauqua, and journals across the U.S. as well as Scotland, Ireland, and Greece. Work has also appeared in some fine anthologies, including Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology.

I have been a creative writing fellow for North Carolina and West Virginia, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m professor emerita of creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University and continue to teach writing workshops.

That’s My Story: Beth Castrodale on Literary Adventures, the Importance of Friendship & the Influence of a Depression-Era Corset Maker

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In the lead-up to the publication of her novel The Inhabitants, Beth took part in a virtual sit-down to discuss her writing process, the role of friendship in her writing, and more.

What’s your process for writing: do you outline, create flow charts, fill out index cards, or just start and see where you end up? Do you use the same process every time?

I find rough outlines invaluable for working out story arcs for first drafts of novels, and for helping me complete those drafts in a reasonable time frame. In the absence of such advance planning, I once spent 12 years writing and revising a novel, which I vow to never do again.

But I never hew strictly to outlines. They’re just general guides, and once I get down to writing, stories and characters inevitably take on a life of their own, which is one of the things I enjoy most about writing.

I’ve created a rough outline for every novel I’ve written since the one that took 12 years to finish, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever skip this step in the future. My life isn’t getting any longer!

We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from the imagination and the creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

Personally, I find it most engaging to write about situations–and from perspectives–that are quite different from what I’ve experienced. To take my most recent novel, The Inhabitants, as an example, the protagonist is a portrait artist, and she moves into a house built by an architect whose creations were said to influence the mind. Although I’m not a visual artist, and the protagonist’s house is purely my own invention, I loved the possibilities that arose from placing someone who’s visually attuned into such a mentally, and emotionally, stimulating space. (And the space is haunted, no less!) To give some examples from my other novels, I’ve also written from the perspective of a (male) rocker-turned-gravedigger and a Depression-era corsetiere.

For me, novel writing is perhaps my greatest source of adventure–a way to immerse myself in diverse characters’ inner lives and to see how they confront various challenges, both internal and external. To my mind, writing about someone who’s a lot like me, and who shares many of my own experiences, would be the opposite of an adventure, and I think I’d lose interest pretty quickly.

I wouldn’t say that there’s a tension between what I’ve experienced and what lives only in my mind, because when I’m deeply immersed in my writing and in a character’s world, I kind of lose my sense of self. However, I certainly draw on my own experiences when I’m writing about characters who are grieving, falling in love, dealing with an upheaval in their lives, or going through just about anything else that most of us typically face over time.

What role has friendship played in your evolution as a writer?

A huge role. I’m thinking in particular of a dear friend, the poet Beth Gylys, whom I’ve known since first grade, when both of us attended a since-demolished elementary school outside of Pittsburgh. When Beth and I first met, I’m not sure that either one of us sensed that writing would be the thing we most wanted to do with our lives. But storytelling was part of our relationship from the start. For one thing, we used to wander around a cemetery near our suburb, read the names on the gravestones, and make up stories about some of the people buried on the grounds.

During recess, instead of playing hopscotch or kickball with the other kids, or swinging our way across the monkey bars, we’d make a wide circuit around the playground, talking and talking. I can’t remember the topics of our conversations, but it seemed as if nothing could be more important than whatever we were discussing. Through experiences like this, we built a bond that lasted for years and across many miles after Beth’s family moved back to New Jersey and mine moved to Ohio. Beth has remained a beloved friend and an inspiration to me as a writer, and we’ve supported each other through many ups and downs when it comes to writing and life in general. Beth has also been a thoughtful, insightful, and generous commenter on my work.

What surprising skills or hobbies do you have?

One of Beth’s hand-sewn dresses, based on a forties-era pattern

One kind of odd hobby I have is sewing dresses by hand. Although I have a sewing machine, I don’t like being rushed by the mechanics of it, and I find it far more relaxing and rewarding to set my own pace and to have the sensory experience of working with a needle and thread.

This all started when I was working on my début novel, Marion Hatley, whose eponymous protagonist is a Depression-era corset maker. The retro nature of the novel inspired me to order some vintage patterns and sew some older-style dresses. It’s been a lot of fun, and I love it that so many old-school patterns are available online.

What’s next for you?

A scene from the family farm that inspired Beth’s novel-in-progress

I’m in the early stages of writing a novel that’s set on a farm inspired by a fourth-generation farm in my family. The story involves a land dispute that threatens the ongoing existence of the farm, which the protagonist has been left to run by herself, for the most part. The dispute stirs the protagonist’s great-grandmother to return to the world of the living and step into the action, on the protagonist’s behalf. But it turns out that she wants more than to just save the land, setting the protagonist up for a struggle that’s far bigger than what she’d bargained for.

Beth Castrodale is the award-winning author of three novels: Marion Hatley, In This Ground, and I Mean You No Harm. Her latest novel, The Inhabitants, will be released by Regal House Publishing in fall 2024.

That’s My Story: Sandy Grubb and Just Like Click

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We recently interviewed Sandy Grubb, the 2022 Kraken Contest winner for her middle-grade novel, Just Like Click, which released yesterday, April 16, 2024. Just as Sandy has been inspired by so many talented authors who came before her, her adventure story with heart and humor is certain to inspire a new generation of readers. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

RHP: Your book is out in the world! How does that feel?

SG: I’m elated. I’m humbled. I’m jittery. I have all the feels, all at once. But I’m so grateful to my family and friends who encouraged my dream of publishing a children’s book. And I’m grateful to my agent, Stephanie Cardel at Lighthouse Literary, and you, Fitzroy Books, for picking my book out of the masses of manuscripts you receive every week and recognizing something special in my pages. I wrote a story about fifteen years ago that slightly resembles Just Like Click. I would pull it out every couple of years and play around with it, making minor changes in my characters and plot. In the meantime, I began really studying writing and realized what a mess that story was. I started all over about seven years ago, and my debut is the result.

RHP: We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

SG: I believe a writer should definitely write what she knows but shouldn’t stop there. A writer’s life experiences inform and enhance her imagination. The more experiences she has, the more her imagination will range far and wide to create exciting stories and intriguing characters.

Imagination is a mysterious phenomenon. No doubt we draw from all the movies, books, and TV shows we’ve consumed along with our real-life relationships and activities. In a way, it’s like having our own personal version of AI running full-time in our brain. For Just Like Click, I drew from my childhood love of Superman comics and our family’s favorite vacation spot at Black Butte Ranch. My characters in the story are a conglomeration of my own family, friends, students I’ve taught, and myself. Ideas may come to me when I’m poised with my fingers hovered over my keyboard, when I’m out for a walk, or when I’m about to fall asleep at night. Imagination is at work all the time. When ideas come, I quickly write them down.

RHP: Which author most influenced you?

SG: In the eighth grade I discovered Charles Dickens. When I finished Great Expectations, at first, I was just impressed with myself for reading such a long book. But that story and Dickens’ writing have continued to inspire me. When I was applying to colleges, the Stanford application asked me what kind of book I would write. I told them, I’d write a story that reflects today’s society the same way Dickens did for his time. I can’t match Dickens’ genius, but the books I write for children are all contemporary stories with universal life themes showing struggles kids face today. I recently listened to the audio version of Tale of Two Cities. It played like a movie in my head. Dickens swept me into his vivid world. I hope I can do that for the readers of my books.

RHP: What’s your favorite joke?

SG: It turns out laughter is good for our health in many ways. Humor is just as essential as breathing. I take it seriously and work it into my writing and my life. The humor I enjoy best springs up organically, often from the quick wit of a friend or within the dialog of my story. Those are the kind of laughs we explain by saying, you had to be there. I also appreciate slap-stick humor or stand-up comedy, in the right place. If I were trying my hand at writing a stand-up routine, I may deliver something like this:

I told my husband I’d like to fly to Paris for the weekend to gain inspiration for a story I was feeling stuck on. When my husband called me delusional, I almost fell off my unicorn. I explained that if I don’t fly business class, our kids will. My wonderful husband agreed. I wanted to blend into the Paris scene, so I shopped for some camo pants, but I couldn’t find any. On the flight, a lively little girl ran up and down the aisles, disturbing everyone. Eventually she ran into the flight attendant and knocked a cup of hot coffee out of her hand. As the attendant was cleaning up the mess, she glanced at the little girl and suggested, “Look, why don’t you go outside and play.” In Paris, I began posting videos on TikTok, thinking it would help spark my imagination. I was addicted to the hokey pokey, but then I turned myself around. When my husband told me to stop impersonating a flamingo, I had to put my foot down. I finally came home when I broke my arm. I explained to my doctor I had broken it in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

RHP: What difference do you hope your book will make?

SG: Recently, blogger Melissa Taylor (Imagination Soup) listed many reasons children benefit from reading, including cognitive development and increasing their capacity for empathy. As a former teacher, I understand how literacy opens doors of opportunity throughout life. So, first of all, I hope my book will spark more children to become life-long readers. Sometimes it only takes one special book to get them started. My world growing up was not much bigger than my neighborhood, but I “traveled” around the world in the books I read.

More specifically, I hope readers of Just Like Click will come to realize that they have superpowers and can choose to use them to change their world, to help themselves, and to help others.

RHP: What advice would you give to an aspiring author?

SG: Live generously. Practice bravery. Read widely. Write even when you don’t feel like it. Find your writing people. Don’t forget to laugh. Don’t be afraid to start over. Never give up.

Indeed, writers are among the bravest people I know. We compose words from our hearts and put them out to the universe for review. When rejection comes, we tell ourselves it’s not personal, but it almost always stings. Perhaps it’s the rejection that makes praise all the more glorious. When Fitzroy Books chose my novel as the winner of the 2022 Kraken Book Prize for Finely Crafted Middle Grade Fiction, my joy broke loose in tears.