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Following Friday’s review of A Far-Flung Life, here’s M.L. Stedman: Capturing the Vast Sweep of Events.

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M.L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London. The Light Between Oceans was her first novel. Her second, A Far-Flung Life (Scribner, March 3, 2026), examines tragedy, memory, loss, secrets, and the power of love in a family saga set against the vast, stark landscape of a Western Australia sheep station.

Where does the germ of such an expansive plot begin?

It’s different for everyone. I don’t plan what I write–it just sort of turns up, from an image in my mind’s eye, or a random thought. Setting is always crucial for me, too, and Western Australia is a natural place for my stories to arise. I’m drawn to intractable problems, which, because they have no “right” answer, force us to examine our underlying values: as with The Light Between Oceans, there are knotty ones at the centre of this book.

I wrote the story over a very, very long time, and it just sort of grew and took shape organically over years. Characters turned up bit by bit, out of nowhere: they might be prompted by seeing a face, or hearing a phrase, or sometimes, they just materialised when I started to imagine a scene. The process is quite mysterious to me.

How was the process or experience of this novel different for you from your first?

The biggest difference was the time it took–I wrote my first book in about three years or so. It was harder to find uninterrupted space to write once The Light Between Oceans was published. As to what’s changed–I’d say the whole world. From that point of view, it was a great luxury to spend so much time in the remote imaginary setting I’d created, where e-mails and smartphones didn’t exist, “far from the madding crowd.”

Do you have any organizational tricks, for plot or timeline, for example?

When it comes to writing, I’m both organised, and not organised. I’m organised in that I set aside time for it–being at your desk increases the chances of actually writing something. I’m not one of those writers (whom I envy), who can say “I’ve got a spare hour between festival events, so I’ll write a few pages of my novel.” I need long, uninterrupted stretches.

I think it’s important to find out how you write best, and do that: if you’re a planner, plan. If (like me) you’re not, and story turns up as your fingers hit the keyboard, don’t fret about the lack of a plan. I don’t write in chronological order. Often, scenes aren’t remotely linked, and then, with time, like mushrooms underground, little connections form by themselves and suddenly things fit together. It’s risky, of course–you have to be prepared to discard strands that turn out to be dead ends. But in discarding, and discovering what the story is not, you narrow down what the story is. For me, the trick is to stay, to wait, and to trust.

Is “forgetment,” for “the opposite of a memory,” your own coinage?

The concept of “forgetment” is foundational to the book. Anyone who spends a long time thinking and writing about memory will probably eventually notice that there’s a word for things we remember (“memory”), but not one for things we forget. I came up with the word “forgetment,” but didn’t investigate beyond its absence in the Oxford dictionary. When I finally did Google it years later, it turned out–not surprisingly–that other people had thought of that word too.

I’m fascinated by how the “known now” becomes the “lost past.” In the book, there’s a reference to Sleeping Beauty, in which a whole castle disappears from memory. The fact that we accept that story so readily bespeaks how familiar we are with the process of “un-knowing.”

I’m also interested in the role of forgetting in forgiving (there’s a reason we say “forgive and forget”). Humans have been outsourcing memory since they first drew on cave walls. Writing supercharged this, and lately, technology has increased it exponentially, so that the most trivial things are now indelibly recorded and subject to instant recall, without context. Does this mean as a society we’re losing the ability to forget, or at least, as individuals, to choose what is remembered about our lives? If every fault or grudge or transgression remains fresh in our minds, does it diminish our ability to forgive?

Was the close third-person perspective, shifting between characters, always the plan, or did you play with a few points of view?

Writing in the third person comes most naturally to me. That said, I also think about the characters in the first person, seeing the world through their eyes. I’m very conscious of how characters see themselves and each other, and, in A Far-flung Life, how the omniscient narrator sees them all. We switch between the characters living their lives minute to minute, struggling through peril to an unknown future, and the omniscient narrator, who reminds us of the vast sweep of events in that timeless, imperturbable landscape. I find that “eternal” perspective reassuring, comforting.

What was the role of research in this novel?

Research is one of my favourite aspects of writing. For this book, I travelled a lot within Western Australia, read a lot, listened a lot: to people; to the sound of the wind in the trees and the night creatures of the Australian bush; above all, to the deep silence that envelopes the far-flung places I describe. I spent a long time in archives, exploring records that left my fingers covered in the red dust that filled the pages. I was incredibly fortunate to speak to pastoralists (like “ranchers” in the U.S.) and geologists and other people of the generation in which Australia “rode on the sheep’s back,” who recounted their stories and guided my research. I studied rocks and sheep (I even had a brief taste of shearing a wether, under very close supervision!). I visited various stations, sometimes hitching a ride on small aircraft visiting remote places, or delivering supplies to a station cut off by floods.

I must pay tribute to librarians and archivists, the unsung heroes keeping “forgetment” at bay. In this era of austerity and automation, I fear these quiet champions of knowledge are an endangered species. But computers could never replace their wisdom and enthusiasm.

What might you work on next?

Ha! If I knew, I might even tell you. But the ink is barely dry on this book. Once it makes its way out into the world, I’ll look forward to retreating to my imagination again, following up a few little threads of ideas, to see what they want to grow into.

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This interview originally ran on October 30, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of Sea Change, here’s James Workman and Amanda Leland: Messy, Immersive, and a Little Salty.

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James Workman and Amanda Leland are the authors of Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions (Torrey House Press, September 30, 2025), the compelling story of hard-driving fishermen and determined conservationists working together to turn the tide on overfishing. In this vivid, accessible book, they argue for a system that could serve as a blueprint for solving other environmental crises.

James Workman

James Workman is a storyteller, entrepreneur, and author of resilience strategies, including the award-winning book Heart of Dryness. He founded AquaShares, a firm pioneering water credit trading, and has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, Orion, Trout, and Washington Monthly. Workman studied at Yale, Oxford, and Stanford, and taught at Wesleyan and Whitman. But his real education came from wildfire recovery, reintroducing wolves, blowing up dams, smuggling to dissidents, getting married, and raising two daughters.

Amanda Leland
(photo: Ben Tiu)

Amanda Leland fell in love with the sea at five years old, when her grandfather taught her to fish. She is executive director of Environmental Defense Fund and previously led EDF’s Oceans program, a global team focused on reversing overfishing while supporting those whose livelihoods rely on fish. An avid kayaker and scuba diver, Leland holds a master’s degree in marine biology and lives with her family in Washington, D.C.

What was the origin of this book?

It’s the classic, counterintuitive “man bites dog” story, right? Against the ubiquitous headlines warning our oceans were running out of fish and “deadliest catch,” we knew there was a counter-narrative of quiet recovery, innovation, and collaboration. Fishing was growing safer, more ecologically resilient, and more prosperous, yet almost no one knew it. That silence was our opportunity: to share this well-kept secret of offshore transformation with fellow landlubbers.

The scale and complexity of this story ruled out a blog series or even a long magazine feature. Moreover, it cried out for a deeply human protagonist, someone who faced storms, institutional obstacles and his own doubts. That search led us to Buddy Guindon, a Galveston captain whose life traced the arc of modern fishing: from unregulated abundance to dangerous depletion, from the most dangerous profession to calm seas, from fierce resistance to steady reform. Through Buddy’s eyes we could share how a remarkable inner shift, combined with real agency, altered the fate of a fishery and sent ripples outward to the region, the nation, and the world.

How did the two of you come to this project?

For two decades, on opposite coasts, we had been watching this story take shape and sensed it needed to be told in full. On the Atlantic, Amanda, a trained marine biologist turned environmental advocate, was building coalitions, educating policymakers, and supporting new solutions. On the Pacific, Jamie, fascinated with hunter-gatherer societies, was interviewing fishermen from Mozambique, India and Belize to Lake Michigan, the Gulf, and his native California coast.

Both of us kept hearing the same universal, fatalistic trap: “If I don’t catch the last fish, someone else will.” We realized our distinct but converging perspectives could make the book richer and more compelling: Amanda could open insights into ocean ecology and the political tensions behind reform; Jamie could personalize the stakes for readers with a firsthand view of life and death on the docks, bars and decks offshore.

What are your roles as coauthors?

It’s an iterative process of talking, writing, rewriting… then rewriting again. Amanda brought science knowledge, policy experience, and relationships with key players like Buddy. Jamie had flexibility to explore narrative structure, conduct dockside or barstool interviews, research scientific documents, and distill complex systems into human stories that would resonate beyond the waterfront.

Drafts got passed back and forth until even red ink Track Changes could no longer tell who had revised what. When we disagreed, our exchanges mirrored the trust-building central to the book, the delicate negotiations between conservationists and fishermen, scientists and policymakers, who must work past suspicion to get results.

What does the research process look like for a project of this scope?

Messy, immersive, and a little salty. We logged hundreds of hours in interviews listening to fishermen, scientists, seafood dealers, policymakers, and critics. We tracked EDF’s decades-long efforts to advance sustainable fisheries. We sifted through historical archives, economic data, and stock assessments, where otherwise dry material might yield some fresh angles or surprising discoveries. For example, among our title’s “unlikely allies,” Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton set aside a lifetime of political rivalry to unite, perhaps for the only time, behind an economic vision for America’s fisheries based on “sharesmen.”

The work took us from early-morning commercial harvests to fluorescent-lit stakeholder workshops, from policy conferences in Washington to cutting bait on a skiff in southern Belize. We found patterns: secure rights, clear rules, and shared stewardship could take root in wildly different contexts, from tropics to arctic, and we tried to bring those contrasts to life on the page.

The structure you use, a journey from personal to global, feels very natural. How did you come to it?

It grew organically, with form following function. Other approaches–framed on a single species, gear innovation, era, or location–lacked the human flow and rising stakes we wanted. By chance, the formal evolution of catch shares paralleled Buddy’s personal journey from alienation to reconciliation, from antagonism to collaboration, from fighting the old system to advocating for the new.

His growing concern radiated outward: from family, Galveston bar and first boat, to the local wharf, fish house, and rival yacht club, then to his coastline, country, Gulf Stream, and fishing communities worldwide. That expansion mirrored the spread of an unlikely idea that began with skepticism yet matured into stewardship. Helping readers identify with Buddy made the story tensions real; scaling up made the stakes consequential.

That arc also let us show a universal truth: fishery management is really people management. And since few of us (not just Buddy) like to be managed by distant strangers, the challenge is to overcome the legacy of distrust and rediscover how to manage from within the community, because the people closest to the problem are often also closest to the solution.

What do you hope results from this book’s publication?

There is an undeniable despair and cynicism about how, or if, we can sustain a healthy, clean, life-giving planet for all of us. It’s too easy, especially while shopping in well stocked supermarkets, to point fingers at “commerce” or “industry” and blame remote “others” for ecological decline, or to cut off access to resources so essential to the health, nutrition, and security of billions.

Sea Change wants to replace simplistic blame and fatalistic shrugs with a proven, science-based case for practical hope. We want readers to see that “wicked problems” aren’t always intractable, that solutions can emerge from unexpected alliances, and that those most directly tied to the fate of a resource can become its fiercest protectors when given the right incentives.

We also hope the book sparks a wide conversation about how the same principles that saved fisheries could help us restore mature forests, groundwater, soil fertility, and even slow climate change. If a Gulf Coast “pirate” can transform into a guardian of the sea, imagine what the rest of us can do?

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This interview originally ran on September 11, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of A Season on the Drink, here’s Pat Harris: People Matter.

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Pat Harris is a lifelong Saint Paulite and passionate community champion. His commitment to public service began in 1989 as a VISTA volunteer at Catholic Charities, where he first learned about the Saint Anthony Residence and heard tales of a softball team that won it all. The experience sparked a lifetime of civic engagement and advocacy. Harris’s debut novel, A Season on the Drink (Adventure Publications, September 9, 2025), chronicles the story of Marty Peterson and the Saint Anthony Residence fast-pitch softball team their single, undefeated season, and the flash of inspiration it provided. Harris and his partner, Laura, have four dynamic children, and one enthusiastic canine companion named Ranger.

Tell me about the line between verifiable fact and fiction in this novel based on true history.

It’s nearly all true, although obviously you have to bring in some license in order to really show the story. When I was a VISTA volunteer, I spent time at the Saint Anthony Residence and learned some of the struggles that people were going through, but also the hope that existed in that building. It’s kind of the end of the road if you’re a person in the deep levels of alcoholism; that’s where you can go to sort of live out life and continue to be an alcoholic. I spent a lot of time there learning about people, and I heard this story, of this one year where they started playing pickup softball games at this park near the building, and they were kinda good! In the middle of some very intense poverty and alcoholism, they were good softball players. It was anchored by a guy I eventually worked with, Marty Peterson, who played baseball at the University of Minnesota. He was a standout baseball player, but alcoholism turned the tide of his life. As soon as I heard it, I was like, someone’s gotta tell this story. A lot of stars aligned to really change some people’s lives. The Saint Anthony is a very intense place that a lot of people are unaware of, but this one year, something really cool happened.

I spent the better part of many years interviewing people and learning what happened. I compiled all the information, but I wasn’t at the games, so I had to reconstruct them based on interviews and stories. All the members of the team, as far as we can tell, have passed. The staff people have passed. Some of the people in the book are still around.

When Marty got sober and got out of the Saint Anthony Residence, that’s when I met him. I discovered this extraordinary person with a trove of original poetry, who saved a child from a burning building (which is in the book)–an absolutely 100% true story that was on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. My main character, who was a chronic alcoholic and played on this softball team, saved a child from a burning building! You can’t make that up. It had to have been true; I could never have thought of it.

What research did you do?

A lot of it was that I was there. Not for the games–that season happened before I arrived–but the stories were told with great pride. I just spent time there and knew everybody. There were extensive interviews. Marty Peterson’s son and I have become good friends. He tells some amazing stories about his dad, ones of struggle and ones of extraordinary times. A little baseball research here and there, to correlate to what was happening in baseball at the time. The Twins were on the verge of the World Series–they didn’t have a phenomenal season in ’86, but they won the World Series in ’87.

Is this a book about baseball?

This is a book about hope. The game of softball, or baseball, carried some people on this pathway of hope and of perception. Sure, it’s a sports book. But it’s also a book about hope and recovery and alcoholism and poverty and all over the top of it, perception. You’re a bank, or a construction company, or whatever, and you’re playing people who are chronic alcoholics–they’re wearing jeans, and they’re smoking, and half of them are actively intoxicated, perhaps on Lysol or other chemicals, and they’re beating you–badly, sometimes. And competitive juices flow on ball fields, and people get angry. But at the end of these games–hey, you know what, y’all might be at the Saint Anthony Residence, but you’re all right.

This book has a little bit of everything. It’s got sports, it’s got some humor, a lot of sadness, and recovery… and it’s got people that couldn’t get out of those depths. A lot of the team passed onsite, or somewhere not far after exiting the facility.

It’s not singularly a book about sports. It’s about perception and hope, in a true story. This is really emotional for me because people matter. People matter. There are a lot of places that lesson can be taught, and one of them is the ballfield.

What about Marty captured your attention so hard?

I was in my 20s when I met him as a client in the job service program. Marty was one of these guys… this softspoken person that had struggled all his life with the disease of alcoholism. At his core, externally and internally, Marty was a brilliant and good human being. He struggled with this disease; it impacted his family, his job, his ability to be successful in baseball. And he was an extraordinary baseball player. He was kind and decent, and we’d sit in the Union Gospel Mission Thrift Store where he worked, and we’d talk about books and about life and where he was going. He was kind. And then I found out he was a poet! You read his poetry, or the letters his son allowed me to see, and it’s extremely emotional. The gentleman was deep. And, oh yeah, he saved a child from a burning building!

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This interview originally ran on July 24, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of I Am You, here’s Victoria Redel: Our Obsessions Reveal Themselves.

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Victoria Redel is the author of Paradise and three other books of poetry; three novels, including Before Everything; and two story collections. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a professor in the Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. I Am You (SJP Lit/Zando, September 30, 2025) is an expansive novel about two 17th-century Dutch women painters and the hardships and joys they experience together.

These characters are based in history, but upon scarce information. How did you deal with such a shortage of fact?

It is great to have a shortage of facts because it provides freedom for invention. I encountered Maria Oosterwijck and my first whiff of a novel reading Russell Shorto’s Amsterdam, where he says little is known about the painter Maria Van Oosterwijck. I was curious and began to research, and what he’d written turned out to be true. I believe I’ve learned all that’s known about her–maybe there’s untranslated Dutch sources–but, mostly, the same scant information was repeated everywhere: that Maria had not been allowed in the Guild because she was a woman; that she’d had a prominent reputation and a prosperous life as a painter despite that; that she trained the family servant, Gerta, to be her paint-maker and assistant. They lived together for a time, though they were not together at their deaths. This posed the question of why? What transpired between them? These seemed like interesting questions for a novel.

I also gave myself the freedom to challenge the received facts. For example, because of the nature of her paintings, it’s assumed that Maria was highly religious. I’ve imagined her spiritual choices differently. I also did a ton of research about life in the 17th century. It’s an essential moment in Dutch history and much is written about trade and everyday life. When the novel expanded to include England, I needed to learn about the English court.

One pleasure in writing a novel has always been diving into research. But the trick is to learn and learn and then not exactly try to forget it all, but, hopefully, create a seamless world, not so jammed with details that you feel the writer bragging, “look what I know.” That’s the hope: that the world is effortlessly stitched on every page. I want the world I shape to feel inevitable.

Do you have a background in the visual arts, or paint-making?

Yes, I was a visual studies major in college. In many ways this book has been gestating for 20 years, when I walked into a paint and pigment store on the Lower East Side, saw shelves stocked with jars of pigment. I wanted to know about and use every one of those brilliant colors! I read about the very storied global history of paint and pigment with the idea of writing a novel, but I couldn’t find the story.

Then, a few years ago I had the opportunity to spend a couple of months living in Amsterdam, and it occurred to me that I might find a clue for that long-abandoned paint book. Every day, I went to the astonishingly beautiful art library in the Rijksmuseum to finish another book. But also to study the Dutch Golden Age. Then I’d leave the library to roam the canal streets. It was wandering through Amsterdam that I began imagining Maria and Gerta.

You excel at sensory writing: food, painting, color, sex.

Thank you for saying that. I say to my writing students, you have to love the thinginess of the world. Witness, observation, that’s at the core of my job on the page. If I want you, the reader, to engage with characters and a world of my making, my task is to render a believable and sensual world. In 17th-century Amsterdam, smells and tastes were right in your face, for good and bad. There were fewer opportunities to be discreet about what you did with garbage. You threw it in the canal! You threw bodily waste in the canal. Those same canals were the lifeblood of the city. My job as a writer dovetails with Gerta, my narrator, who moves from a profound physical knowledge–caring for animals, for a house, making food–and, over the course of the novel, extends her range from house servant to studio assistant, to painter, and lover. Paint-making, botany, lovemaking are beautiful and messy. Her awareness expands. She has an artist’s awakening. I want the reader to accompany her on that journey.

Gerta and Maria’s story offers commentary on power dynamics, especially gender and class, in society and in interpersonal relationships. Was that by design or a natural feature of their lives?

It’s what I learned through writing the book. There was an initial glimmer of power dynamics, understanding that Maria had a maid and assistant. And I right away knew it was Gerta who must tell their story. I needed to learn what Gerta needed to learn. As the story of what happens to them and between them unfolded, I saw that both interpersonal and societal power became more layered. What was at stake for each person? Their situation, their story complicates as it unfolds. What were their essential questions? I had to discover how they would each respond. I knew none of this when I started the book. I know very little when I begin. Which I think is good. Otherwise, I’d want to protect them from their choices and actions. The surprise and mystery of my characters’ choices is the hardest and greatest fun of the whole enterprise.

Where does this novel fit in your larger body of work? What was different this time?

I started as a poet. My relationship to language as a poet is, I’d like to believe, present inside all the fiction. My prior novels take place in loosely contemporary periods–though I’d argue every novel is a historical novel–and I Am You takes a leap back in time. If one of the goals in writing fiction is to enlarge and engage the empathic imagination, to let oneself enter into what it is to be another human, here I had the opportunity to consider people in another historical moment with all that might entail. Certainly, there’s much that reverberates in a contemporary way, but my task was to honor my characters, the choices and limitations of their present-day lives, and not impose current ideas and values on them. I didn’t think about overlaps while I was writing, but perhaps obsessive love, devotion, autonomy, and secrecy are themes that ribbon through all my work. But as I say to my writing students, we don’t choose our obsessions; for better or worse, they reveal themselves to us.

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This interview originally ran on June 10, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of To the Moon and Back, here’s Eliana Ramage: Personhood Isn’t Static.

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Eliana Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she lives in Nashville, Tenn., with her family. Her first novel, To the Moon and Back (Avid Reader Press, October 28, 2025), is the spellbinding story of a woman who aims to become the first Cherokee astronaut, with her loved ones and generations of history as backdrop.

Why space? (Which came first: Steph or the astronaut dream?)

Actually, Della came first! I started writing about Della when I was about 23 years old. I loved her. For me, she’s the easiest to love. I wrote a novel draft from her perspective, astronaut-less, and when I brought in Steph there was still something missing. When Steph turned out to really want something (space travel!), and when she came to live in the same fictional world as Della instead of in a separate project, I got what it meant to need an engine in a novel for the long haul.

As for why space? I love space! I’ve always loved it, since I was a kid watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my brothers. The show taught me to have optimism when it comes to the far future. It’s easy to feel like there’s no point in our efforts towards good–for other people, for the earth, for both–when you assume we will always do terrible things to each other. Space exploration, an extremely long-term group project, carries a lot of weight for a novel that’s interested in who we are and what kind of world we’ll leave behind. When I say “group” I mean humanity, and I also mean specifically Cherokees. I wanted Cherokee people in the novel to grapple with their identities, as people everywhere have done forever. What does it mean to be Cherokee? When we’re living on Mars–an inclusive and optimistic “we,” because I’d be dead or unwilling–that question will still be there.

Is this a coming-of-age novel?

At first the book was heavily focused on Steph’s early years, because I defined “coming-of-age” more narrowly and as the kind of writer and reader I was. And that’s still true, I’ll read any yearning queer kid with big ambitions!

What changed is that I got older. This book took me up to age 34, with stops like coming out and having a child. The mom-as-side-character turned out to be (of course!) more complicated than I’d thought, and I revisited Steph’s first love with different expectations for what it could hold.

This is still a coming-of-age novel, but now I know personhood isn’t static after a character makes it through their teens. We see how much Steph changes and surprises herself, all the ways her life expands outwards for better or for worse, which is something I didn’t know to expect for myself in my early 20s. Now it’s one of my best hopes for anyone.

You’ve created an interesting blend of points of view and epistolary fragments. How did you choose which voices to highlight?

Kayla, Hannah, and Della are all characters who are or who become hyperaware of how they’re understood by others. For Kayla there’s the pressure to be a certain kind of Native woman on social media; for Della there’s the worry that her story will continue to be told for her after her Native identity was picked apart on a national scale; and for Hannah there’s the tension between what to share with her children and what to keep for herself.

A few years ago, I was messing around with my computer on an airplane and thought it would be a funny exercise to ask how Steph might represent herself on Tinder over about a decade. But 10 years of Tinder profiles is 10 years of choosing how you want to be seen and judged. It went from a joke to something deeper, and I leaned into epistolary forms for other characters. Stepping outside of first-person point-of-view for Kayla, Hannah, and Della meant a more conscious engagement with questions of representation.

Your characters navigate identity, trauma, science, ambition, romantic and familial relationships. How did you handle keeping so many threads balanced in the larger narrative?

I’m so glad I get to talk about school supplies! There were so, so many school supplies. While the novel itself went through a lot of change, I stayed obsessed with trying to organize it. Post-it notes, highlighters, stickers on top of Post-it notes to indicate several things tracked within a single scene… I was inspired by [author] Claire Lombardo, who back in grad school built the most beautiful storyboards and color-coded charts that I’ve ever seen.

Between drafts, I’d make storyboards where different threads were different colors (i.e., “Green is science, according to this green index card this scene is science-y, oh NO wait, why have we not seen a green sticky note for 100+ pages?!”).

By the time I made it to my last three years of edits, I had an evolving system of checklists. As I read each chapter, I’d make myself check off that yes, this chapter had addressed/touched on/hinted at [insert long list of threads I was determined to keep in balance]. Some of the things I’d check for were broad, like the heading “Astro!” to make sure the novel hadn’t strayed from its interest in space. But some were weirdly specific, like (for example) “[Bicycle] Where?” That one meant that for a few objects that really don’t spend much time on the page, I wanted to remember where they’d been stashed and ask myself if they were needed.

To what extent are Steph’s or Della’s remarkable lives based on true stories?

Steph became a character after the first Cherokee Tri-Council meeting, which I attended in 2012 with my family and two Cherokee friends. That first version of Steph wasn’t interested in space, which is wild to me now. Looking back, I think No-Space Steph would react to other people and their actions, but she didn’t have that drive to push forward on her own.

A few years later, long after Steph had become an aspiring astronaut, my brother began a Ph.D. program. He was studying the political and economic history of the Cherokee Nation between 1866 and 1906. Just about everything I was starting to learn from him was surprising to me–regarding both our nation and our own ancestors.

One day, when I was visiting friends in Oklahoma, my brother invited me to join him in the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma. That, along with several years of sibling talks that would follow, complicated and deepened my understanding of Cherokee identity and how it was understood in the past and today.

I wanted that for Steph, particularly as she looks to the future, so I decided that up until the year 1860 her ancestors would be my ancestors. Lending Steph a real, research-based history wasn’t the key to many answers for Steph. But it raised questions! And, importantly, it added Steph to a conversation that had begun long before her.

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This interview originally ran on March 25, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Filed under: interviews | Tagged: authors, Maximum Shelf, Shelf Awareness | Leave a comment »