I also decided to launch “Media and Publicity” cohorts for 2027-28 debut writers who want a little more guidance and insider information. While I give away a lot of my insight for free, these classes (5 weeks, plus a 1:1 with me) are $500. The first one is sold out. But if you’re a writer, please visit our DEBUT U page to get more info. Our October cohort is one or two writers away from being sold out.

These classes are flexible, but the outline I sent the first cohort is as follows:

It’s a lot of “if I was launching a debut novel, what would I do?” insight based on years of seeing what works, what makes writers pull their hair out, and what’s fun. Because launching a book should be as fun as it is about selling books.

If that weren’t enough exciting news, my first-ever attempt at being on an AWP Panel was a success! rounded up some killer publishing experts — A.L. Major of , of , former S&S editor and literary citizen extraordinaire Yahdon Israel, and… me! Hope to see you at the panel.

If you’re headed to AWP, please let me know! The Debutiful off-site reading will return, and we already have three exciting writers booked.

Whoo, boy! That was long. Links for Debutiful lists, podcasts, and interviews below!

— Adam

Debutiful | Instagram | BlueSky

Book Recs & Lists

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in August 2026

• 16 debut books to discover from August 2026

• Five Novels Written by Women Featuring Feminine Rage, recommended by Isabelle Spotts

• 8 Graphic Debut Memoirs That Quietly Blew Up Everyone’s Expectations of What a Comic Could Be, recommended by Emil Wilson

Podcast Conversations

• P. Paramita discussed Appetite — Apple | Spotify

• Clare Carusillo discussed The Responsible Party — Apple | Spotify

Interviews

• Devyn Defoe on Burnside, Lemony Snicket, and Writing the End Times, interviewed by Viviana Freyer

• Stacey Yu on Love, Magic, and Coming of Age in New York City, intrveiwed by Lior Torenberg

• Friendship, Betrayal, and Enmeshment: Ekin Oklap on Her Dreamlike Summer Debut, interviewed by Lior Torenberg

• Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove, interviewed by Aaron John Curtis

• When Harry Met Sally Met Marguerite Duras: Inside the Mind of Annie Lord, Author of The Project, interviewed by Amanda Nyren

• In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?, interviewed by Asale Angel-Ajani

• Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites, interviewed by Luke Sullivan

• Rebecca Wright Stevens on true crime, violence against Indigenous women, and the nonstop daylight of Alaskan summers, interviewed by Athena Waligore

My Reading Life Q&As

• Leila Renee was shaped by Toni Morrison, Goosebumps, and The Phantom Tollbooth

• Drew Buxton Reads for Voice, Craft and the Swerve

• Nita Noveno Finds Freedom in Breaking Form

• How ‘Are You My Mother?’ Followed Leslie Bazzett All the Way to ‘Mia’

• The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange

Inside the Collection Q&As

• Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

Cover Reveals

• See the cover for Sensual World by Lauren Friedlander

• See the cover for Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring by Jared Lemus

• See the cover for All of Us Wildflowers by Tria Wen

• See the cover for Overwintered by Elina Katrin

• See the cover of The Vanishing Act by Eoin Connolly

• See the cover for Talented and Gifted by Kelly Kearsley

• See the cover and read an exclusive excerpt of The Joplin Horror by Jason Kaleko

Carusillo grabs you from the jump and takes you on a twisty journey.

[A plug: Debutiful’s FREE Short Story Contest is taking submissions through November 13th. It’s judged by Jared Lemus and Mariah Rigg. / + Mountain Words Fest are graciously sponsoring.]

She was one of the first authors I invited onto the podcast way back in March 2026, when I first received her book. Our conversation covers everything from how only one publisher offered to buy it to why she and her partner opened a bookstore/skateshop in a dusty town outside of Salt Lake City after living in NYC for years.

Apple | Spotify

Adam Vitcavage: What’s your unofficial bio? Who are you outside of this crazy debut world?

Claire Carusillo: My name is Claire. I live in Utah in a town called Midway, about 45 minutes outside of Salt Lake City. I did not grow up here. I grew up in suburban Chicagoland, but I find a real draw to being surrounded by natural beauty, even if I’m not always, or even usually, outdoor recreating.

As of probably eight weeks ago, I opened a bookstore, skateboard shop, and coffee bar in this little town. It’s called Storyboard, and that has been consuming me for the most part. So when you’re asking what I’m doing outside of reading and writing, I guess I’m doing this thing, but it has a little bit to do with reading and writing, too.

Adam Vitcavage: Amazing. We’ll come back to Storyboard. That excites me very much. I love talking about bookstores, and I think what you’re doing, though I don’t know a lot about it yet, is the kind of thing that will make bookstores thrive. Having coffee and a skate shop gives people another reason to come in.

Claire Carusillo: We’re hoping. It’s a little bit of an impetus to get people in the door. And if we’re getting people who are involved in another discipline that has historically hung out in a third space, why not combine them and see what we can get cooking?

Adam Vitcavage: Exactly. We’ll come back to that. You grew up in the Chicagoland area. Did you skate? Was that part of your life?

Claire Carusillo: I didn’t learn how to skateboard until I was 30 years old. My boyfriend, my partner who runs the shop with me, is a dyed-in-the-wool skate rat. When we met, he taught me how to skateboard, and a lot of that time my dog was with us, pulling me on a skateboard. So that’s the mode of skating that I’m interested in. You’re not going to see me attempting a gnarly kickflip or anything. I’m just cruising around, and I’m always wearing a helmet and full pads. Got to protect the moneymaker.

Adam Vitcavage: Got to.

Claire Carusillo: Got to.

Adam Vitcavage: I live in Denver, so not Midway, Utah, but similar vibes perhaps. And we are inundated with electric scooters and bikes from some company. It drives me crazy for numerous reasons, but one of them is that people who probably never ride bikes or scooters are riding them without helmets. It’s so dangerous.

Claire Carusillo: Oh my God. I know. I think it’s more dangerous than skateboarding without a helmet.

Adam Vitcavage: Because it’s motorized.

Claire Carusillo: Totally. It’s really wild. I have an e-bike because I live in a small town and I can take it to the grocery store. I have saddlebags on it, but I’m always strapped in.

Adam Vitcavage: And you’re like a professional biker. You’re doing it right.

Claire Carusillo: Exactly. I’m trying to cede the roadway to pedestrians and do it to the letter of the law.

Adam Vitcavage: You weren’t a skateboarder until you were 30, and you might not even call yourself a skater now, but you are.

Claire Carusillo: I would. Thrasher T-shirts or whatever. But no, I don’t pretend this is the culture that raised me.

Adam Vitcavage: Was writing the culture that raised you? How involved was that in your life growing up?

Claire Carusillo: Our family joke, in some ways, is that I had two older siblings who were naturally gifted academically very early on. Then the third kid came along, which was me, and we always say my parents forgot to teach me how to read. Maybe there was more to it than that. I won’t foist the blame upon them, but my memory of first grade is that they would take me to a janitor’s closet and make me go to remedial reading. I don’t know if it was actually a janitor’s closet, but I did read pretty late. I probably wasn’t reading until I was six and a half.

I wonder if much of my academic or writing life since then has been overcompensating in some way because I felt behind in reading very early on. But I did take to it as a hobby, and even when I was younger and before the iPad of it all, I did notably observe that I liked to read in a way many of my classmates were not necessarily reading. It’s always something that comforted me. You know from reading this book that I’ve never been a good sleeper. I’ve always been afraid of the dark, so having a light near me and a book near me has always been a comfort object.

Adam Vitcavage: You mentioned overcompensating. I feel that way with reading. Debutiful kind of became my life and my personality for a while, and I’m trying to make that a more healthy relationship. The more books I get and feel like I have to read, the more I have to remind myself that I don’t actually have to read all of them.

With writing, I’ve talked to a lot of writers about how it’s a compulsion. You need to write in one way or another. Was writing a compulsion for you leading up to your MFA? Or was it still playful, like maybe this will become a profession and maybe it won’t?

Claire Carusillo: No, I think it was always a compulsion for me. Again, let’s forget about those early years when I could not read or write and was significantly behind my classmates in that sense. But early on, I felt a comfort in confession. Confessing something creates some sort of community, or at least another person saying, I feel this way too. Or, on the flip side, I haven’t felt this way before, and it’s interesting that you observed that and put it in writing.

Very early on, I felt some sort of compulsion to write. It’s not like I was young and writing novels, but I was always on the school paper. My job for a long time out of college, and sometimes to this day, is that I’ve been a writer on the internet. I’ve been a journalist in the classic sense before, but I always feel I write best when I am writing about myself or allowed to put myself observationally into pieces.

Adam Vitcavage: Writing on the internet, doing journalism. When does an MFA come into your mind? Why do it?

Claire Carusillo: I applied for an MFA two years out of college. I had lived in Washington, D.C., working at a political super PAC, I guess that’s what you’d call it. Then I got my first job at a website. I was doing social media, and I really wanted to write more. I had started a newsletter called That Wet Look that was by no means an MFA-quality piece of writing, but it did well for me. It was a way to get away from my day job, or even the pieces I was being assigned as a freelancer outside my day job. It allowed me to write about myself a little more.

I guess I was getting feedback and having a fun time with it, and that made me think I could try for an MFA. The Responsible Party took me ten years to get published from start to finish, so I had also always had an idea of this book I wanted to write knocking around in my head since I was a little kid. Getting some positive feedback on the internet for writing about other things allowed me to take myself more seriously in some way.

Of course, people can write a novel without an MFA. If I had the chance to go and do this again, I’m not sure I would make all of the same decisions that I made. I did love being in that program, but I wonder how the world has changed since 2016, when I started. But yes, getting a little bit of positive feedback allowed me the luxury of taking my writing more seriously.

Adam Vitcavage: That’s funny. I try not to talk about myself on the podcast, but I started writing seriously, in air quotes, for the first time in January.

Claire Carusillo: Of this year?

Adam Vitcavage: Yeah. I never wanted to write fiction. It was not my thing. I wanted to do journalism always. Then life happened and I started doing pop culture journalism and then literature interviews, basically. But then I applied for two workshops that I got into. I think about workshops and wonder who can really afford to apply for these things, but I got into them, and it was helpful to hear outside validation from people. It was like, maybe I’m not terrible at this.

Claire Carusillo: Totally. The MFA conversation is probably something longer than we have time for right now, but I encourage anyone who’s a writer to workshop. That was a transformative experience for me. Before I did my MFA, I think I did three once-a-week workshops at a place called Sackett Street in Brooklyn. That was a total life changer. I probably could have been satisfied doing that kind of workshop for a long time. I really think it makes you a better communicator and makes you see outside yourself. It’s a wonderful thing to get involved in.

Adam Vitcavage: Your MFA was 2016-ish, then? Was that when The Responsible Party started being written?

Claire Carusillo: I think I wrote a couple of short stories before turning in the first couple pages of this novel, probably in my first semester of MFA in 2016. They were kind of concurrent. It’s not like I went into the program for the express purpose of writing this specific novel, but the more feedback I got on it, the more I started thinking about it as a long-term project.

Adam Vitcavage: The Responsible Party is ten years in the making. I like to ask writers: cutting through what media might say or what a publicist might say, how do you clearly pitch The Responsible Party?

Claire Carusillo: It’s tough because it has three timelines. I usually lead, because marketing has led with this, with this old-timey plotline about these ancestors of mine. Sarah Monsey and Fanny Mounsey are my great-great aunt and my great-great grandmother. They endured two shipwrecks in a row in 1914 and 1915. That’s the splashier part of the book, and it is the foundational myth the book rests upon.

But a lot of the other parts of the book, the other two threads, get a little lost in that marketing pitch. Fundamentally, I think this is a book about a mother recounting her childhood in the 1970s to her daughter, who shares the same name as me. It’s based on a true myth about shipwrecks. In the current-day timeline, a narrator named Claire Carusillo gets a knock at the door and discovers that her matrilineal DNA has been found on a body that just washed up in a creek. The cops insinuate that her mother, who is a tough nut to crack, has something to do with it. Via extortion, guilt, and all of that, Claire gets her mother, Kath, to recount some of her childhood, including living with the shipwreck survivors.

The funnest part of the book, I think, which often gets lost, is this plotline in November 1971, where Kath, as a teenager, gets taken in by this aging scion of industry who lives in a lighthouse 400 yards off the coast of Lake Michigan. She goes to a party there and then sort of gets marooned there. In some way, she learns responsibility.

The book is a pun on the centerpiece of the party, the responsible party. But in other ways, it’s also a title about these shipwrecks and who is responsible for what. And also what kind of smaller-level violence these women are doing to each other and to the people around them.

Adam Vitcavage: It’s so interesting when there are multiple timelines. When I’m trying to describe a book for Debutiful, or just to someone on the street, I usually take the highest-level view of it because it’s easy to get in the weeds when you’re recommending a book. A quick one-sentence pitch often does better than trying to overexplain a plot.

Claire Carusillo: Totally. And that’s hard for me to do, the one-sentence thing.

Adam Vitcavage: With your book, I have two big questions, and you can tackle them in any order. Why name the character Claire Carusillo, and why three timelines? How did that unfold?

Claire Carusillo: We can start with the timelines. Maybe that will lead to an answer.

Adam Vitcavage: Perfect. You’re in your MFA. The Responsible Party is starting to become bigger and bigger. What was the first timeline?

Claire Carusillo: The first timeline was a contemporary narrator recounting a true family story about shipwreck survivors in her family. That is a true story, though I’ve taken an enormous amount of liberty. In some ways, I’ve sullied the names of my ancestors by including their real names in this book. But it was a story that haunted me as a child. All these shipwrecks and the fact that perhaps fate is real, and maybe this sort of drowning could be coming for me or my family or my loved ones at any time, because we shared this lineage.

I started referring to it internally as disrespectful historical fiction. I always thought it was funny to have a contemporary narrator who hasn’t done a lick of research recount a family legend. I don’t know how much interest people have in the truth of this story, but there’s a lot of stuff on the internet that you can find out about these women that doesn’t happen in my book. These are verifiable facts that, if the narrator had done a quick Google, she might have been able to figure out. And yet I wanted it to be colloquial.

Sometimes I compare it to the tone of Drunk History. The show hasn’t been on in a decade, but I always thought it was hilarious the way people were retelling a story they pretty much knew the gist of in such a casual way. That was the tonal foundation and mythological foundation, if you will, of the book.

Then another ripped-from-the-headlines-of-my-own-life situation, to a lesser degree, is that I always knew a story from my mom, whose name is not Kath. It’s confusing because the character in the book is named Claire, but I gave my mother character a different name. The dedication is to my real mom, Suzanne, and the first thing you read in the book is that it’s dedicated to Suzanne, whose name is not Kath.

My mom would anecdotally mention, when we drove from the suburbs into Chicago, that we passed this lighthouse 400 yards off the coast. When my mom was in her 30s, she had a coworker who lived in that lighthouse and rented it from the Coast Guard for a dollar a month, and she would go party there. Again, I have totally sullied and corrupted that story of my mother’s. I made the mother character a teenager. All sorts of debaucherous things are happening in this lighthouse that aren’t true.

I always had these two timelines going back and forth. It probably wasn’t until five years into writing the book, when my agent Monika Woods suggested that the narrator needed a name and something to do. I think Monika suggested that I just name her Claire, and I was like, yeah, that works. It would seem disingenuous to me if I gave this narrator any other name.

I always knew there would be a murder mystery involved, where a disinterested narrator finds herself getting involved in this. I also think it’s funny to have a murder mystery where the central murder issue is solved halfway through the book, and we turn to a more compelling mystery from there. That is how it evolved over the course of the eight years it took me to get a book deal.

The character being named Claire felt right. I named the mother character something different out of respect for my living mother. I kept the names of Fanny and Sarah out of respect for their legacy. But Claire felt like I was telling this almost-true story, and it wouldn’t work for me if anybody else were telling it. Even if my circumstances are totally different from what I wrote into the book, I was looking for what I call the oomph of the truth, the emotional thrust of the truth. That remained more truthful if I gave the narrator my own name.

Adam Vitcavage: You started your MFA in 2016, and now the book is being published in 2026. What’s the path after your MFA? When do you finally get a draft that’s draftable? When do you talk to Monika Woods, who runs Triangle House?

Claire Carusillo: I had a different agent before Monika. I probably got her within six months of finishing my MFA. We were connected through a mutual friend. We worked together for maybe two years, and it ended up not working out. There was also quite a bit of turmoil going on in my life at that point.

Another friend introduced me to Monika Woods, who I had known socially a little bit, which is part of the luck of living in New York. Monika sort of rescued this book for me, no pun intended. She very quickly agreed to help me, but she let me know how much work we still had left to do. I think I wrote one more draft for her.

One of the things she had me do, which I’ll forever be grateful for, is create a timeline where we see all three timelines on a spreadsheet. Every single beat, every single bit of dialogue, plotted sequentially next to each other in the three different timelines. In that way, I was able to have all three timelines mirror one another because it’s three generations of the same family. And because the plot became so complicated, you learn things about the original timeline in the 1970s plotline and back and forth. There is a mystery to solving this.

The fact that she had me do so much work ahead of time, plotting it out like that, means I basically have an answer for any plot hole that might come up. I do think the plotting of this is airtight. Monika and I worked together for at least another two years. We went out on submission. Only Holt said yes, and that took about six months. Holt’s condition on publishing it was that I had to excise a 50-page plotline from the book. From signing a book deal to publication, that was another full two years, or something like 23 months. This was not a miraculous story of a wunderkind getting it right.

Adam Vitcavage: I want to go back to agent number one. I don’t need any specifics, but did you have a draft then?

Claire Carusillo: Yeah. My final MFA thesis was a draft of this book, and it was much shorter. It was probably 200 pages, and now I think we’re at 336 or something. But using that, I was able to do it. Again, you don’t need to go through an MFA program to have a draft of a book that an agent will look at.

Adam Vitcavage: Cool. I just wanted to clarify.

Claire Carusillo: I think it’s been a really circuitous path for me. There were a lot of times when this just wasn’t happening, and I kept trying to make it happen. I think I knew somewhere that this could happen at some point. That’s the only reason it exists.

Adam Vitcavage: You mentioned only Holt made an offer and you had to cut 50 pages. Now, from an outsider’s perspective, someone who’s semi-inside the book world, the book is being talked about. People are in it. So do you think that if those 50 pages that eventually were cut weren’t in it, there might have been more offers? Do you think about things like this, or is it not even healthy to think about?

Claire Carusillo: It’s been really interesting. I worked in media for the entire decade that I was writing this book. This is not me tooting my horn about work ethic. This is just how it has to go when you have a job. For many years, I was a person who would wake up at 4 a.m. several days a week and get writing done before my job. Some of that time, I also didn’t have a job, to be real. But often I did have some sort of internet writing job.

It was very hard for me to be a person who wrote for a living and had staff jobs or good freelance jobs, and then in this other arena that wasn’t celebrity blogging or beauty writing, to be a total rookie. These are two totally different realms of writing. I did feel hurt and shocked that I wasn’t being taken seriously at all as a fiction writer, which I had gone to school for.

I’ve heard this book called maximalist, and that’s not an aesthetic I aim for, but I do believe in letting people cook and seeing what happens. I don’t think the version of the book that had the extra 50-page plotline is a better book. That’s a testament to my editor Emily at Holt. But I do think there’s room for bizarre plotlines, bizarre plotting, and bizarre cadence that I don’t think a first-time author can fully get away with, maybe.

That said, I do feel unfettered in some way in this book. I was allowed to be a little wild and keep talking constantly, even if it had nothing to do with the plot. I’m forever grateful to my editor for that. But yes, I do think a lot of it has to do with risk in the publishing industry. We’ll see. I have a bookstore, and I haven’t sold a book yet. I have no idea how this book is going to do.

But it’s been interesting now that I’m receiving two or three pieces of institutional praise. I’m like, oh, damn. Maybe I had this all along. I don’t know. It’s definitely a very overwhelming time for me. I got written up in the Times yesterday, and I cried for an hour after that happened because the first time I ever read book reviews, my parents got the Sunday New York Times. That was so overwhelming for me. I didn’t think that was something that could happen to me. That’s not to say, oh, I’m just some kid out of nowhere. I obviously have connections other places and an immense amount of privilege. But it’s been a really interesting time because I couldn’t get this book published for so long, and two days from publishing, things are going better than I expected.

Adam Vitcavage: I won’t belabor this point, but I think the more people are in the industry in some way, shape, or form, either writing freelance outside literature but with an MFA or without an MFA, or writing for literary magazines, it makes it that much harder because you know what’s happening. It’s like, why did this happen for this person but not me? Not that jealousy is involved.

Claire Carusillo: No, it is.

Adam Vitcavage: It is. But it’s like, when you know this person got their Times review two weeks ahead of time, you’re wondering, where’s mine?

Claire Carusillo: Yeah. I learn things every day. The things we read into about publishing time. It was definitely hard for me. I graduated from my MFA in 2019, and I have seen classmates lap me in writing books. There are so many people who have written beautiful books that I’m so proud of, and it’s amazing to see their projects go from workshop to a published book. But it was always tough for me. I did always think I would eventually get to this place, but it was never happening fast enough.

Adam Vitcavage: I don’t want to take up too much of your time because you have to open Storyboard, your skate shop. One question on this, and then I’ll ask my final question. You love books, and your partner loves skateboards. Was that it? Is that how this came to be?

Claire Carusillo: He’s a writer and a reader too, and I guess I would consider myself a skater in some ways now since we’ve been together. We both moved from New York. Moving anywhere from somewhere where you have community or places to convene, a third space, is daunting when you’re moving somewhere that’s more rural. Where am I going to have community?

I wanted to be in an environment of mountains and nature and streams, but in some ways we wanted to create a cultural hub, even as tiny as this place is. We think that happens at bookstores. We think that happens at skate shops. We think that happens at coffee shops. I really can’t think of three things that go together as well, and that people spend as much time milling about in.

Again, we’ve only been open for eight weeks, but it has been pretty remarkable. Put aside sales. Put aside the amount of money that we owe people. It has been remarkable every day to see people show up. The conversations I have with people, people I had no idea I had shared affinity with, whether we’re talking about books or skating or coffee or not, have been really cool. In this small town where I did not grow up LDS, like many of the people here, it’s interesting to find out that wherever you go, if you create a space, your people will find you.

Adam Vitcavage: I agree 100%. Since you’re a brilliant writer, but also a bookstore owner who reads a lot, what are some reading recommendations you can drop on our listeners?

Claire Carusillo: The one that I just looked at on my bookshelf that blew my mind is The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Our barista Avery, who’s the only other person who works at Storyboard, is a big reader too, and she recommended it to me. That book was kind of a mind blower. It’s so thick, and any time someone asked what I was reading and what it was about, I was like, it’s just about the sisters. It really is just about some sisters hanging out.

The interesting thing to me was that it is fiction, probably inspired by real-life events, told by a narrator who shares the same name as the writer. It was very inspiring to me, even though my book was pretty much sealed up and done by the time I picked it up, to see someone do it at such an expert level and to enamor me with this book.

I just read The Housewives Underground by Kaitlyn Tiffany, who is a friend. She wrote an incredible book. I’m going to butcher the first title, but it was Everything I Need I Get from You, which is about how fangirls built the internet. Her follow-up nonfiction book, The Housewives Underground, is about the women who formed a network over letters and investigated the official findings of the Warren Report in the wake of the JFK assassination. That’s a mind-blowing book. She did so much deep research, and yet it comes off as so readable.

I also just read Upward Bound by Woody Brown, who is nonverbal autistic. That was such a fascinating, heartbreaking read to me. I read it really quickly. Because I live in Midway, Utah, home of Ballerina Farm, I did just read Yesteryear. I’m not necessarily sure I’d recommend it in a general sense, but the number of conversations I’ve had about this book in my little bookshop has been totally illuminating and incredible. No one will ever stop talking to me about it, for some reason.

I’ve started reading Lonesome Dove, but I actually took a break last night to read Sunrise by Téa Obreht. I’m about 150 pages into Lonesome Dove, and all that’s happened is cowboys clowning on each other. Nothing’s happened yet. But I like it. It’s funny to hear these guys razz one another.

In 2027, I hope to add a monthly original short story, handpicked by myself or a guest editor, written by some of Debutiful’s favorite writers. I also hope to run a quarterly Short Story Contest.

On August 18th, I’m officially launching the Debutiful Short Story Contest, but Substack Subscribers get to hear about it first.

I’ve asked Jared Lemus and Mariah Rigg to be judges of our first-ever contest, each picking one first-place winner and one second-place winner from a group of finalists narrowed down by volunteer readers.

Entry to the contest will be free (edit: after community feedback, this contest has been made free as of 1:00 p.m. MT. It was previously $5).

Winners will receive $100 for first place and $50 for second place, with publication on a new section on Debutiful in 2027.

Let’s spread the word. Even before Monday. Start sending this to your favorite writers looking to publish new work!

— Adam

Debutiful | Instagram | BlueSky

Book Recs & Lists

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in August 2026

• Five Novels Written by Women Featuring Feminine Rage, recommended by Isabelle Spotts

Podcast Conversations

• P. Paramita discusses Appetite — Apple | Spotify

• Shannon Sanders discusses The Great Wherever — Apple | Spotify

• Emeline Atwood discusses A Real Animal — Apple | Spotify

• Hannah Murray discusses The Make-Believe — Apple | Spotify

Interviews

• Devyn Defoe on Burnside, Lemony Snicket, and Writing the End Times, interviewed by Viviana Freyer

• Stacey Yu on Love, Magic, and Coming of Age in New York City, interviewed by Lior Torenberg

• Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove, interviewed by Aaron John Curtis

• In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?, interviewed by Asale Angel-Ajani

• When Harry Met Sally Met Marguerite Duras: Inside the Mind of Annie Lord, Author of The Project, interviewed by Amanda Nyren

• Rebecca Wright Stevens on true crime, violence against Indigenous women, and the nonstop daylight of Alaskan summers, interviewed by Athena Waligore

Inside the Collection Q&As

• Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

My Reading Life Q&As

• Leila Renee was shaped by Toni Morrison, Goosebumps, and The Phantom Tollbooth

• How ‘Are You My Mother?’ Followed Leslie Bazzett All the Way to ‘Mia’

Cover Reveals

• See the cover for Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring by Jared Lemus

• See the cover for Sensual World by Lauren Friedlander

• See the cover of The Vanishing Act by Eoin Connolly

• See the cover for Talented and Gifted by Kelly Kearsley

It’s August 9th, and I am already thinking about November’s “The Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2027, Part 1.”

I’ve been slowly curating a list of titles coming out in 2027, focusing on books from January to June. I publish a second list covering July through December each year in June.

The screenshot below shows the spreadsheet I used to track books I am potentially interested in covering. It’s a Google Sheet with five columns (four of which an author should always include in the opening sentence of a cold pitch): Book Title, Author Name, Release Date, ISBN, and my early thoughts for coverage plans.

As you can see, this is bare bones right now. I don’t even have release dates or ISBNs put in yet. I’ll start hammering out very specific details and triaging books. Coverage Plans is just a note saying I 100% want to cover it… How remains to be seen.

What Kind of Books Does Debutiful Cover?

Debuts. Specifically, literary fiction, memoirs, short story collections, and poetry collections. More and more, my interests have shifted toward “genre” literature, and some horror, sci-fi, and fantasy have been finding their way into Debutiful coverage with more frequency. That said, it’s still well-written fiction that is what I care about the most. Debutiful does not cover Middle Grade or Young Adult.

There are also categories I generally don’t cover. Not because they lack quality, but because I’ve learned they’re outside the editorial lane Debutiful does best. These include romance, self-published, and, even though I just said some horror, sci-fi, and fantasy get covered, those genres have to have something specific that appeals to me. Exactly what makes it appealing is ineffable.

Additionally, established writers like T Kira Madden (memoir to novel) or Deesha Philyaw (story collection to novel) make the list because they’re debuting in a new form.

How Do You Hear About Books?

The first books I officially heard about were Side Streams by Yasmin Adele Majeed and Tastes Like Seeing God by Nina Michiko Tam, on December 16, 2025, during an email exchange with literary agent .

That’s extremely early, but that day I created my “2027 List” tab in my running spreadsheet.

Since then, I’ve discovered a lot of books from publicists sending me catalogs or direct pitches, casually watching Publishers Marketplace deal announcements, getting recommendations from writers like or Mariah Rigg, who have their fingers on the pulse of the publishing industry, cover reveals (my own and other outlets’), and cold submissions from writers.

The current list features 65 titles, many of which I will list on the site’s “The Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2027, Part 1,” but not all of them.

How Do Books Make the Cut?

This month, I’ll start reading physical copies I’ve received. I hate reading on my screen, so I don’t use NetGalley; however, I will happily accept PDFs because I know indie presses can’t always afford to print many galleys.

These books get put into three buckets: Most Anticipated, Cover It, and Pass.

The Most Anticipated lists are around 50-60 titles. Of the 65 I have put into my spreadsheet, about 20 will make the Most Anticipated list.

There will be titles I don’t have copies of yet by the time November rolls around that make the list. Usually through word of mouth. I know this is part of the industry’s unfairness, but it’s the reality that having connects help. If a writer I’ve covered before recommends a book because their debut author buddy asked them to, it helps. Recommendations don’t guarantee coverage, but they often help me discover books that otherwise might never cross my desk.

Other times, it is a writer who has won an award (like the Dau Prize for Best Debut Short Story) or received some sort of literary clout that piques my interest.

What’s Next for INSIDE DEBUTIFUL?

Next month, I’ll continue this series, which I think will be some sort of diary of the exact process of curating “The Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2027, Part 1” list. This will also give insight into how I select podcast guests, monthly Noteworthy lists, and other coverage for the site^. All coverage stems from the books on the Most Anticipated lists.

^A friendly reminder that the site dominates Debutiful’s traffic, and the podcast is only about 10%. You can learn more about what works at Debutiful here.

I Have Questions!

Leave a comment on this email via Substack, and I’ll include an answer in the next INSIDE DEBUTIFUL.

[A plug: I am doing small cohort classes about publicity and media that you can sign up for here.]

In that class, I invited all of the debuts to email me directly and bypass the submission portal with a pitch.

While the whole pitch is longer, I want to highlight the opening. She gave context to where I met her (which is always helpful!) and then hooked me with a small detail she knew about me and how it related to her book. Genius. I stopped reading. I was IN

Though she had my direct email, I prefer the submission portal for authors. Publicists, please keep emailing me directly, but if an author is reaching out, it’s easier/healthier/safer if you use the portal.

Once I got Paramita’s Appetite, it was so fun and so well-written. It’s not bourgeois literary (which I know I lean), but it smartly explores obsession, friendship, and fandom. If you’re a fan of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, you’ll be a fan of this.

We chatted about wrestling (of course), parasocial relationships, and the very interesting path Appetite took to publication!

Apple | Spotify

Adam Vitcavage: I’m very curious: what’s your unofficial bio? Who are you outside of reading and writing, cooking, and wrestling?

P. Paramita: Thank you so much for having me on the pod. I am a fan, mostly above all things. I love to gush about the things I’m currently obsessed with and the things I’ve been obsessed with. I go through phases. Sometimes they lie still and then come awake again when it’s time.

That’s who I’ve been my whole life. I grew up in Bangladesh, which is in my bio, and I was bilingual from the get-go. I was subjected to pop culture from both Bangladesh and the U.S., and some from the U.K. as well. I grew up in the early 2000s, when globalization was really making its impact, so I’ve always been the friend sending whatever new thing I’m into to my group chats and saying, “Hey, this is coming out today,” or, “I really need you to listen to this because it’s important to me.”

So yes, I’m a fan. I’m a foodie. I really love New Haven, where I live. Those are the things that are most important to me right now.

Adam Vitcavage: I feel like you and I are very similar. Being a fan, being a hype man, is who I am for debut books, obviously. But for the past three years, my wife probably hates it, I’ve been deep into Dungeons & Dragons and TTRPGs. That is my other personality. Before that, it was reality competition shows. I get obsessive because I think adults don’t have enough fun. We should treat ourselves like kids and talk about what we love all the time.

P. Paramita: Absolutely. My roommates love Dungeons & Dragons, so I hear them watching Dimension 20. I’ve played it sometimes. Reality TV shows, I love Top Chef. I love food content. And you are also familiar with wrestling, right?

Adam Vitcavage: Yes. And wrestling, I didn’t even talk about that. During the pandemic, WWE — I still call it WWF, but I know I should call it by its proper name — the network still existed, so I watched every episode of Monday Night Raw from 1997 to 2000. We had nothing else to do.

Then that obsession laid dormant for a second. My wife, I forget why, was like, “Let’s watch the Montreal Screwjob.” She didn’t know what that was. So we started watching pay-per-views, and now we go to live wrestling every first Friday here in Denver.

Actually, this comes back to your book. My wife read Margo’s Got Money Troubles.

P. Paramita: Oh, yes. There’s a show now.

Adam Vitcavage: She read it and wanted to learn about wrestling: heels, faces, all of that. Your book Appetite is obviously not exactly like Margo, but in the sense that it is a fun, engaging read and wrestling is involved, I was thinking about that connection.

P. Paramita: I love Margo. It was coming out, I think, right as I was submitting my book, and it really helped me feel confident that stories with wrestling on the side have a place in the literary world. That book deals with OnlyFans and creating a character for that stage. My book similarly takes a very unrelated industry and tries to find the parallels with wrestling. So I guess it’s similar in that sense. I loved the book, and I loved the show. It’s fun to see people thinking more about wrestling because of it.

Adam Vitcavage: With Appetite, it sounds like it was really born out of two obsessions you have.

P. Paramita: That’s correct. Wrestling I was into since I was a kid. I think the first idea I even had of what death was came from a Buried Alive match at Survivor Series in 2003: Kane, Undertaker, this whole thing. I watched it and was like, “What is happening?” Then The Undertaker came back to life, and I was very confused. So I started understanding death a little bit more.

Since I was a child, wrestling was also a way to gain knowledge of the world in a way people maybe wouldn’t assume. I learned what different cities in the U.S. were because people come out and they say, “This person’s from Missouri,” or wherever. I also learned a lot about character work: good guys and bad guys. Similar to whatever was happening in my favorite shows, wrestling was creating plot and characters that were awesome. I got even more into it once the women started coming in during the 2010s.

Adam Vitcavage: I think we’re going to talk a lot about wrestling, but I do want to talk about the storytelling. What people don’t understand is that it is long-form storytelling. It is written, but it’s also long-form improv. People who like Dimension 20 — this is storytelling. If you watch anything to do with wrestling, even the Unreal docuseries now, which people have mixed opinions on, they are thinking, “What is the story we’re telling in three to seven minutes in that ring?” It’s beautiful.

P. Paramita: And I know the Dimension 20 people are big wrestling fans too, from what I’ve heard.

I would watch wrestling and imagine myself being friends with John Cena or whoever was the big good guy at the time, and I would seek advice from him on whatever was happening in my life. Very slowly, maybe in the back of my mind, that stayed with me. I started thinking, what if a person who has no connection to the wrestling world suddenly gets involved?

Food was also a big part of my life at the same time, when I was at the peak of my wrestling fandom. I had just graduated college. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had an English degree, a gender studies degree, and no job. So I had to make food for myself with a limited budget and a small amount of ingredients. I was coming up with creative recipes and watching a lot of videos.

The pandemic pushed that even further because I had a job by then, but more time, and all I was doing was watching TikToks of people making food and watching food YouTube videos. I couldn’t go home to Bangladesh and I missed it, so I would watch a lot of that cuisine and talk to my mom and think about how I could make these recipes work.

At the same time, I really fell into wrestling fandom. I became part of Twitter. I saw how easy wrestlers were to access and started talking to people and getting involved in group chats. Together, I thought: why not combine these interests and come up with a world where a chef has a whole wrestling rabbit hole?

Adam Vitcavage: That’s how it came to be. But were you always thinking you were going to write fiction? Did you want to write fiction prior to all this?

P. Paramita: My MFA is actually in nonfiction. I grew up almost exclusively reading novels until maybe my junior or senior year of college, when I started reading more memoirs, graphic memoirs, and essay collections. Then I took a lot of classes and realized I preferred to write nonfiction. When I applied to MFAs, I had a creative writing thesis that was an essay collection, and that helped me create samples for the application.

I actually hadn’t really written fiction until I wrote my novel. I wrote essays, and everything I was writing about in my personal essays and publishing felt too vulnerable. It was too personal for where I was at the time. I had this story I wanted to tell about wrestling, and nonfiction didn’t feel like the best way to do it. So in figuring out how to fictionalize everything, I started teaching myself how to write a novel.

Fiction has been the genre I read the most, but definitely not what I wrote the most. Now I think I’m mostly writing novels.

Adam Vitcavage: That’s fascinating. You got an MFA in nonfiction and had essays that felt too vulnerable. I’ve heard that a lot from writers in general, fiction and nonfiction, where they have this thing they want to write, but they don’t have the experience or distance yet. Do you think you’ll eventually go back to those essays in some way?

P. Paramita: Eventually my goal would be to write a memoir of some kind that combines my bilingual identity, different things I’ve been through, and my love for pop culture. That is a long-term goal. But for now, I’m enjoying dipping my toes more in the novel world.

I wrote poetry too, in the middle, when I had no idea what I was doing between graduating from the MFA and writing the book. It was such a good way to stop feeling like I had to face whatever was really depressing me in the real world and jump into creating worlds of my own.

Adam Vitcavage: That’s why Debutiful exists. I was just like, “Oh man, life sucks. I should be having way more fun with it.”

You do a lot. It feels like you’re creating a lot. Your longer bio mentions that you write nonfiction for places like Teen Vogue and Them. You founded Dream Glow Magazine, a literary journal inspired by the work of BTS. You founded We Have Food at Home, a weekly digital literary magazine about food. You have Don’t Smell Like Donuts, a food and photography Instagram. You have a Substack. You’re doing a lot.

P. Paramita: Yes, I think I hate sitting still. Some of those things I used to do and don’t do as regularly anymore. Dream Glow was very much a pandemic passion project where I was listening to a lot of BTS and thinking, “There are so many fans out there. What are they writing inspired by BTS?” It was a cool exploration of what being stuck at home can create. We had about ten issues and met people from all over the world. It was really fun.

As for hustling, I love trying new things and exploring the things I’m interested in. In my daily life, I have a full-time job in marketing and college consulting. I teach at a university. I teach creative writing. Over the summer, while the university is closed, I’m doing various teaching things, and I’m working on books.

I love doing things. I love meeting new people. I’ll sit at my local indie bookstore and meet everyone who comes in and say hello. These days I’m promoting my book, but I love hearing stories and being able to participate in the world. I spent so much of some earlier times being sad and not doing anything that nowadays, when I have more energy, I just want to do everything. Sometimes I’m walking ten miles a day because New Haven is so walkable.

I would like to slow down the pace at which I write or do work. I think doing things really fast is not necessarily the American way. Sometimes people are like, “Did you spend enough time on it?” So I’m learning to make sure I’m putting as much effort into things as I should. But at the same time, I really do love juggling everything.

Adam Vitcavage: Same. I like being involved, meeting new people, learning new things, and doing things. What you said about the BTS project is important: not everything people create needs to be long-term. It can be, “This is the moment we’re doing something together, and it was beautiful, and now it’s done.”

P. Paramita: Exactly. It was just me and my friend having fun, and it reached heights we couldn’t have guessed when we started. We did a professional development conference. We hosted open mics, trivia, random game nights, and met a lot of great writers who I’m still friends with to this day.

As things started getting more offline and people started to get less engaged, we had to check in and say, “We are also losing capacity and passion for this.” BTS also went to the military at that time. So a lot of things fell into place to say, “This was a great chapter in our lives, but it’s a great time to end.” It gave me experience editing a literary magazine and all of those good skills.

Adam Vitcavage: Through life, you’re cooking, you’re watching wrestling, things are happening, and you decide, “I’m going to write a book.” What is Appetite? Pitch Appetite for us.

P. Paramita: Appetite, I always say, is a book about obsession. It’s a book about finding the right people. In a one-word pitch, I always say it’s a friendship between a Bangladeshi up-and-coming chef and a white professional wrestler that goes wrong for both of them. I like to hold both of them accountable.

Adam Vitcavage: You were writing essays. You studied nonfiction. How do you start Appetite? Because people wonder: how do you write a book?

P. Paramita: It happened really randomly on a day in June. I had just finished the book Yellowface, which talks a lot about online worlds, the discourse created on Twitter, and the publishing industry. For some reason, it made me want to get into it. I had this degree. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I liked the way Yellowface had a narrator who was not great. I wanted to explore what we do when we have a narrator who is still figuring stuff out.

I also liked that there was this uneven dynamic between a white person and a person of color. I had a lot of different experiences in the wrestling world and was thinking maybe I could write about something like that. Because I had been so in the food of it all — I was doing that Substack, We Have Food at Home, at the time and thinking about the different ways people do home cooking versus how it gets to a bigger stage — I knew off the bat that I wanted the main character to be a cook and then a chef.

That’s the part I needed the most research on because I didn’t have restaurant experience myself, just a lot of absorbed information from watching food shows, food TV, and eating at restaurants. So I set out that summer to immerse myself in that world and figure out the parallels I could create between food and wrestling.

Adam Vitcavage: What year was this? I like to get timelines.

P. Paramita: Summer 2023. I finished the MFA in October 2022, and then graduation was May 2023. Then I started writing.

Adam Vitcavage: Writing is hard. Writing fiction is hard. You’re making it up. There’s pacing, foreshadowing, all the jazz. What was draft one like? Was it a hot mess, or were you learning and editing along the way?

P. Paramita: My priority was to word-vomit it out there. I finished the first draft earlier than I think I would ever finish a novel again. I took that summer and wrote the first draft, and it went through a lot of iterations. The first draft is quite different from where it is now, whether through my own edits, my agent’s edits, or my team’s edits.

It used to be called Parasocial because that word was so buzzy at the time. People were talking about parasocial relationships left and right. There was also this whole element where the main character would talk to an imaginary version of the wrestler before they started becoming friends, as an ode to that John Cena I used to talk to when I was nine years old. That version doesn’t exist in the book anymore, but it was good scaffolding for me. It was a way for the main character to talk to someone and a way for me to plan the book out.

I was outlining a lot and thinking of it as I went along. The parts that needed the most editing came from the fact that I had a nonfiction background. In essay writing, what I was used to doing was: what happened, then analysis; what happened, then analysis. A fiction book does not work like that. I had to teach myself a lot of that. I have a lovely agent — I still have her — and she has a fiction degree herself, so I learned a lot from the way she edited my book as well.

Adam Vitcavage: Speaking of agents, was this agent someone you approached for nonfiction, or did you start your relationship through Appetite?

P. Paramita: We started through Appetite, but I have a very nonconventional publishing story. I found my editor first.

When I finished the book, I started querying pretty soon after. I was querying in fall 2023 and getting noes. I was getting full requests. Around the same time I finished the book, Dial Press, which is now my imprint, had an open submissions period. It felt like things fell into place perfectly timing-wise.

I sent them the query, and they wanted to read the full manuscript. Katie Nishimoto, who is my editor now, was the person who reached out. I didn’t hear back from her for months, but it was in the back of my mind as I kept querying. My current agent had also requested a full manuscript. By the time Katie got back to me to have a conversation, my agent did have the manuscript. Katie and I sat down and talked about the book, and it was the first time I had reception from someone about the book, someone who really got the book. Someone saw the book. I felt so seen in that project for the first time. I had been doing the writing thing alone my whole life, and in that moment, connecting with this editor, I knew this was the right editor for the book.

What Dial was doing through that period was connecting authors with agents. Katie helped connect me with agents who were already on my list, including my current agent. After that conversation, I talked to a few agents and heard their editorial visions. I think one of those agent conversations is how I found out that Margo’s Got Money Troubles was coming out, because this person said, “Oh, this wrestling book is coming out.” So I was keeping an eye out for it.

It was cool to talk to people who had read the book and hear different things they had in mind. I went with my current agent, Ashley, whose editorial vision I loved. One of the first things we did was change the title of the book.

Adam Vitcavage: I love to hear that. I just saw Simon & Schuster put out a call for first-time, unagented authors. I think people see that, or something like Dial Press, and wonder, “Does this actually work?” And it does. Sometimes it just takes years to actually publish a book.

P. Paramita: So much of it is luck and the right person. It fell to the right editor, and I’m always grateful for that.

Adam Vitcavage: You mentioned there have been a lot of iterations, and it’s now shaped into Appetite. What are some things your agent and editor helped you get over the hump with?

P. Paramita: Because of my nonfiction background, so much of my initial plot focused on the protagonist, Zarina, and the wrestler, Sierra, who she has a friendship with. Some of the side characters were replaceable or interchangeable. My agent and editor helped me distinguish them, narrow down who to keep, merge some people who weren’t as important, and create more of a hurdle for the resolution to reach.

Some of what I was doing was trying to reflect real life because I was a nonfiction writer. But in a fiction book, we try to create more obstacles, have more things go wrong, and put characters into weird situations. My agent and editor helped me with that a lot.

The ending of the original version was very different from how it is now. It’s a lot more positive and wholesome now, whereas the ending of the version I wrote was quite sinister.

Adam Vitcavage: Because in real life, life is sinister.

P. Paramita: That ending was just out of nowhere. I wanted it to be the opposite of what could possibly happen in real life because nowadays I read a lot of books that have wild endings. I think I was trying to create that, but it maybe felt inauthentic to how we had edited the rest of the book. It changed into something more uplifting, which I like. I like that this book is uplifting. I think we need that, especially from immigrant stories right now.

Adam Vitcavage: That could be a whole separate podcast about trauma in immigrant and queer stories. As someone who had a nontraditional path — you didn’t do a fiction MFA, and you had the Dial Press of it all — what have you learned through the whole process? This is what Debutiful listeners are interested in: what the hell? We don’t know anything. No one knows anything. What are some things that shocked you, or that made you think, “Oh, this does make sense”?

P. Paramita: Just how everything worked and how collaborative it is. I didn’t know that once your editor has edited your book, you get passed on to the marketer and publicist, and those people become your main lines of communication.

I was learning on the job how to approach agents, how to prepare a list with agents of people we wanted to submit the book to, what different kinds of submissions were, what Publishers Marketplace is. As I was learning, I thought, “This is so cool, and so many people don’t have access to this information.”

So I started creating a series in New Haven at the independent bookstore Possible Futures called Manuscript Meetup, where I would invite people in the publishing industry to come talk about their experiences so that more people could learn all these words: query letter, comp titles, how to market yourself, how important social media is. We had a lot of local writers and authors who live here, but also editors. We have a Random House editor who lives in New Haven, and she came and gave advice. Then I started inviting people on Zoom.

That was a cool experience where I thought, “I had this unconventional entry into the publishing world, and I want to show people that anything is possible.” Sometimes it can feel so hopeless. People try and try and try, and it doesn’t work out. That’s where I was with my nonfiction to some degree. But when things fell into place with this fiction, I wanted to help others as well. I think I have a teacher brain at this point. I wanted to hold class, and that was one way to do it.

Learning how collaborative it was, and how kind everyone is, was so cool. Everyone wanted to appear at these talks. My agent came and did one. Before I was part of this, I was so intimidated by everyone. Occasionally I would DM someone on Instagram and say, “I like your book,” but the way people have been receptive has been wonderful.

Adam Vitcavage: What you’re saying is about finding opportunities. Not everyone has to teach or put together organizations, but going to these events matters. I was looking through our emails, and you went to Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Debut Author Academy, correct?

P. Paramita: Right.

Adam Vitcavage: You and I hadn’t really interacted. Maybe we followed each other, but you had a parasocial relationship.

P. Paramita: I had a parasocial relationship.

Adam Vitcavage: Which I love. Well, hold on. I don’t love parasocial relationships, but I have a lot of them.

I’m going to read a little bit of your email to me because I want more people to see how to pitch. It was like, “Hey, Adam, hope your New Year’s off...” Then you mentioned Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Debut Author Academy. And then this is what got me: “Longtime Debutiful listener. I know you’re a pro wrestling aficionado.” I stopped reading and was like, “I’m in.” That’s it. You didn’t pitch your book right away; you just got who I was.

I saw your book was about wrestling and food, but I think that’s vital: learning how to connect with people. Everyone in this industry wants something from someone, and that’s fine. Publicists want things from me. I want things from publicists. Agents want their books to make money. Everything is based on wanting something, but humanizing it as much as possible matters.

P. Paramita: I followed you and would see your stories. You were talking about Mick Foley, and then you had your WrestleMania predictions. I was like, “This guy — we connect on the same level.”

Being in my college counseling job has been useful in marketing the self because we’re always talking to these kids about how to make their profile unique and how to tell colleges, “I see you, and I am a part of this.” That’s the philosophy I was applying to that email.

Adam Vitcavage: I get thousands of emails. You can only pitch a book by saying it’s brilliant and well-written so many times. It needs to have human connection in some way.

Speaking of my predictions, I do love Mick Foley. Mankind and the Three Faces of Foley. He is my favorite wrestler. So I’m going to rattle off some favorite-things questions. We’ll start with wrestling. It sounds like you liked John Cena, but do you have a top one or two wrestlers?

P. Paramita: Absolutely. When I was growing up, Edge and Lita — I think I wanted them and wanted to be both of them. They were everything. I’ve always been more drawn to heels. Jeff Hardy was another important person. He was an artist. He would always talk about creativity, and I would play his speeches in my head and listen to his theme song. So those are from back in the day.

Currently, Dominik Mysterio. I love him. He has so much charisma. He’s so funny. He seems like a nice guy out of the ring too. I think he and Liv Morgan, with their on-screen romance, are creating a very different genre of wrestling romance than we’ve seen in the past, where it doesn’t seem like there is an end. They have really good chemistry.

I also love so many of the women’s wrestling stars from the last few years. Charlotte Flair is without a doubt the most influential. Becky Lynch, the whole Four Horsewomen — they’re not all there anymore; Sasha Banks is not there anymore — but Bayley. From the current stars, Blake Monroe, I think is her name. She had a great storyline with Toni Storm in AEW, and now she’s in WWE. Those are some of the people I’ve loved.

Adam Vitcavage: Edge was my favorite. I think my childhood wrestling and your childhood wrestling are slightly different eras.

P. Paramita: Mine is Ruthless Aggression.

Adam Vitcavage: I’m Attitude Era. But Edge as a vampire — I was obsessed. I came back into WWE now, and Oba Femi is someone I’m obsessed with. They’re going to put him over. But Rhea Ripley, Becky Lynch — Becky Lynch, I think, is the best man or woman on the mic right now. She understands character work so well.

P. Paramita: Becky Lynch is a big influence on my book in a lot of ways. What she started in that 2018 era and has continued is very admirable.

Adam Vitcavage: You mentioned Top Chef. I also like Top Chef, though I’m not as well-versed in it. I forget the names of chefs instantly. What seasons are the best seasons to watch?

P. Paramita: Hands down, the second all-star season, where Melissa King won. That’s my favorite season. I was having a really hard time when I was writing that book and seeking inspiration for the book, and I was bingeing Top Chef all the time. I think it’s called All-Stars, and it might be season 17, 18, or 19. I can’t remember. But it was Melissa King, and she was amazing. Gregory was in it. It’s a great season.

I follow a lot of chefs from Top Chef. Gregory has a restaurant in New York, Tatiana, that I really want to go to. I go to Melissa King’s pop-ups. I watched the latest season with my roommates, and one of the runners-up, Lawrence, has a restaurant near us in Massachusetts. We really want to go because he makes cool Chinese fusion dishes.

Adam Vitcavage: Chicago was the first season I watched and loved, the one with Stephanie. I went to her restaurants when I was in Chicago.

That’s the thing about Top Chef compared to other shows. With The Voice, no one has really become a main singer. American Idol had maybe four of them. But these chefs are James Beard Award-winning chefs already, and then they get to go on TV.

P. Paramita: Eating the food is so immersive. A wrestler can’t come punch you in the face, but Top Chef chefs can feed you.

Adam Vitcavage: We talked about wrestling and food, but I do want to know: what’s your favorite meal to cook, to eat, to go to? I want to think about food right now.

P. Paramita: Let’s talk about food. I love weird flavor combinations. What I’m doing in my kitchen is basically Chopped: what do we have, and what can I make? I make a lot of fish, chicken, and steak.

Bengalis are very known for fish, and we don’t get a lot of the freshwater fish from home here, so I try to make it work with salmon. I’ve written about this, I think, both in Appetite and in other places. There’s a mustard dish we make with our national fish that I make with salmon here. That’s something I make for almost all my dinner parties.

I’m also influenced by East Asian cooking. My roommate is East Asian, and I eat a lot of really good East Asian food. Chili oil is something I’ve discovered in the last ten years. I love making chili oil fried rice and subbing out the protein for anything. It’s really good with shrimp or crab.

In New Haven, which I think gets an underrated reputation, we have some good places, including places by the water where I love eating seafood. And when I’m making steak, I love making different kinds of compound butter — seeing what I can put into butter to top the steak with.

Adam Vitcavage: It is 10:38 a.m. where I am, and I’m ready for a hearty meal.

Thank you so much for talking with us about random stuff. This was a super fun conversation. To end the podcast as I always do: what have you been reading lately?

P. Paramita: Because I have a book coming out this year, I’ve been reading a lot of 2026 debuts. One I read that I absolutely loved was The Maidenheads. I went to their launch in New York recently, and I picked it up. I love people talking about art and music and seeing their passion come through. I thought Benny did a really good job with that.

One book I read this year that did not come out this year, but that I’ve been thinking about a lot, is I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane. It’s a really good, hopeful piece of art that gave me joy and made me really sad about the world, but also made me think about how we mark people and what’s been going on.

When I need writing inspiration, I always read Memorial by Bryan Washington. I’m reading that book five times a year because I really love the voice. I love the nonchalance with which the characters speak. For research for upcoming projects, I’ve been reading a lot of campus novels, so that’s been fun.

I had dreams of it being a media outlet in a time when media was rapidly dying.

A colleague of mine said it would never succeed because it was too narrow in scope. That person was partly right… Debutiful would have a lot more traffic if I featured household names. The Stephen Kings, or maybe even Jesmyn Wards or Michael Chabons. Perhaps the TikTok romantansies of the world.

But I wanted to feature the names you’ve never heard of before. The names on the cusp of being the literary heavyweights of the world. In 7.5 years, I’ve kept Debutiful as true to the initial vision as I could.

Because of it, I’ve presented at the Center for Fiction, AWP, Denver Publishing Institute, and countless other organizations I respect the hell out of.

I’m not a famous influencer, but I do hope Debutiful’s footprint continues to help readers discover debut books and, more importantly, helps debut writers launch their careers.

— Adam

Debutiful | Instagram | BlueSky

Book Recs & Lists

• 16 debut books to discover from July 2026

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in July 2026

• Beyond the Biological: Ten Novels About Social Contagions, Recommended by Alice Martin

Podcast Conversations

• Shannon Sanders discusses The Great Wherever — Apple | Spotify

• Emeline Atwood discusses A Real Animal — Apple | Spotify

• Hannah Murray discusses The Make-Believe — Apple | Spotify

Interviews

• The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed, interviewed by Caitlin Barasch

• Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Agnes Lives!, Millennial Despair, and Writing the Messiness of Real Life, interviewed by Adam Vitcavage

• Roshan Sethi wrote The Simp almost as if he were rewriting Vanity Fair, interviewed by Amanda Nyren

• Love, Grief, and Hawai’i: Alicia Upano Discusses Her Debut Everything to the Sea, interviewed by Mariah Rigg

• Sofia Montrone on Nymph and the Strange Way Time Shapes Us, interviewed by August Thompson

• Alison Leiby on Identity, Chronic Pain, and Why the Messiest Parts of Life Are Worth Writing About, interviewed by Brie Ward

• Krista Diamond on Close Relationships with Strangers, Parasocial Relationships, and Celebrity Obsession, interviewed by Al-Lateef Farmer

• Emilee Hackney on Speaking in Tongues, Trad Wife Culture, and the Other Appalachian Memoir We Won’t Name, interviewed by Madeleine Moss

• How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging, interviewed by Tsahai Makeda

• Wasp’s Nest author Kat Stoddard asks readers to reconsider how they view intimacy, interviewed by Samantha Paige Rosen

• Arielle Hebert and Chelsea Krieg on Poetry, Place, Water, and Friendship

• Chiara Bullen on D&D, Fantasy Taverns, and Writing Like You Rolled a Nat 20, interviewed by Adam Vitcavage

Inside the Collection Q&As

• Inside the Collection: Mac Crane Dissects Perverts

• Inside the Collection: T Clark dissects All This Want (And I Can’t Get None)

My Reading Life Q&As

• The Flayed Man Author Chloe Lauter Reveals the Weird Stories That Made Her a Writer

• Avigayl Sharp is bad at writing book lists… but will give you a Damn Good Writing syllabus

• Amy Chozick on With Friends Like You, Cormac McCarthy, and Great Writing

• Jayson Greene wishes he had gotten into literary sci-fi and speculative fiction earlier in life

• Ben Reeves, author of Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, reveals the books that shaped his life

Cover Reveals

• See the cover for Untranslatable by Lara Vergnaud

• See the cover for Notifications On by Emily Holland

• See the cover for Don’t Cure Me by Catherine Foulkrod

• See the cover for Creatures of Habit by Jennifer Yeh

• See the cover for Villains by Samantha Neugebauer

• See the cover and read an excerpt from Not a Good Mother by Karabi George

But when I got a copy of actress Hannah Murray’s memoir, The Make-Believe, I knew I needed to cover it.

She was the manicpixiedreamgirl of millennial dreams as Cassie on Skins and then the wildling Gilly on Game of Thrones. Then, she became obsessed with a wellness cult, had a mental breakdown, and was diagnosed as bipolar.

The Make-Believe, subtitled A Memoir of Magic and Madness, is for anyone who felt lost in their own existence. Hannah and I chatted a bit about everything, including why she felt it was the right time to release a memoir now, despite being exceedingly private at the height of her fame.

Apple | Spotify

Adam Vitcavage: People may know you as the actress who played Cassie on Skins or Gilly on Game of Thrones… but who are you? What are some things people may not know about Hannah Murray?

Hannah Murray: A really good question. A slightly scary question, for some reason. I’m so used to giving a CV-type bio. I am someone who loves karaoke and cooking and reads a lot and writes a lot. I am bipolar, which is a big element of my book and feels like it has defined my life in both wonderful and challenging ways. And I think I’m quite open and curious.

Adam Vitcavage: I’m very open and curious as well. And I’m so open and curious that I’m going to ask a very personal question: what’s your karaoke song?

Hannah Murray: People ask me this all the time whenever I say I love karaoke, and I think it displays an inherent misunderstanding of how passionate I am about karaoke. I don’t like when there’s a big group of you and you each just do one song.

I like to do two hours with one or two other people, and I have 20 songs I would like to do in that session. There are certain greatest hits of mine, but I always like to try something new and often fail at it. I like to go in lots of different directions. So I could not pick one favorite.

Adam Vitcavage: That is very fair. I am tone deaf and have no rhythm, so I do not karaoke. Maybe I should get over the fear of being made fun of.

Hannah Murray: It’s very cathartic, I find.

Adam Vitcavage: I think that’s what we’re really looking for in life: that cathartic release of what makes us feel human.

I started things off by reading your official bio because with writers, and especially people who wrote memoirs, people may think they know a lot about you. You have been on screen since 2007, give or take. You broke out almost 20 years ago. Did you feel like people were obsessing over you? With your role on Skins, there was a certain type of fan that really loved who you were playing.

Hannah Murray: There was a very strong fan reaction to that character, to Cassie. I was very young and very shy, and I found that level of attention quite overwhelming. If you’re 17 and people are talking about you on the internet, you can’t help but see what they’re saying. Some of it is really nice and some of it is really horrible. That was a very strange feed into my brain at quite a young age: to be so aware of what people thought of me, of me as that character, of that character independently from me. There was an intensity around that time that was quite surreal.

Adam Vitcavage: Was there ever a time where you wanted to walk away? Eventually, you were also on Game of Thrones, which became the biggest thing on the planet. Were you ever done?

Hannah Murray: I wasn’t done during either of those experiences on those shows. I wished it could be different. I definitely wished I could wave a magic wand and all the public attention would go away. But I was so in love with acting. I loved my job so much, and I really wanted to keep doing it. I knew that continuing to build a career in the way I wanted to, and get the kind of roles and exposure I was hoping to get professionally, would continue to lead to people coming up to me in the street and saying, “Can I have a selfie?” Although I found that challenging, it never made me not want to do the thing I loved.

Adam Vitcavage: That’s the hard part. I talk to a lot of fiction writers, and they talk about how writing fiction is art, but publishing a book is a business. It’s not necessarily what they love to do, but it’s part of the art journey. It’s a double-edged sword: you love acting, but maybe not everything else that comes with it.

Hannah Murray: I think that’s true of any job. Even the greatest jobs in the world have elements that you don’t love all the time. I have found the experience of publicizing my book very different from publicizing a TV show or a movie, in really positive ways. The kinds of conversations it is allowing me to have have felt deeper, more interesting, and more rewarding. That has been fantastic because I was scared about going back into the public visibility element. Writing is so solitary for so long, and I was writing this book over seven years, a lot of which was just me on my own. Then it was, “Oh, I have to go and be on camera again.” That felt nerve-racking, but it has actually mostly been really positive.

Adam Vitcavage: So The Make-Believe was seven years in the making. Why did it feel right to write it and to share so many parts of your life that had been kept off screen for a long time?

Hannah Murray: One element was the fact that I had been so private as an actor. I was always very strict about only talking about the work in interviews. That was all I was interested in doing. I wasn’t interested in pushing myself forward as me. I just wanted to play characters and talk about them and talk about the work.

So I felt like I had a blank slate to work with, in a way. If I chose to make these experiences public, it would be the first time I was really sharing myself publicly: who I actually am and what I’ve actually experienced. There was something exciting about that to me because I was getting to do it in a book, which meant I would do it completely on my own terms and in exactly the words I wanted to express that story in.

But I didn’t start writing it with publication in mind at all. I started writing it for myself. That’s part of why it took so long to get to this point. I was writing for at least a year, maybe more, just going, “I want to get these memories out. I want to put them down. I want to get this all out of my head.” When I realized I was writing a book, it was quite a daunting prospect. It was like, “Oh, I think this is a story I could share. I think I’m writing a memoir.” That was a bit of an oh fuck moment because I knew it would be really vulnerable and really exposing.

But the more I worked on it, the more proud I was of what I was creating. I also started to see bigger themes in the story that felt bigger than just my experience. I thought there was something of value in what I was writing, and that it would be a good thing to put into the world.

Adam Vitcavage: Was there ever a moment where you thought you were too scared to put it in the world? I know it’s important, but there are a lot of intimate moments.

Hannah Murray: It wasn’t necessarily, “I’m too scared to put this out there.” It was a long period of asking, “Am I willing to do this? Can I do this? Am I brave enough? Do I want to go here? Once it’s out there, I can never take it back.” But I just kept writing, and as I kept writing, I had time to sit with those decisions. Obviously, I wrote a lot of stuff that is not in the book and will never be published, that I just wrote for me.

Over those years, I had time to refine what the most important thing to say was. By the time I got my agent, and definitely by the time I got my publisher, I was so certain that I was ready to make this public and share this story. People still ask me, “Are you sure?” I would not have done this if I wasn’t 1,000 percent sure.

Adam Vitcavage: One thing I want to go back and ask about is that you mentioned earlier that you’re curious, and you have a degree in creative nonfiction. Was that part of this journey? When was that in your life?

Hannah Murray: That was very much part of this journey. I started my MA in autumn 2022, and it was a year. It fell around the midpoint of the writing process. I had written a huge amount, read it back, and thought, “Oh no, this is a book.” Then I thought, “I don’t really know that much about memoir as a form.” I started reading a lot of memoirs, and I had this feeling that I wanted to level up what I was doing. I didn’t feel ready, at that point, to send something to publishers.

So I googled “creative nonfiction MA” because I thought maybe that’s what I wanted to do, if it existed. There was basically one course in the UK, which was the one I ended up doing at the University of East Anglia. It fell right in the middle of the seven-year process.

Adam Vitcavage: In a lot of my interviews, I like to know what people learned. You googled it, you found the one, and you were there. How did it help you grow as a writer?

Hannah Murray: It helped me in lots of different ways. One thing was that it felt like baby steps into the process of sharing the story. There could have been a world in which I got workshopped, absolutely hated it, found it way too uncomfortable to let people critique my work, and ran screaming from the whole idea. But I had really supportive groups, and I got really interesting feedback on my work.

When I was editing the book at much later stages with my publishers, I could still see places where I thought, “I took a word out here because someone told me to in a workshop,” or “I put that thing in because someone said they were curious about it and wanted to know more.” I can see the influence of that feedback from my classes on the text itself.

It also gave me a lot more confidence. I don’t really know any writers who don’t have anxiety about whether they can call themselves a writer. I was definitely struggling with that. After my year at UEA, I felt like, “I am a writer now. I can legitimately say that.”

The most important piece was the community element. That was one of the things I really wanted from going there. I knew some screenwriters and playwrights, and obviously, having been an actor for so long, I knew writers who worked in those mediums. But I didn’t really know anyone who wrote prose, and certainly not creative nonfiction. I wanted to meet other people who were equally passionate about those forms. I made such a wonderful group of friends on the course, both on the fiction and nonfiction strands. That community feels so foundational now to how I feel myself to be a writer. It’s about relationship to other writers.

Adam Vitcavage: Writing is so insular, and you don’t know anything happening outside your little universe. It can be very lonely in the writing world. This may be a dumb question, but how was it healing to put these things down? I know you started writing almost as a diary, and then it became, “Maybe I’m writing a memoir.”

Hannah Murray: It’s not a dumb question. It’s a question a lot of people are curious about. Because of the context of what the book is about, I find the word “healing” tricky. Sometimes it’s hard not to use it in terms of what this experience has done for me, how rewarding writing this was, and how in the early stages it was cathartic. I was getting a lot of stuff out that I had otherwise been holding inside me.

The biggest thing was that it was really empowering to put that story in my own words, to express it the way I wanted to tell it, and to develop more reflection on those experiences. To turn something really traumatic into a work, into a book, into an object that I’m so proud of and think is beautiful: I can’t think of anything more healing than that, really. That transformation of pain into art is phenomenal, and I had never known anything quite like it.

I had always felt slightly frustrated as an actor, even from quite a young age, about not having as much creative input as I hoped acting would allow me to have. Often you turn up and are told, “You’re going to stand over here and say it like this.” I felt a bit like a puppet. Not really having a voice, not making something out of nothing.

For me, real creativity is when the idea doesn’t exist, or only exists in your head, and then there is a thing you have made. I think acting can be more interpretive. I found it fulfilling for a long time in different ways. But there was something about “I have a voice now” that was the coolest thing I’d ever known.

Adam Vitcavage: As someone who was self-described as very private during acting, you talked about acting and your roles, but you did not talk about yourself. Now, in your book, you’re talking about wellness cults, mental health, and a lot of personal material. Do you ever think about what might have happened if you hadn’t been so private as an actor? Would things have been different?

Hannah Murray: That’s a really interesting question. It has kind of never occurred to me what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been so private. The biggest unknown is that I’ve never been on social media. That was one of the biggest ways I felt I could definitively protect my privacy: by not posting things online about my life. That was a very clear decision I made early on when Instagram started to be a thing and a lot of actors were on it.

I thought, if you’re posting pictures of yourself online, is that inviting people to take more pictures of you? I wanted the boundary to be so clear. Knowing my temperament, if I had been on social media throughout the Game of Thrones heyday, I’m not sure I would have been able to function very well. I mentioned earlier reading things people said about me online, but there was a point where I stopped doing that because I realized it was a toxic habit to look on IMDb message boards about yourself. But I always had to go and seek that out. It wasn’t being directly fed into my phone the way it would have been if I’d been on Instagram.

So that’s a huge way in which my life could have been very different. My experience of the world could have been very different. But it’s not easy for me to imagine because I’m so social media illiterate that I don’t really know what that version of my life would have looked like. I definitely can’t imagine a world in which I would have shared this story publicly right after it happened. I think that would have been incredibly reckless. I’m really glad I’ve been able to do it exactly on my terms.

Adam Vitcavage: I think that’s a lot about Hollywood media today. A lot of fans and viewers feel they own the story. They deserve personal stories. Not everyone feels that way, but that attitude is out there. I think more people should be private. I wish I was more private. I share too much.

Hannah Murray: I feel like anonymity and privacy are underrated luxuries that you don’t understand until you don’t have them. I fully admit that I really wanted to be famous when I wanted to be an actor as a teenager. Before I started working on Skins, I thought, “I want to be a very famous movie star.” Then I became a bit famous, and I found it overwhelming and scary to have people looking at me in the street, pointing at me, coming up and asking for photos or autographs. It’s hard to put it back in the box once it’s out.

It ebbed and flowed throughout my 20s, and then Game of Thrones really ramped things up. But I feel like you don’t know what it means to be anonymous until you’ve experienced the opposite. You don’t really understand it intimately.

Adam Vitcavage: Now you are putting a book out there, and you have to be “on” again. Do you feel like 17-year-old you again, where you’re doing all these interviews, you have an excerpt in The Guardian, and people are talking about you?

Hannah Murray: No, it feels so different. Partly because 17 and 37 are remarkably different life stages. A friend said to me before I started the press process, “You got through it when you were a child. I think you can definitely handle it now. You’ll be absolutely fine, and you’ll be so much more in control of what you want to say.”

I feel a lot more confident and clear. It’s such a different thing to promote. Publishing as an industry feels so different from film and TV in that it’s so author-led. Everything has been, “Are you happy to do this? Are you comfortable doing this? We want to get the book out there and promote it, but we understand that you’re talking about very sensitive issues.” I have never felt forced to do something I didn’t want to do. Whereas as an actor, it’s more like, “You are obligated to promote this film, and we’re going to decide what press you do.”

The conversations feel so different. Again, it feels like this is on my terms. I also love talking about the book. I wrote about the time in my life that was most fascinating to me, so it’s fascinating to continue to talk about it. I don’t mind having those conversations publicly. I think it’s interesting, and it’s a privilege to have a platform to have conversations about these issues. I am really proud of the book, so I want to get it out there. It doesn’t feel like this bears much relation to my teenage self and those experiences. It feels very different.

Adam Vitcavage: Literary media is so fascinating. Speaking of social media scrolling, you see something like the new Supergirl press junket and the actress is in the same seat with 20 different interviewers. Nothing feels intimate. Literary media feels different. We sit for 40 minutes and just chat.

Hannah Murray: Because reading is an intimate act, far more than watching a movie or even watching TV. It’s so private. Unless you were to have an audiobook listening party, which I don’t know if anyone has ever done. Generally, people ask different kinds of questions after they’ve read the book. I don’t think it’s very similar at all.

Adam Vitcavage: That is fascinating. I’m going to ask about your reading habits because you mentioned you’re a big reader. I can only read in bed. I can’t read sitting on a couch. I don’t bring books on vacation.

Hannah Murray: I can’t read in bed. I just fall asleep.

Adam Vitcavage: It’s my cozy space.

Hannah Murray: That’s nice. I love when people tell me they read in bed before they go to sleep. That’s a nice way to wind down. But I find reading incredibly stimulating, so I don’t do it in the evenings, really. It’s rare for me to read after dinner, let alone before bed, because it gives me ideas and excites me. I tend to read in the mornings or afternoons, but never in bed because I would immediately pass out.

Adam Vitcavage: That happens a lot. I’m also a terrible sleeper, so I’m up all night with those ideas you’re speaking of.

Before we wrap up, the book is out in the UK now and coming out in the US. This interview will be out later, but how has the reception been? Are people coming out from your past saying, “I didn’t know”?

Hannah Murray: I’ve heard from people I have not heard from in a very long time, which has been random and interesting and really lovely. I hadn’t anticipated this as a way to reconnect with certain people, but it has been in a lot of beautiful ways.

Overall, I’d say the reception has been beyond my wildest dreams. It has gone so beautifully. The responses people are having to the book are exactly the responses I hoped they would have. It’s doing exactly what I hoped it could do.

In terms of people’s reading experience, I wanted it to be immersive. I wanted it to be page-turning, and I really wanted people to finish the book. Particularly if they didn’t have personal experience of psychosis or some of the other things I write about, I wanted them to feel like they had been in it with me and could understand what I had gone through. Overwhelmingly, that has been the case.

I described it the other day as being like an inventor who has been making a machine for years and years, but doesn’t get to test it and see if it works until the whole thing is put together. I feel like I’ve just turned it on, and now it has flashing lights and is making noises, and everything is working exactly as I dreamed it would. The idea that the book does what I set out to achieve is the most validating thing. It’s amazing.

Adam Vitcavage: That is so beautiful. I’d love to end the podcast by asking: what have you been reading lately? Have you been able to enjoy anything?

Hannah Murray: I read a really wonderful essay collection recently called It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me by Philippa Snow. I think it’s seven essays, and they’re all about female celebrity. Each essay is a pairing of famous women that she compares and contrasts. For me, it’s the most delicious thing: very intellectual, almost academic pop culture analysis. It’s so wonderful.

The first one is Anna Nicole Smith and Marilyn Monroe. There’s one about Kristen Stewart and Louise Brooks. I had to look up words every few pages because she’s so smart as a writer and uses language amazingly. I learned so much, but also I was reading about loads of my favorite actresses, which was fun.

I’m also about halfway through The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang at the moment, which is a very different reading experience. Again, I feel like I’m learning so much. It feels very mind-expanding. I love reading quite widely across a lot of different genres, and I hadn’t read fantasy in a while, so it’s really enjoyable.

An aside: this is my preferred pitch style from publicists. Just a list of books with their release dates and the publicity copy in the body of an email. As early as possible. I’m not fancy. I don’t need PDFs or catalogs. I don’t want links to NetGalley or wherever. I love getting a PDF as early as possible and let the galleys roll in whenever they’re printed.

Okay, back to Emeline’s book. From the moment I read it, I knew it was special. The way she embodies trauma and desire throughout the book shook me. Atwood allows readers to fall into the characters. There’s plot, of course, but for me the magic is in the vibey scenes where we just live.

On top of being one of the best books I’ve read during my time running Debutiful, it’s probably a Top 5 cover. It was designed by Patrick Sulliver, with artwork from Daniel Cacouault.

Emeline joined the podcast (listen here or here), where we talked about scuba diving, trauma, sending her book to agents when it was half-finished, and whether or not family reading something so personal is stressful.

Apple | Spotify

Adam Vitcavage: Who are you outside of being a debut writer?

Emeline Atwood: The first thing that pops into my mind is that I work as a scuba dive instructor in Texas, which is a little strange because we dive in a lake. I just picked that up again. The last time I worked as an instructor was in 2021, so I just got back into it, which has been lovely but also somewhat exhausting because I do that after work.

I work a day job in marketing, which I suck at. They haven’t found out yet, but I’m really not good at it. I live with my fiance, who is, surprise, a woodworker. I live with my dog, who we just adopted in August, so I’m a new dog owner. I am shocked by how much dogs love you. I did not understand that dogs are absolutely obsessed with you, and it’s the most beautiful thing.

And I do a lot of yoga. I do the 26/2 hot yoga sequence almost every day. I’m a pretty avid practitioner of that.

Adam Vitcavage: Yoga. I tried it a few times. I have really weak wrists, so I can’t do a lot of the poses. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong.

Emeline Atwood: No, the wrist thing is so real. I broke my wrist snowboarding on the bunny slope in college, and I still can feel a little bit of strain in it during yoga.

Adam Vitcavage: We’re here to talk about you as a writer, but I have to learn more about scuba. How and why did you get into scuba diving?

Emeline Atwood: That gets right to the core of the book, actually. I started writing this book when I was getting into scuba, so the two things go hand in hand. I have started getting back into scuba again because I think it’s going to be helpful for the book I’m working on now, which is what motivated me. I didn’t think, honestly, that I was ever going to dive again once I stopped. It was something I was doing for a very specific need during that period in my life. I didn’t understand that at the time, but then I was sort of done.

I started diving after college. I was on a fellowship abroad in Australia. The true, honest story, and how it connects to the book, is that I experienced something traumatic. I randomly decided to start scuba diving, and I think I was in a moment where the thought in my head was, I don’t know what to do with my body anymore. I just don’t know what to do. And for some reason, I decided to scuba dive.

Doing that reconnected me to my body in this insane way. I remember being underwater and feeling completely addicted to that sensation, being around animals and in a habitat that was totally different, and thinking, my body can change into anything. I can become anything. That made me reconnect with this sensation of, I don’t actually want to be in a different body just yet. I still want to be in this one. That was very healing for me.

I became really addicted to the sensation of being underwater. It wasn’t even about the animals, which is wild because now it totally is. Back then, it was just about being able to control my entire body with breath and being totally weightless. I followed that for years. I became a divemaster and worked in Thailand, and then I worked as an instructor in Maui. Then I kind of burnt out because in Maui, we got so many tourists over and over again. I was working every single day, and it became very intense. And now here we are.

Adam Vitcavage: Throughout this time period in your life, were you a writer? Did writing come after this? Did writing come before this?

Emeline Atwood: I’ve always considered myself a writer. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dream of publishing a book. Even when I was a kid, I didn’t have any real concept of what that was, but it has always been my vocation.

This sounds overly romanticized, but it’s just true: I can’t process my experience any other way. I write. I’ve always written. The way I write is totally crazy. I’ve never kept a diary. I write very close to my lived experience, but always as a way of daydreaming what could have been or what I would be scared to have happened, without any intention of going in that direction. My journal entries, for example, start with truth and then take me somewhere else, which makes it very hard to trust my memories of things because they’re all completely messed up.

But I’ve always done that. I will always do that. I love putting narrative upon my experience, as entrapping as that can be. College, high school, everything. The fellowship I did after college was because of writing. I went to an MFA when I was 23, so it’s been a pretty consistent thread for me.

Adam Vitcavage: And then A Real Animal is born after Australia, it sounds like, and then after your MFA.

Emeline Atwood: I think I started writing it in Australia because I remember when the first sentence of the book came to me. Actually, I think I started writing it in Thailand. I didn’t think of it as the novel it is today probably until 2023. Three years ago, it became more of the central project I was working on.

Adam Vitcavage: Maybe there’s not much to dive into, but how did it become the central project? How did it morph into that?

Emeline Atwood: The real answer is that in 2023, I was feeling like I was totally disappearing into my day job. It didn’t feel like what I wanted to be doing. I didn’t feel like a writer, and I wasn’t writing. It was that period of my life where I thought, my MFA is done. I work in tech, which felt so out of alignment with who I am. And I was bad at it. It wasn’t even something I was resentfully good at. I just was not doing the right thing. But I needed a job, which remains true to this day.

It was Christmas time, and I was home with my boyfriend’s family. I was just like, fuck it. I’m sending out what I’ve got to agents. Basically what I did is I wrote a query letter for the novel that wasn’t, because I had the seeds of what are now the chapters of the book. I wrote a query letter even though I hadn’t put those pieces together in any meaningful way.

On New Year’s Day, I got a bite from an agent who was interested in reading it. Then I pulled several all-nighters and sent her the book. Within a week or so, I signed with my agent, Mariah, because she wrote me what is still one of the most meaningful, beautiful responses to the book. When she sent me the email, I opened my inbox and could just see the preview, the first sentence, and I felt like I wanted to throw up. I had gone so long without having any faith in myself or my work at all. I immediately forwarded the email to my best friend and had her read it first. Then she talked me through it, and I was able to read the email. I knew I had to sign with Mariah because she’s brilliant.

Adam Vitcavage: I have to dive into this query time period, which I usually do. Walk me through this. You had nothing, or you had things? How many words did you have, not in order, but did you have a novel’s length of stuff?

Emeline Atwood: I probably had about 120 pages of stuff. So not nothing.

Adam Vitcavage: Not nothing, but not a full book.

Emeline Atwood: Not a book, and certainly not what this book is now. But the book came from short stories that I wrote in my MFA, mostly, that were all drawing from the exact same voice, which was Lucy’s voice. Lucy’s voice has always been very clear to me and something I can step into. It’s not my voice at all. Especially when you’re messing with a first-person character who is close to your age, people can confuse that. Thank God her voice is not my voice, because I think some people find her really unlikable and frustrating.

I was like, okay, these are all Lucy stories. I’ll put them in chronological order and see the evolution that happens there. The book, to me, is informed by a more poetic logic. The things that connect the stories and allow me the privilege of skipping over time are patterns of repetitive images and evolution over the course of the structure. I think the ending, for people who appreciate it, can be satisfying symbolically because of the poetic logic informing what comes next in the story.

It wasn’t originally plot-driven. That being said, the book that exists today definitely has a plot. It is chaotic, but things have consequences and lead to other things. That emerged as I was working on it more. But I had the spine and the nerves of the book.

Under pressure, I hate my writing process so much, but one of the worst parts of it is that I will write when I’m asleep if I need to. That sounds crazy, but I can, under pressure, sacrifice multiple nights of sleep to get stuff done. I think that’s what I fell into in that moment. I try not to do that as much as I can because it’s horrible.

Adam Vitcavage: So Mariah Spence, your agent, says send me something. Do you send her a full book, or do you just send her the 120 pages?

Emeline Atwood: Yeah.

Adam Vitcavage: People are always like, don’t send books when they’re not ready. But you kind of did it, and it worked.

Emeline Atwood: I disagree with that advice. I got it in my MFA, and I’ve heard others say it.

In the same way that I believe everybody has their own process, and you can take tips from other people and try on other people’s processes and see what works, ultimately you have your process. Your job is to figure out what that is and create the conditions in your life that allow you to do that. If you try to change your process too much, you’re going to end up writing when you shouldn’t be and then not writing when writing is actually coming to you.

I think querying is the same way. There are people who might never be ready to send out a book that probably should. I can think of some friends I’ve thought this with. With querying, the work can’t actually dictate too much whether or not it’s ready to be sent out. But I’m speaking from my own experience.

You need to pay attention to the fact that you’re on the precipice of going from private to public. At that moment, it’s not entirely about the work anymore. It’s hard to have a sense in your own brain of whether your work is ready when it’s only been a private dialogue you’ve been having with it. You just don’t know. You’ll start going crazy if you’re trying to figure out whether it’s ready or not.

I think it’s more about whether you’ve hit a big plateau. In 2023, I had hit that plateau. I was thinking, I am sinking into my life in a way that doesn’t feel right, and I need to do something that is going to bring me back into my faith in myself, or just back onto the path of desiring recognition for my writing.

You can have writing as a vocation without chasing the publishing world at all. But I had taken this book as far as I could because I had completely flatlined on it. The work could keep going, clearly, because it did. But I couldn’t keep going on it anymore. That meant it was probably time to send it out. But it’s going to be different for everybody.

Adam Vitcavage: What did working on it after you had an agent look like?

Emeline Atwood: Mariah and her assistant, Mackenzie, who is incredible and such a brilliant support, both worked with me. Mariah, I hope she doesn’t mind me saying this, signed me literally when she was going into the labor room to have her first kid. So that was wild.

I worked with Mackenzie during Mariah’s maternity leave on a few chapters. We signed in mid-January, and we went on submission, I think, at the end of April. It was pretty quick.

Then Kendall, my editor, and I worked on the book a lot. The revision process of this book was unlike anything I’ve ever done, and it taught me so much. I had never gone through the cycles of editing that way. I don’t know how you really can unless you work with an editor so deeply. That was a crazy experience, and that was a year.

Adam Vitcavage: And now it’s coming out. Kendall at Catapult is one of my favorite editors. I think I’ve featured countless books Kendall Story has done. What was that like? This is the part of the podcast I love. I love talking about editing because I don’t understand it.

Emeline Atwood: I didn’t understand it at all. No workshop could have prepared me for the level of attention and depth of understanding that an editor like Kendall gives you. Kendall is the best editor in the entire world.

She line edits, basically, which isn’t something that people do anymore and is something every writer is just craving. You can’t take that for granted, the fact that somebody would give your work that kind of attention. She does that for everybody. That’s just the way she edits.

I think her background in translation informs it, too. She’s very attentive to sound and image on the level of the line. I remember getting on a phone call with her about one word in a sentence. I wanted the word to be “rainbow,” and she wanted it to be “streak,” and she was right. I’m really glad she convinced me, but that was the level of attention she was giving the sentences.

She would notice late into editing if I tried to sneak in and cut a couple words. Nothing gets by her. She’s reading so carefully, which makes me feel very intimately connected to her, but also like this book belongs to her too, very much. That is really important for me and my stability going into this process. It doesn’t feel as much like I’m just being thrown to the wolves. It does feel like that also at night when I’m trying to fall asleep, but I know they’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this too.

Adam Vitcavage: I love the team at Catapult. A lot of my favorite books have come out of that imprint, including A Real Animal.

Earlier, you mentioned this went from scenes that were vibey and informed by poetic recurrences, and then a chaotic plot comes through. When was that transition? Was it the editing process where you found what A Real Animal becomes?

Emeline Atwood: One moment that comes to mind is that one of the editors we submitted to had this idea. One of their pieces of editorial feedback was that they wanted to see the leopard transformation come back and maybe have there be a happy ending between Lucy and Liam.

First of all, right now, I’ve read the ending and I think it’s very sad. I’m like, oh, this book is really fucking depressing. But there were moments in writing it where I did not read it that way. I read the ending as very hopeful. And why does Lucy need to end up with Liam? Is that the only version of a happy ending for her? Maybe that is not her happy ending at all.

That feedback pushed me in the same way that, in a fiction workshop, feedback can clarify what your project is. I think there were many years when I was very susceptible to taking all feedback and thinking that anything anybody had to say about my work was right and more right than my own thoughts. It is helpful to have an incredible level of humility when it comes to receiving feedback, just to be able to be edited, but that is not always the way to approach it.

The point of that feedback was that I realized, oh no, this book isn’t about a girl who turns into a leopard. That would be a much more plot-oriented path. This book is about multiple transformations happening. It is very important to me that the transformations and the traumas in the book are somewhat equally weighted, and that it’s hard to pick the thing that explains the other thing.

In that way, I knew the book had to honor its poetic logic. Plot needed to emerge from repetition and evolution, bringing things back that had already happened but in a new way, and letting that lead to Lucy’s next decision.

With this book, it was very important to write from a very embodied place. I wanted it to be visceral, even if the prose isn’t graphic per se. I wanted it to be felt in the body, which meant I had to write it very much in my own body. If I was ever in a moment of not knowing what was going to happen, I would literally play make-believe. I would climb into a tree or whatever I needed to do to put myself in the scene.

Adam Vitcavage: I think A Real Animal hits all the books I want to read. I jokingly, but I guess very seriously, say that the books I want to read are at the intersection of sad, weird, and horny.

Emeline Atwood: Hell yeah.

Adam Vitcavage: If that gives you insight into why A Real Animal works for me. I also think A Real Animal’s cover is one of my top five favorite book covers of all time. It is perfect. Can you talk about the process for this?

Emeline Atwood: Really, that was Catapult’s team. I remember being very stunned by it. They sent two versions of a cover. They sent one that was very different, and then they sent this one a few months later. With this one, immediately, everybody was like, this is the one. I was also like, yes, this is the one.

Then two days later, I felt panic. What you’re saying is giving me some new insight into that. Maybe it’s because it was just so close. It took me up until January of last year to accept what this book is about and to stop trying to hide what it’s about.

The cover had been a little more vagina-forward at first. They toned that back. A couple days later, I was like, oh my God. This book is about sex and rape, and I can’t have this. Now I’m over the moon in love with the cover. It feels like somebody else’s gift of artistry to this book. I could never have come up with that or designed anything close to that. That’s not how I think or create at all. I’m just blown away that somebody was able to put that image to the book.

Adam Vitcavage: I think the whole package, from the writing to the cover, is fantastic. You brought your mom up earlier. With something that is so close to home, in your body and your soul, how does it feel to have family read it? Your mom especially, since you said you gave her a galley. Do you worry about that?

Emeline Atwood: Oh my God, this was a huge thing. Now all my anxieties are about critical reception of the book, but the biggest thing for basically my entire life was family reading my work.

I’m a pretty private writer, to be honest. I think about this in the MFA, where being silent in a workshop really works for me because the guise of privacy is so important. I want to be very separate from the work, whatever that means, but as much as possible.

If I have heard my book brought up not to my face, like if I overhear it, and people don’t say my name, it doesn’t matter what they say about the book. I feel like, oh, interesting. When my name is brought into it, I get so stressed. That’s obviously something I’m going to need to work on because that’s not sustainable.

To that point, I have some family members who cannot separate me from the work. They just cannot. This book is very difficult for that, which I understand is a challenge. And then other family members, like my mom, my dad, and my sister, thank God, are really good at that and gracious about it. I think that’s because they are readers of fiction specifically.

That means a lot to me because this is the way I’m always going to write. There is this idea that debut novelists, in particular, write really close to their life. But the thing that has always informed the way I write is literally the Virginia Woolf idea of moments of being. What in my life is pricking me? I don’t think of imagination in terms of distance or proximity to the perceived reality. I think of it as: how deeply are you embodying the imagined thing? It doesn’t matter how close it is to what happened or what didn’t. Are you actually putting yourself in something that wasn’t there?

When I was in middle school, my diary entries were what I wished had happened with my crush after recess that day, as opposed to what actually did happen. Those were my sister’s diary entries. Every time I tried to record my actual life, I got very bored. So I wanted to record the lies.

Right now, I’m most scared of my fiance’s family reading it, and I haven’t gotten ahead of that. I wish I had just bitten the bullet, sent them a copy, and had them read it before this excruciatingly vulnerable time. But my uncles on my mom’s side have read the book. I was worried about them reading it, but I got that out of the way. Most people I was worried about reading it have read it, besides my fiance’s family.

Adam Vitcavage: I think it’s always fascinating, being able to separate the writer from the work. I just interviewed Sonia Feldman, who wrote Girls, Girls, which comes out soon, and it’s a first-person narrative. She’s like, this is not me. Her opinions are not mine. That should be easy to understand, but it’s fascinating that people cannot understand that with first-person narratives.

Emeline Atwood: Dreadfully, I think about this because two characters in the book are very close to people in my life. I don’t think of Lucy as me. I’ve written narrators who are very close to me, and I have to step into an imagined place to get to Lucy. But Liam is very similar to my fiance, Chris, and Patty is very similar to my sister Libby, or Liv, I guess, is what everybody else calls her.

I’m dealing with that because my sister has always been a muse for me. She sees the world in such a different way than me and says things that I could never make up on my own, things that I have to write down and don’t want to change once I’ve written them down. I’ve never thought that how much somebody inspires me is equivalent in any way to how much I love them. I love people deeply who just don’t inspire me, which I think is fine.

I cannot believe I’m marrying a man who is like my sister in that way. Chris says and sees things. Yesterday, he was on the porch and came in and said, “Three wrens just flew out of our fern.” I thought, that’s such a beautiful way of saying that, and I love that you just exclaimed about three wrens. I think that’s going to be an interesting predicament for us, that he just does that for me. I wasn’t expecting to marry a man like that.

Adam Vitcavage: Speaking of inspiration, and me awkwardly transitioning to the final question, what books have been inspiring you lately?

Emeline Atwood: The last book I read was Into Being by Lily Dunn. She wrote Sins of My Father, and now I’m reading Into Being. I’m actually reading a lot of memoirs right now because I think I’m a little preoccupied with where this boundary is. The minute something is not honoring what you own as your truth, I believe it is fiction. Autobiographical fiction, let’s just get rid of that term. It’s either fiction or memoir or biography.

I just read Natasha Trethewey’s memoir, Memorial Drive, which absolutely knocked me out. Then I’ve returned to Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. I think Didion has been in my mind because of that essay on keeping a notebook.

I read Beum and Shapiro’s The Prosody Handbook, about poetic versification. I’ve been taking a lot of comfort in craft books, like Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences.

I read my friend Avygal Sharp’s Offseason, which I really enjoyed. I’m seeing her tonight. She’s reading in Austin, which I’m very excited about. And I read, for the first time ever, Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the first one, because Kendall recommended it to me. She was right to recommend it because, of course, I tore through that.

“I don’t have any interest in writing.”

I said that countless times at events and on the podcast whenever a writer asked me what I was working on.

Then messaged me on Instagram about her forthcoming essay anthology, Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection.

That DM turned into my debut essay called “You and I Were Roommates Once” — an ode to my sister and the years we were roommates in Phoenix after she got divorced and I was a ball of depression and anxiety.

You can purchase the anthology, which features essays and interviews with , , , and so many other bangers.

A few months later, we crossed paths again when she was part of the Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Publicity Cohort (still with a selfie headshot).

It was years later when she finally published her debut short story collection, Company, and was a guest on the podcast. Her book eventually landed on the Best Debut Books of 2023. She also won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Now, she’s back with a 400-page family saga debut novel. The Great Wherever has been one of my most anticipated novels for almost a year now and has been one of the buzziest books of the year.

It’s been such an honor to see how Shannon’s career has blossomed, and I have long-admired her literary citizenship.

On a personal note, earlier this year, I started writing fiction for the first time ever, and she was my first ever workshop instructor after I applied for the One Story Advanced Fiction Workshop. (Note: you can apply for the workshop, this time led by Omer Friedlander, here).

Simply put, her eye for what makes fiction dazzle is unparalleled.

Shannon joined the podcast (listen here or here), where we talked about drafting in a linear path, not planning on writing a 400-page behemoth, and how short stories and novels are different. You can read the conversation below.

Apple | Spotify

Adam Vitcavage: Hey, Shannon, it’s been a while. Who are you outside of being the author of Company and The Great Wherever?

Shannon Sanders: Well, I guess first and foremost, I am a busy mom of three kids. And I also work by day for a financial regulator. So I’m a working mom of three kids. You know this, Adam, I am also occasionally a teacher of fiction workshops, which hopefully it’s okay to mention that you and I got to interact in one of those recently. And I am also trying my best to be a better, generally literary citizen right now. So I’m trying to get back to my former life of reading and interacting with writers and being part of that community as best I can.

Adam Vitcavage: I’m glad you brought up the literary citizenship. I’ll follow up with that because that was one of my major questions. But yes, the One Story workshop that I just finished taking with you the day we’re recording this, I just put out on the newsletter, like in my little intro, I talked about it and I made sure people pre-ordered your book because that’s the magic of preordering. we’ll get to teaching and workshops because now that I have gone through one, I’ll follow up with that. But you mentioned, yes, you work full time. You have three children and a real life outside of writing. No MFA. Did you do the MFA path at all?

Shannon Sanders: I did not get an MFA.

Adam Vitcavage: And so one of my major questions for you is, you with Company, your debut short story collection, and now your debut novel Company specifically like did very well. And I’m going to dive into specifics about that. But I, you, I view you as a writer who is very talented and you’re in the literary community, but I also feel you’re not and maybe I’m wrong, not like chasing you’re not a rat chasing the cheese, a lot of other writers, which is not a bad thing. But you, I feel just do it. And now you have a novel coming out. How do you balance everything and not in a mom way in a, in a not being too focused on being a Writer with a capital W on social media all the time. you’re doing other things on social media, I see.

Shannon Sanders: I first of all, I think all of us are chasing the cheese.

Adam Vitcavage: sure, sure, sure.

Shannon Sanders: To some extent for sure. But I just my path in was a little bit different. And so I already had all these other things going on. By the time I finally figured my way into the world of writing and authorship and being part of that literary community that I’m going to mention, I’m sure so many times. But, I am really interested in trying to be a multifaceted person. Writing is really important to me, but I also know that people want to see the writer as a complete person, and that’s how they get interested in their work, I think. So if I were just constantly pushing my writer endeavors, I don’t know that I would have as rich a life on social media as I do. Which is kind of a sad thing to be excited about having, but yeah.

Adam Vitcavage: No, I think especially nowadays with working people and parents, I’m assuming it’s the internet is an actual like pillar of our life now in a way that it wasn’t like 20 years ago. And I think communicating through the internet. Like is I talk about this a lot with writers. It’s just vital. it is how if you’re not in New York or LA or San Francisco, Chicago, you’re in D.C., a big city. I’m in Denver, a big city. But and they have a lot of writers, but, publishing isn’t in those cities necessarily.

Shannon Sanders: For sure. it’s it’s worth saying that I didn’t join at the time Twitter until the day that I found out I had won the PEN/Dau Prize. And at that moment, I was kind of oh, I should probably try to tell people that this happened. And that was my impetus for getting onto social media in a different way, because I had been sort of, I grew up with social media, more or less stuff started debuting when I was like in high school and college. But that’s really when I decided I was going to dip a toe in and then it became you just said, so vital to knowing what was going on, feeling like other writers were accessible, which becomes later so important in the publishing journey, you really, really need to have people in your corner and feel you can access information that becomes so important.

Adam Vitcavage: And we talked previously, going back to the PEN/Dau Prize, we talked for Company on the podcast and I’ve interacted with you numerous times throughout the years, but I do want to go back to that time, 2020, the pandemic is happening. We don’t have to talk about the pandemic, but I do encounter you because of the PEN/Dau Prize. That’s my favorite anthology every year. I love reading it. I try to interview the writers when I could remember to do it. And you were one of the 7 in 2020 who did a little round table for me. And I’m looking at it right now on Debutiful site and like your headshots, a selfie and you didn’t have Twitter and what did you know about the writing world then? what did or didn’t you know in 2020?

Shannon Sanders: So little when you remind me that my headshot was a selfie at the time. And I know the one it, I was so nice to and just green. And I think that, I don’t want to, knock that person at all. And I don’t want to knock anybody who’s in that stage because it’s such a necessary stage that you have to go through. I was at that same time. I had won the pen prize by that point, but I was still in the phase where I was sending all of my work to basically every journal I could think of. And just collecting a gigantic pile of rejections. My aim wasn’t very good. I didn’t have like as great a sense of what markets were publishing, what kind of stuff. I didn’t realize how ultimately easy it was to make friends with other writers or how much how much I would need to do that. There was just a lot that I really didn’t know at that time, but I don’t think that there is a shortcut to finding that out because even as I’m saying this, I’m aware that there are people, I’m sure who will hear this and think, well, you just think that that was easy because you have done it already. But it really is. you, you really start out not understanding and having like sort of these misconceptions about how the whole publishing game works. And I think it’s easy to get disgruntled about that, but I’m really glad that I, that I stuck with it and tried my best to figure it out.

Adam Vitcavage: And then, and then I know we’ve, you’ve talked about this three years ago with Company, but I think now there’s time removed and I, and I am excited about this. 2020 is that prize best is a best debut short story for short story kind of puts you on the literary landscape, which whatever that means, three years later, you publish Company with Graywolf, small or not small, a mighty independent press. And what was briefly that journey, like those three years, the growing pains and what, what 2020? Shannon didn’t know what did 2023 Shannon figure out?

Shannon Sanders: Well, first of all, I mentioned, I figured out a little bit better how to research publishing markets. I read so many journals and so many short stories and I started to find out kind of who my work was in conversation with, whose work my work was in conversation with which because I don’t have an MFA, I think that was a really important phase for me because you have to know what is happening in contemporary writing. My agent, I know we talked about this a few years ago, but my agent found me, which was really lucky for me because I got, I got a little bit of a pass on the whole querying and collecting again, a million rejections from agents stage. I did do a little bit of that, but I ultimately got to sign with the person who first approached me, which was wonderful.

Adam Vitcavage:

Shannon Sanders: And she has been wonderful this whole time. And then just in terms of working with Graywolf, first getting my book acquired by Graywolf and sort of getting a, an introduction to what publishing is like. I feel I really got so lucky because Graywolf is mighty. They are so warm and friendly and nurturing. It was, in so many ways, such an ideal debut experience because of how curated their list is and how much they really care about making sure that their writers are are taken care of. So it was, it was really wonderful. I’m so glad that I got to work with them.

Adam Vitcavage: Remind me who I don’t I don’t think I know who your agent is. Can you share?

Shannon Sanders: Her name is Reiko Davis, and she’s with DeFiore and Company.

Adam Vitcavage: Oh. Very cool. I was just thinking about. I always think about agents now, and I’ve said this on the pod and in other interviews where, when I was just a not just a bookseller, when I was a bookseller years ago, I cared about who was the blurb on the front, and then I learned, oh, that’s because that was their MFA professor, right? And excuse me. And then I cared about what imprint it was on then what editor. And now I’m really paying attention to what agents are repping writers. And that goes along with, how I discovered debuts. it’s a learning process. It’s I’ve been doing this exclusively for eight years, almost. Yeah, eight years I think. And it’s it’s just similar to what you were saying about you have to learn the industry. If you haven’t gone through an MFA or if you have, they don’t teach you everything.

Shannon Sanders: I hear people saying a lot that a lot of the benefit of getting an MFA for the most part, unless you go to a particularly prestigious school, is the networking and having people who you can call on later when things that arise. the blurbs and the conversation partners and all that stuff.

Adam Vitcavage: And it’s so, it’s so fascinating. The whole the sausage we’ll, we’ll pass, pass that with this. But because I want to talk about Company after the fact, I talk to you officially before publication. That’s how I, my interviews work. Well, how was Company from pub day onward? it. I said in your in your bio at the top of the hour Los Angeles book prize, other prizes, starred reviews. Did you expect it? No, I know you’re gonna say no and that’s fine, but everyone wants it, but how? how did Company shape your career, I guess?

Shannon Sanders: Well, you said it did, it won the LA times book prizes. First fiction award, the Art Seidenbaum award, which was very unexpected. I have to, I do have to say that because it’s true. And it got shortlisted for a couple of other prizes. I actually found out like two months ago. The book’s been out now for three and a half years, I think, or two and a half years I guess. But I just found out that it won the top prize at Towson University for 2025, which is super cool. And I’m going to, I think, get to go and talk to that school. I got a chance to go and talk to English departments at a few different creative writing programs, which was super cool as well. I got to go back to my alma mater, Spelman College, and talk to the creative writing students. And then I got to have a bunch of really fun events. I got to go to Baltimore and New York. I got to go to San Francisco for the paperback. And I really, especially for an independent publisher, the writer doesn’t get a lot of insight into how the book is doing, quote unquote, or have such a sense of what the sales are like or anything that. But I got to experience lots of interacting with readers about it. And that was the most rewarding thing for sure. because of course, it’s just it’s so writing is lonely. Publishing is, is lonely and sometimes even feels like adversarial. But talking to people who have read your work and understood it in in their ways is really special.

Adam Vitcavage:

Shannon Sanders: A lot of book clubs, which I love doing, by the way. So if, if you’re listening to this, invite me to your book club.

Adam Vitcavage: I think that’s like really the secret I was just doing, I do on the side every now and then like consulting work with debuts who just have questions and like want guidance. And her book is a literary upmarket. It’s definitely not this isn’t a term, it’s book club. I think I think it’ll land with book clubs. And just contact every bookstore and offer to be like their book club pick. And then that’s better than doing events almost because it’s yeah, guaranteed sales ish, but also it’s curated and you don’t have to like be on necessarily. It’s still, it’s still being on. But yeah. and you had an agent and I think, at the time and even now, and I just named an episode this, but did you have a novel was always the question, do you have a novel? You have a great short story collection, But do you have a novel? Did you have The Great Wherever then?

Shannon Sanders: Was it the classic question? I at the time, okay. Because I was debuting with a short story collection. And that is the main thing that that a lot of people throughout the industry want to know the answer to. So I’ll start by saying that both Reiko, my agent, and Graywolf were extremely on the same page with me about being satisfied with the collection. So Reiko, as an agent, she was very encouraging about I think I can sell this where I know that some agents will say, I’m not even going to try to sell this if you don’t have a novel to pair with it. Same thing with Graywolf. Graywolf never even asked me if I was working on a novel. But other publishers did. And so Company went to auction and I did have an offer that would have been a two book deal for both Company and then also the subsequent novel to pop that book. To get into that position, I had to have first an excerpt of a novel. So I had to write 50 pages of The Great Wherever or the book that would become The Great Wherever before we took Company out on submission. And I did do that. This was this would have been like late 2020 into early 2021. And I at that time, I was, I had a toddler, I was expecting twins who were coming in early 2021. And it was just a little bit of a stressful time. And so I knew that even if we did sell both books, I was not going to be able to say for sure, I’m going to deliver a novel on X timeline, you know? And so I just really, really wanted for that reason and other reasons that I’ll also mention. I really wanted to make sure that we were focused on the short story collection that was already written because I just I wasn’t sure if I was ready to finish the novel that was in the works. But the other thing is that, of course, I really believe in short stories, and I really wanted to find a readership for that. That wasn’t just like waiting for me to also produce a novel. But what I had at that time was 50 pages that became basically like chapters one and two of the novel that’s coming out in July. And they have changed very little from then to now. So I, even though it felt a crunched it was sort of a little bit of a stressful production, having to get those, those chapters in order for that timeline just to get things out into submissions. I feel it was, I am glad that it happened. I guess I’ll say it that way because I don’t know what otherwise would have motivated me to get started on the novel that I had the idea for at that time.

Adam Vitcavage: Oh, I’m fascinated by this. 50 crunched pages or on a, on a crunch timeline relatively unchanged. I I, what does that mean exactly? Because I feel people hear that and they’re how is that possible?

Shannon Sanders: well, definitely it doesn’t look the exact same as it did at that time. But I, and I at that, in that period before I had my second and third children, I was kind of a sprinter as a runner, as a sprinter, as a writer. And so that means that I would I would pick sessions where I could sit for hours at a time. And so that might be late at night after my son went to bed, or it might be on a weekend if I could get away for, for a little while. And I would just write, write, write, write, write and try to get like as much of the draft banged out as I could. And so I had, I probably had, 25 pages that I wrote in 1 or 2 sittings. Oh, wow. And then another 25 that I added maybe I remember doing an all nighter because I had a meeting with an editor that I wanted to talk to about it. And just kind of like some crazy, slightly, slightly absurd things had to happen for me to get that yeah, those two chapters done. But the benefit of writing in that way is that you stay in scene really well, and you don’t lose kind of the momentum or the thread or the voice. And so the scene that you end up writing, for me at least, it felt it was really cohesive. And that really worked, I think. And so it became a chapter that worked almost as it was, and we took it out on submission. And a lot of the editors that we talked to about it really liked and praised that chapter, which was nice. So even though a lot of things changed from draft one of the book to draft whatever we ended up on.

Adam Vitcavage:

Shannon Sanders: That is one thing that did not change a lot. Was that beginning?

Adam Vitcavage: Wow. And so during, so you go with gray wolf and then you mentioned you might have there was other reasons that you kind of went with them.

Shannon Sanders: The other reason was the focus on the short story itself.

Adam Vitcavage: Okay. Okay.

Shannon Sanders: So that was one thing. And then the other is that Yuka Igarashi, who was my editor at both for the pen prize and then also for Company. She was just fantastic. I knew she was on the same page with me about a lot of stuff, so I was happy to work there.

Adam Vitcavage: for sure. I think Graywolf, I’ve heard this before. I just interviewed M. Lin, who has the book, The Memory Museum. She was also a pen door prize winner after you a few years, I think. But, it’s I think Graywolf is paying attention to, short story collections, short story writers and art and are happy to foster that talent as opposed to needing a novel. So that’s always good to hear that there’s publishers out there even to this day. While you’re promoting Company, doing book clubs, traveling, winning prizes, how is Great Wherever unfolding, are you able to sprint on certain days while you’re while you’re doing the Company time.

Shannon Sanders: You know what, book promotion really does kind of suck up a lot of your creative attention. there’s such different things. Writing a book is so unlike promoting a book, but it feels you’re doing something. So while promoting the book, I gave myself a lot of passes to not be working on the next thing, even though I kind of regret that now, I wish I had started working on the next thing while I was promoting that book, and then I wish I were working on the next thing right now while promoting The Great Wherever. But what kind of happened next was I had those 50 pages. So I had something done. I had a good starting point. And I felt I knew what I was going to be able to do next. And then after the babies were born, eventually, like six months later, I started, I, they were sleeping through the night sometimes and I started to write at nights. And so then my process became more about catch as catch can. Whenever I had some energy and some time I would try to chisel out something. And I got through about a quarter of the draft that way and then right around like 2023 at some point. So shortly before Company was published, I hit this wall in the book because the novel is, it has a contemporary there is an, a story that’s in contemporary times, but then there’s also a major historical section. And it kind of goes back and forth between the two. And when I got to the first historical voyage, I got very overwhelmed and I felt I had all this research I needed to do, and I just wasn’t sure about some of the choices. And I remember one day in like summer 23 being I’m gonna have to come back to this later and setting it aside and then just not picking it up again for a year. And I. That was really discouraging and hard.

Adam Vitcavage: Not picking up The Great Wherever at all or the historical sections.

Shannon Sanders: At all.

Adam Vitcavage: Like wow, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shannon Sanders: Because I typically try to be a linear writer. I don’t like to hop around. I get confused. Sure. So and I just feel it kind of, I lose a little bit of the cohesiveness of whatever the project is if I’m moving around in time. So I set it aside for it had to be like ten months, if not a year. And I did little bits of research that they didn’t feel like research because I wasn’t like going to the library or anything. But I was just kind of like googling things that were relevant and looking into, I wanted to find out more about what could be some authentic feeling details about a small black town in the 30s in western Tennessee. And I did some research about that. I talked to my grandmother who grew up in that in that environment, in that time period. I got some good fun details from her. I did like little bits of research that were kind of just piecemeal and slowly I started to feel I had a picture of what I wanted to work on. And one day I just kind of picked it back up and I was, I got some wine and I was just okay, you’re just going to get through this chapter. And then if it doesn’t work, you can stop and work on something else. And lo and behold, I got through that chapter. And the fun thing, I know you probably hear this from a lot of writers, but the thing that you spend six hours reading about on Wikipedia or, in a, in a journal or whatever ends up becoming a half of a sentence in your draft. And I think it does feel more authentic because of the research you did, but it is just, it feels you spent so much time for such a small little nut. But it’s. Yeah, it’s worth it.

Adam Vitcavage: Before I interrupted just about how you stopped, you were kind of saying it felt bad. I think you were going there what is it about not writing? Because I’m in the middle of spoiler, I’m finally writing a novel. I don’t know, we’ll see. And I haven’t written since February. It’s now May 22nd. And but I, a writer, told me, oh, you are writing because you’re thinking about it. and so, but how does it feel to put a project on hold? Or how did it feel?

Shannon Sanders: It’s so frustrating. I think it probably if you are, I think you have to give yourself permission to do it. Because of course, we have to take care of ourselves. We have to take care of our, our minds and our, our creativity really is tied to how rested we are and things that. And so for example, when I had very young babies, I had to give myself permission. this is just not going to happen for a little while, you know? But I find it frustrating because I love writing and I really, if I have a project that’s in the works, I really want to see it through to the end. And if I’m excited about characters or about a storyline, I really want to spend time with the characters, with the storyline. I also don’t like forgetting things, so I hate when I have what feels a good idea. And then I set it aside even for a day or two, and then I come back and I’m not as excited about whatever I come up with as I was about the previous idea. and just for all those reasons. And then the other thing is that I have written this book now and I have other book ideas and I kept saying to myself, okay, you have to get through this because you’ve got to pave the way to start working on one of these other things that you’re excited about. So life is just I know a lot of people who have set aside their writing for a long time and who maybe feel regret about that. And I just really wanted to be able to say that I got through this.

Adam Vitcavage: And then going from short stories to a novel. As someone without an MFA and again, not that MFA teach you everything because I’ve heard of MFA writers from the cream-of-the-crop schools or whatever. See, I didn’t know what I was doing, but how did you teach yourself or what didn’t you know? Or what did you know that was actually wrong? What was the process of, of becoming a novelist?

Shannon Sanders: It’s such a, it’s such an act of hubris and ego, I think to believe that you can do that. There’s no reason to think that you can write a novel.. For sure. Short story writing. Even though I don’t have an MFA, it does feel like something that you can be taught because there are so many classes and workshops are structured around the concept of the short story. And so even if you go in feeling you don’t have formal training it would be hard to say that we have not all read a lot of short stories that have instructed us in some way. And really the same thing is true with novels. I love to read novels and one thing that has become clearer and clearer to me over time, especially as I read more contemporary stuff, is that there is not there are trends for sure. And there are types of books that are easier for readers to access than others. And there are types of books that people find too challenging to be worth it and so on, but there are not really like hard and fast rules about what you can and can’t do. And that is very freeing to figure out, I think, because as long as the reader is having a good time, they will keep turning pages, even if it doesn’t match up with some idea of what a novel is supposed to look like.

Adam Vitcavage: So yeah. No, it’s so I think I read a lot. And now like attempting to write and I talked to you about this a little bit, but it’s I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just like kind of know, oh, this moment felt good in this book. And I’m not trying to replicate it, but I have permission to do something similar to it because yeah, others have done it.

Shannon Sanders: You can do anything you want. It’s it’s yeah. one thing that’s really different about novel writing, though, from short story writing, is that with short stories, you do have the that constant feedback loop because you can spend some time writing the short story, you can take it to a workshop, you can get opinions about it. You just did this with a novel excerpt. You can do that with a piece of a novel too, if you’re interested. With a short story, you can then send it out. You can get rejections to wallpaper your house with. You can you can show it to a friend or whatever and have them tell you what they think about it, and you just feel you’re still in conversation with the world while you’re in the short story mode. And you can do that, you can like lather, rinse, repeat that many times, you can write a bunch of short stories in the time that it would take to write one novel. Whereas with a novel, I had to train myself to do all of my work with no feedback at all.

Adam Vitcavage: So no writing group or anything. It’s just you doing it. Wow.

Shannon Sanders: I didn’t show it to anybody. Partly I didn’t, I didn’t show it to anybody until I was close to actually, I think I was at the end before I showed it to my agent. And then after that, to one friend who I knew would be generous about it. And a lot of that is because I didn’t want to get discouraged. I didn’t want somebody to say, I’m not understanding what’s going on here because I felt I had such a tenuous. Ability to even keep working on it. Just because of all the other demands on my time and stuff. So I, that I just felt I had to just keep plugging away to make sure that it happened. And then I would take the plunge and let somebody see it. I don’t really recommend that, though.

Adam Vitcavage: I think that would kill me. I sent, I sent a few writers, including you a thousand words just to be does this have something? And then I remember I, there was another writer who I like. I was really active when I was writing. I wrote 19,000 words and which is the most I’ve ever written in a month and a half. And I haven’t written since. But a writer was don’t send it to people until you know what it is. no, I know what it is. I just don’t know how to write. So I want people reading every 5000 words. I think at this point.

Shannon Sanders: No listeners. Great, by the way. So get excited about that.

Adam Vitcavage: Oh thank you. Thank you. Well it’s yeah off mic. I’ll talk to you about my stresses. But so great. Wherever in our One Story workshop which again, I’ll just plug real quick if you’re listening, any Shannon Sanders class take and then any One Story class go find, I think it was brilliant. Shannon, you’re a brilliant instructor and so thank you. You, you jokingly and I, and I, you just mentioned it’s 400 plus pages, so be ready. Did you know it was gonna be 400 plus pages or like close to, I don’t know the exact number right now, but yeah.

Shannon Sanders: It is, it comes in at like 400 pages. So I said, I wrote that first big section before I took my year long hiatus. That was all set in present day. And I just sort of assumed the whole book would be in present day for most of the process of writing that part. And, that meme where it’s okay, I’m going to wake up today. [question mark, question mark, question mark] It’s over for everybody. or whatever. the thing where something is going to happen to get us to the grand finale. And I just had no idea what that was for, the entirety of the first section of writing. And then once I figured out that the story was actually primarily in the past, in the history that went leading up to the present day story, oh gosh, thank God I’m writing a novel because there’s a lot more I have to do here to get us back to where I need to be. And that’s, that’s the gift and the curse of, of working in the novel form is that you have so much space that technically you can include so many things. The question becomes what is actually worth including? But I had no concept that it was going to be so long. And then we’ll probably talk about this in a little bit, but not every publisher wants to publish a 400.

Adam Vitcavage: Oh, yeah yeah. Oh, yeah. I’m excited to get to once it’s ready and your agent sees it. We’ll get there because that’s part of the beautiful journey. You mentioned linear and then right now, right then you kind of mentioned, oh, you had a big finale in mind. you knew, did you know the ending that you were writing towards?

Shannon Sanders: I always know what the ending is when I’m writing anything. That’s usually the one thing I know because then I can run toward it.

Adam Vitcavage: And one thing I’m fascinated and I think that stresses me out is throwing things away that you’ve written how much you mentioned at the top, how many drafts now, but yeah, how much do you think you deleted throughout the journey?

Shannon Sanders: Nothing willingly, only because my editor said I had to, I almost never I usually draft in a straight line. So I don’t write it down unless I’m pretty sure it belongs in the book. And then thank God for both agents and editors who who are there to tell you no, no, doofus this does not belong in there. So I didn’t delete anything of my own accord.

Adam Vitcavage: Sure.

Shannon Sanders: My editor very brilliantly told me some stuff needed to come out for sure. One great thing was that she was, she said, I am excited for this to be a big book. Like as in.

Adam Vitcavage: Big.

Shannon Sanders: You know?.

Adam Vitcavage: For sure. So pre-Company you get you get 50 pages time off. You go back to it’s 400 ish pages. Your agent sees it. Is she. what, where do we go from here? because you didn’t do a two book deal. You chose not to. Years ago. What do you do? You and her edit it a little bit. what does that relationship look like?

Shannon Sanders: Reiko is a she’s a really, really smart reader. And she’s a really generous reader. And I’m so happy to have her because again, I’m not plugged into the New York or the MFA world.

Adam Vitcavage:

Shannon Sanders: She is, for the most part, my first set of eyes. Who knows what they’re talking about. She is not super editorial. She will raise big picture questions and she might throw in, she might put a couple of tweaks in that she thinks are going to make it more serviceable for submissions. But she did not do a major line edit or anything that. Cool. She did make some suggestions that took me, I would say a few months to resolve. So I spent after I got it to her, which I think was in probably like spring of 2024. She gave me kind of the summer to work on it or technically she said, get this back to me whenever you want to, but we she understands that it’s always better for me to have something that feels a deadline because otherwise everything else is going to come. Come crashing in on me. And she, we just did like maybe two passes, I think 1 or 2. And then we decided it was ready to take on submission and she was okay with the length. We knew that there was a chance also that it was going to get longer. Because actually, I think before we took it to Holt, it was like 350 pages or something that. It got longer through working with Holt. But yeah, she had a really smart submission list for it. Of course she was, she was very encouraging about trying to have it find the best possible home. That’s always her, her goal and stuff. And so yeah.

Adam Vitcavage: Big novel that was getting bigger. She had a smart list. How and why did you find Holt was the right home for it?

Shannon Sanders: It ended up getting preempted by Holt, but we considered a few different paths, and the thing that finally drew me to Holt was, again, you can just I just feel you can really tell when it’s in front of the editor who has the vision that it’s the closest to what you think you can deliver. And Emily Griffin is my editor at Holt. She said that was one of the first things she said to me about it. She said, this is long, but, I’m excited for this to be a big book. Some books are just meant to be bigger. And I was excited about that because I knew that there was at that point, so many things had entered the story that I didn’t want to get rid of. Not necessarily this paragraph can’t come out or this page can’t come out. But I knew that there were a lot of threads that I wanted to service, and I thought that if we had to make it a lot slimmer, we would have to lose some of the robustness of that. I had, had, I had had conversations with other editors who I knew were going to want me to make it smaller which I think could have also been great, but would have been a different book than what this one ended up being. So there was that I had been working with Graywolf again was super wonderful. I had had curiosity about working with a big five publisher. And of course, that feels it is the holy grail in some ways for a lot of writers. There are so many things about it that are not that different from working with an independent publisher at all. But of course, there are some things that are different. And I just, I felt it was obvious that that was the right, the right home for it. I thought they were going to do a really good job and help me really bring it to life.

Adam Vitcavage: What is it like? and I know what are the positive differences and not, not that grey wolf did something bad or did something good, but what are noticeable differences for writers curious between mighty independent presses and big five?

Shannon Sanders: I feel very lucky that I get to wait for the right offer. And of course, a a big five publisher. The resources are just different. I also feel the reach is a bit different. And I think you see that with like social media. You see it in the fact that there are certain outlets that really only consider, I think, submissions from big five publishers. So of course, I have always felt very grateful for other outlets. For example, Debutiful, where you’re extremely generous with the types of books that you that you spotlight. And we get to be introduced to so many diverse books through beautiful and other stuff that. There are, there’s, there are magazines that it seems like they focus in certain places. And I really wanted to see if I could try to find an audience that would be looking in those places too. And. otherwise they feel so similar. There are differences in scope, but otherwise it’s just such a similar process because you spend so much of the time leading up to the publication itself, working in concert with just this editor. And so it’s really just like two people who love the book in different ways. Having this ongoing conversation over the course of a year about what would make it better. And yeah.

Adam Vitcavage: And you mentioned with Emily, it got about 50 ish pages longer. What was that editing relationship like? you just said, it’s you spent so long with her just loving the book. But I’m just curious what, what was the edit?

Shannon Sanders: And so understanding that most people hearing this won’t have read the book, but if anyone has, there is a pretty pivotal section that is kind of the, I guess it’s, I guess it would be viewed as the climax of the book. There’s a, an event that happens in the past and the way that the draft originally was submitted to Emily. It was really opaque. you really couldn’t even tell. What happened because I was sort of writing around it because it’s kind of a tragic event. And I really wanted to be kind of stylistic about it and maybe even obfuscate it a little bit. And Emily luckily loved the beginning of the book up until she got to that part. And then she was this part really needs to change. And I had kind of anticipated that, but she really wanted me to make it a lot clearer. So I had to, I had to do what I had not wanted to do in the original draft, which was to actually write the scene as opposed to just kind of like writing around it, flash forward. And then they were wow, I can’t believe that happened. So a lot had to go there. There were some places where we had to make the historical kind of exposition a little bit clearer because I really didn’t want this to be a book that felt a history textbook. I really didn’t want it to be a slog where people did the same thing that I did in the drafting process, which was to get right up into the history part and then get frustrated or scared and stop. So I had to do some, some work there to judge it a little bit around that. And then there is, I’m not going to use the p word, but there is a little bit at the beginning before chapter one that kind of like sets up what is going on in the story. And I had to play with that a little bit. It’s not very long, but it was something that I had to make sure was in there that I thought would eliminate confusion for most people, hopefully. So yeah, everything Emily suggested, you know what the, the mark of a great editor, I think, is that even if they don’t have the solution to everything that they think is wrong, they know how to ask the right question. And she asked so many great questions and she gave me opportunities. She didn’t make me feel boxed in and say, go do this. She would say we need to figure out how to make this clear. What do you think? And then she would give me some time to go and try my best. and in most cases, I came back and she said, oh, this works better. So that was a really it’s so it feels hard when when one is in the middle of it. But looking back, it was such a great process..

Adam Vitcavage: So and then we’re close to publication. It’s in theory. Ready. You did it all. And I usually ask this for like debuts who like true blue debuts, right. Like first books and you are debut novelists, but you’ve gone through it a little bit. How are you feeling now compared to two months before Company?

Shannon Sanders: Well, when it was two months before Company, I didn’t really know how that whole thing worked. And so I didn’t realize that the coverage and stuff all really ramps up right about this time. And I just had no idea. So when the reviews and stuff started to come in, I didn’t know to be nervous or self-conscious then. And I did know this time to be nervous and self-conscious. So I started to have little, small panics about reviews that were going to come in. a few weeks ago, oh gosh, I’m probably gonna hear something from Kirkus soon. I’m going to hear something from Publishers Weekly. And of course, with a second book, there is also that question of like expectation. Oh, they liked the first book. What if they don’t this one or they liked the first book? Are they going to think she can write short stories, but not novels and so on? So there have been I’ve had like little moments of panic about all of those things.

Adam Vitcavage: But.

Shannon Sanders: Overall, the one thing that I think has been nice this time is having been through it, I do know that this is the part to really enjoy this and then also interacting with readers, but this is the exciting part. whatever happens, like on pub day is can be sort of anticlimactic. the exciting part is the lead up, the anticipation, knowing it’s about to happen, other people being excited for you. There’s a writer named Aaron Summers. She is really smart in the way that she talks about kind of the writer’s journey and something that she said in an interview I heard was that I’m probably going to make this detail up or get it wrong, but I think she said she and her husband had a special bottle of champagne when her first book came out that they were like saving for something, you know? And that’s something what was it? They didn’t really know, but different things happened, a mention of it in a magazine she liked or a starred review or a really positive review. And eventually she was oh, these are the things to celebrate. Like everything along the way as opposed to this nebulous whatever is going to happen. That, and also, of course, the main advice that everybody gives, which is getting back to writing that’s the actual reward that I’m supposed to be excited about right now..

Adam Vitcavage: So and speaking of, and I’m not going to ask, I’m not going to ask what you’re working on, but someone who’s done short stories, someone who’s done a novel do you see both in your future always. Do you prefer not prefer one? But do you, do you? Do you see both?

Shannon Sanders: This is a tough question. I’m going to mention Aaron Summers again because she famously had a short story. It was called ten Year Affair that she then that she published as a short story and then adapted to the novel, which is called The Ten Year Affair. Or vice versa. But she talks about, how that process happened and how the short story was had its own life and then she wasn’t done with it. And so she had a novel. I have similarly been really missing short stories. And so I have been working on writing some just because I really miss being like in the game. I want to send stuff out. I want to get it rejected. I want to eventually get it published. And I want people to read it and remember that I exist. But she, I take that back. I want people to remember I exist. But in the process of drafting some of these short stories, I have been thinking, oh, this would work better as a novel. I have had that thought twice now. And so I’m going to experiment with expanding something I’m working on and see if I actually have the stamina to try to start the next novel. But I do think I’m going to hold on to space to keep short story writing so that I can try to get something published soon.. So I think, I think the answer is I’m going to try to have both fit in somehow.

Adam Vitcavage: I love it. Yes. You have so much going on. In the middle of promotion. Children. Real life. Being active on threads. Do you have time to read? What are you enjoying in the past? However. Whatever. What what what are you vibing on?

Shannon Sanders: Okay, well, this is the answer to this question. The truth is that I’m in a book club right now, and it’s technically a romance book club, even though I’m not really a romance reader. We have been reading romance, but we have started branching out at my request. So right now I’m reading Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins, Reid and yeah, well, the my jury’s out on that one. I read last year The God of the woods. And that was one of my favorite things that I read last year. Liz Moore. I thought that was really exciting. I read Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness, which I really loved. I read and Blurbed Oyin Olugbemisola’s A Little Bit of Everything, which was beautiful. It was, it’s so fantastic. A lot of my life right now, my reading life at least has had to do with getting ready for conversation events with other people. So Reena Shah, like happiness was one that I got to read earlier this year and I got to do an event with her. And that book is also so beautiful. And I think she’s doing some events coming up this summer with that. And then you mentioned M. Lin. I got to be in conversation with her about the Memory Museum and that was also fantastic. So it’s, it is, I feel really lucky that I get to have a reason to fast track a lot of things to the top of my TBR pile. And I am looking forward though this summer to being able to pick some stuff that I have just been interested in. And then start there again.

Every month, I curate a noteworthy debut book list comprising of the books I read. I usually read these books 3-4 months prior to their release and it is always a treat for them to come up in my spreadsheet and realize the reading world gets to discover them soon.

July’s list includes some of my absolute favorites this year. Shannon Sanders, author of the knockout debut Company, is back with her debut novel, The Great Wherever.

A Real Animal by Emeline Atwood is easily one of the most Debutiful books out there. And its cover is in the top 5 for debut books since I started the outlet in 2019. Look at it!

This month also marks my own debut. Can you imagine? I have an essay called “You and I Were Roommates Once” in the anthology Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, edited by Samantha Paige Rosen. It’s a short 1,000-word ode to my sister and how living with her in our 20s saved both of our lives. (That’s the most melodramatic pitch. I can also pitch it as: “How Adam Learned to Stop Being an Asshole and Started to Be Himself”).

It’s part of the reason I got the confidence to start writing my own fiction project. The other reason is reading Meg Charlton’s Voyagers because it deals with very similar themes of what I have been kicking around in my brain for years. You can read a conversation between Meg and me here.

That’s a long preamble to say: check out July’s Noteworthy Debut Books and discover our recent interviews and lists below!

— Adam

Debutiful | Instagram | BlueSky

Click on the image to discover more about each debut book.

Recent Links

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in July 2026

• Inside the Collection: T Clark dissects All This Want (And I Can’t Get None)

• Cay Kim, author of The Future Perfect, was initially inspired by We the Animals

• Five Books Set in the East of England, recommended by Laura Evans

• 20 debut books to discover from June 2026

• Cosmos in a Calabash: Seven Literary Fictions That Explore Themes of Gender, Race, and Justice Through Intimate Storytelling, Recommended by Kangkang Li Kovacs

• Nemesis Mine author Amy Archer has been writing stories since she was six

Her name is Vivian. She’s teeny, loves to nap all day, and parties nonstop between 10 pm and 3 am. Kelly is doing well in her recovery. Mothers out there, please send me any tips your partner did (or you wanted them to do) during your first months postpartum.

Thank you to all who reached out, and especially to those who sent gifts and added to the Lil Cabbage Library. (If you also want to send books, please let me know and I can send you our address—this is a half-joke, but also… maybe not?)

For those curious, she’s a Cancer Sun, Libra Moon, Sagittarius Rising. And even though America is the only country to do their dates like this, the numbers guy in me loves the 6/22/26 date.

Here’s hardcore wrestling legend Mick Foley (aka Mankind, Dude Love, and Cactus Jack) introducing Big Viv to the world:

Because most of our closest friends and family do not live near us, we’re still figuring out how to use social media to help our loved ones stay connected to us. A private account? Using an app like Family Album? Public photos taken from angles that obscure the face? Or the hotly debated emoji tactic? People like Betches hate the emoji. And just this week, Jason Diamond wrote this beautiful essay about his daughter, “Bagelface.”

Regardless of what we decide, we’re incredibly happy to report Big Viv is healthy and slowly getting used to life at Debutiful HQ.

Okay, That’s Cute, but… You’re Still Gonna Cover Debuts, right? RIGHT?

Yes! This is the most frequent question I get. Not in a pushy way, but a “Man, you do so much reading and interviewing, how are you going to do this healthily now?” way.

I’ve already selected the debuts I plan to read throughout the rest of the year. They’re on this Most Anticipated List. I’ll start reading 2027 titles around September, so start pitching those now!

But for the rest of 2026, I need specific kinds of pitches that fill a need. For transparency, my out-of-office response for my direct email through the end of July is in part:

Debutiful’s coverage is mostly planned through September. Any October-December 2026 books, please continue to put them on my radar!

For July-September, I’m mostly looking for a few more themed reading lists, My Reading Life Q&As, Inside the Collection Q&As, excerpts, and cover reveals (especially cover reveals)! Examples of each are below.

The editorial calendar for podcast episodes is set through the rest of the year. I am no longer accepting podcast pitches and will continue to hand-select them in 2027.

Book List: https://debutiful.net/2026/03/09/seven-books-that-walk-the-borderlands-between-human-and-non-human-recommended-by-jarod-k-anderson/

My Reading Life: https://debutiful.net/2026/01/22/ya-horror-got-hemlock-author-melissa-faliveno-through-puberty/

Inside the Collection: https://debutiful.net/2026/01/15/inside-the-collection-senaa-ahmad-dissects-the-age-of-calamaties/

Excerpt: https://debutiful.net/2026/05/19/read-an-excerpt-from-all-them-dogs-by/

Cover Reveal: https://debutiful.net/2026/01/07/see-the-cover-for-voyagers-by-meg-charlton/

If you’re an author, the best place to pitch is still our submission portal. I like you all, but prefer to keep my inbox direct for publicists, agents, and editors only. Please consider pitching one of the above articles specifically.

Amazing! Got links to recent coverage?

• Kangkang Li Kovacs shares a reading list.

• Cay Kim, Jessica M. Goldstein, and Amy Archer answered our My Reading Life Q&A.

• We revealed the cover for Buzzard by Inez Ray.

Her debut novel, Names Have Been Changed, is the last to be published from that cohort and was one of 2026’s Best Debut Books published in the first half of the year.

It follows Ophir, a globe-trotting fugitive whose life unravels after a petty crime in Singapore forces her to abandon her home and identity. As she reinvents herself across continents, she recounts her crimes, secrets, and regrets while searching for belonging, only to find herself facing a choice that could alter her future forever.

Yu-Mei joined the podcast (listen here or here), where we walked about how Singapore shaped her and the U.S. guided her fiction. You can read the conversation below.

Apple | Spotify

Adam Vitcavage: What’s your unofficial bio? Who are you outside of reading and writing and being a debut author?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow I was thinking about this question because I knew you would ask it, and it stumped me a little because, to be honest, I’ve been thinking of myself as a writer for about 20 years. I started out doing nonfiction in Singapore. Some of it was work for hire: copywriting, travel writing, and research for museums in Singapore. Then gradually I started to put my feet into fiction writing, which I’ve been doing for 15 or 16 years.

What I’m trying to say is that even though this is my debut novel, it’s been a long time coming. I’ve been calling myself a writer, and now I feel like: oh, I also have a novel out. I’m still a writer, maybe at a slightly different stage, which is exciting.

Besides writing, I’m from Singapore, which is in my bio, but I think what’s not in it is that I lived there for most of my life. I went to college in the U.S. and then moved back. I lived in London for a year and then moved back. Most of my adult life and childhood were spent in Singapore, which probably still shapes the way I see myself, even though I’ve been in the U.S. for some years. I came here to do my MFA and stayed.

One thing that’s important to me, but maybe isn’t obvious to a lot of people, is that my family is mixed race. On my dad’s side, my grandfather was an immigrant to Singapore from what is now Sri Lanka. It was called Ceylon during the British Empire days. He moved before World War II, then met and married my grandmother, who was an immigrant to Singapore from China. That kind of interracial marriage was highly unusual in the 1930s. I wish I had thought to ask them questions about it before they passed away, but it’s kind of lost to history.

They had a bunch of children, including my dad, and then my dad married my mom, who’s of Chinese descent. When I was growing up in Singapore, it wasn’t very common to be of mixed-race descent. If you look at my last name, Balasingamchow, that’s basically my parents amalgamating their names to create it. In that sense, it’s a made-up name. I’ve always felt a bit uncertain about who I am. Sometimes when people are talking to you, they’re just curious, they’re not being hostile, but they’re trying to figure out: Who are you? What are you? That question has always been on the edge of my consciousness.

A lot of writers and artists talk about growing up feeling like an outsider in some way. When I was younger and first heard that, I was like: yes, that makes sense. We feel like outsiders. We may not visibly look like one or behave like one, but it’s permeating your consciousness when you’re looking at the people around you and how you’re interacting with them. I don’t know. It sounds too weird.

Adam Vitcavage: No, that makes sense, especially with your grandparents and your parents, being mixed race and having different immigration stories. Do you feel more like you in Singapore or more like you here in the U.S.? Is it easier to be you in one place?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Wow. Tough question. I don’t think I can choose. In Singapore, I still go back and visit at least once a year. Every time I go back and I’m talking to people I know, or I’m in places I know, and I hear Singlish or a Singaporean accent, I’m like: I know this world. I know how to operate in this world. I know what’s what in a way that I sometimes don’t in the U.S.

I’ve been lucky to be in social groups and communities here that are very welcoming, but sometimes I’m still like: wait, what’s that? Or: I don’t get that cultural reference. Or there are certain behavioral norms I don’t fully understand.

On the other hand, I was just reading Peter Ho Davies’s book The Art of Revision, in which he talks about revising fiction but also weaves in personal stories. He talks about being an immigrant from the U.K. who came to the U.S. to study creative writing, and he’s been here for decades. He felt that coming here enabled him to become a writer in some ways because people here didn’t have expectations of who he was. Whereas in the U.K., they already knew him in a certain job, in a certain family environment, in the town where he grew up. Here, he could start from scratch as a writer.

I sometimes think about that. Even though I was writing fiction in Singapore before I came here, being away from certain expectations from home also liberates you to tell a certain kind of story you maybe didn’t try before, or to think about fiction and writing and reading in fresh ways. That’s been invigorating for me. I enjoy that imaginative space. I’ve also been very lucky in finding my footing in the literary community in the U.S. and making friends. Not just friends because we’re writers, but people with whom you find lots of connections beyond writing, and that’s really meaningful.

Adam Vitcavage: I’ll come back to the literary community in the U.S. and the Get the Word Out publicity cohort, which I think is amazing and worth talking about. But going back to Singapore: before this debut novel, you were the co-author of Singapore: A Biography, the editor of How We Live Now: Stories of Daily Living, and co-editor of In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel.

Singapore isn’t just home. It’s also a subject you’ve spent time thinking about as a writer. Why? Not everyone wants to write about home.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: That’s true. When I was living there, especially for the books you just mentioned, most of which I worked on between the late 2000s and mid-2010s, I think I was trying to figure out why Singapore is the way it is.

When you live in any environment, whatever society you’re in, you take certain things for granted: these are the norms of society. We do these things because everyone around us does them. Some of that is behavioral, not so much political, though it can also be political. Why do we talk like this? Why do we always use that phrase? Why do we believe this is more important than that?

At one point, I was trying to puzzle out Singapore culture for myself. I grew up here, but why are we doing things this way? Why do we believe these things?

Singapore: A Biography is a history book that covers 700 years of Singapore history. It came out of me working as a researcher and writer on a project for the National Museum of Singapore. After that, my co-author, Mark Frost, and I realized there wasn’t really a book that put together all that information in an accessible way for the general reader, the non-specialist reader.

When I was doing that research, I would come across all this stuff about Singapore history and think: no one taught me this in school. This is fascinating. This would have been great when I was 13 and bored in class. Why didn’t they teach us this interesting stuff about social revolutions, how different cultural groups interacted, and the long histories of people in the region before the British arrived? The British arrived in 1819, but there was history before that, and I wasn’t taught it in school. I think now they do teach a little more of that long view.

It also made me think about belonging. What does it mean to belong to a place when so many people who pass through Singapore, which is a small island state, have been immigrants in one way or another? Of course, there are also people who are born there. But as someone who lived there and didn’t question these things for a long time, I started to question some of them.

The anthologies you mentioned were both about fiction and other ways of thinking about home. The airport one came about partly because a lot of people in Singapore take pride in the airport being number one in the world, which is a strange thing to take pride in. But when you’re in a small, very urban country, and you want to take a break or have a certain kind of leisure or work or travel, you often have to leave the country. Even before the current number-one-airport era, people would hop on a ferry and go to an island in Indonesia or Malaysia across the border. Singapore is so small that you have to cross the border.

To me, it’s fascinating: how does that inform your psyche? I belong to this country, but my country is really small, and if I want a certain kind of fun or leisure or work or travel, I have to leave. That’s the opposite of the U.S., where you can travel and there’s so much to see and do here. Psychologically, it’s so different: a small country, a big country. I’m always interested in how those things shape how people think and behave.

Adam Vitcavage: This week, as we’re recording this, someone I know who also has a debut coming out and lived in Singapore for a decade was in town. We were driving to an event I was hosting, and I realized I couldn’t place Singapore on a map at all. I also swore the flag had blue in it. We were just discussing how, as an American, there’s so much I didn’t know about Singapore. It’s something like 50 kilometers wide by 30 tall, smaller than the Denver metro. Like you said, you have to leave the country to see certain things, whereas in America you could drive a day and see something completely different.

You mentioned you’ve been writing for 15 or 20 years, and this is now your debut. You did nonfiction and these research projects. You got your MFA from Boston University. What year was that?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: 2019.

Adam Vitcavage: So pretty recently. When did fiction come into your life? I know some of those anthologies were fiction, but when did you go from writing a history of Singapore to feeling like there was fiction you wanted to explore?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: That was around 2011. It started because someone who knew the work I’d done on history was putting together an anthology about different neighborhoods in Singapore. Because I had been writing about place and belonging, she asked if I wanted to try writing a short story.

Like a lot of writers, when I was a kid, I thought: I’m going to be a writer because I love to read, so naturally I want to write. Then as I got older, I didn’t really see a path for how one becomes a writer. It became this fantastical thing, like a unicorn job. That’s why I didn’t consider it seriously.

Writing nonfiction gave me some confidence. I knew how to make sentences flow on a page. I could tell a mini story in nonfiction. Maybe I could try and play around with fiction a little. So I worked on the story for that anthology. At the same time, I had an idea for what I thought might be a novel and started working on that.

Around 2011 is when I started dipping my foot into the fiction world, and over time I found that I enjoyed it more than nonfiction and wanted to spend all my creative time on it. At some point, I remember thinking: if I want to write fiction, I’m really going to have to put my heart into it because I need to learn so much and I need time to do it. I was working day jobs, and the writing was happening in the evenings and on weekends. If I wanted to work on fiction, I had to stay home and write. I couldn’t just go out and have fun every weekend.

I made that conscious choice, then started reading like a writer and trying to learn from other people, whether through public lectures, informal classes, books about writing, or YouTube interviews with writers where I could hear about how they did it. I got more and more into it, until I decided to apply for an MFA and see whether that would give me a boost and help me take it further.

Adam Vitcavage: So the MFA was really: I have the passion and I have the work, but I need the time and the education. It felt right.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: It definitely felt like the right time to do it. I was also in the middle of a second novel at the time. The first novel I mentioned, I had written a few bad drafts and didn’t finish. At some point, I looked at it and thought: I don’t think I’m that interested in this story. I had a germ of an idea, and I stretched it out, but it actually isn’t that interesting. Even though I’d worked on several drafts, I wasn’t interested in going back into it.

But working on it had taught me a little about novels. You learn by doing. Writing is an apprenticeship. I learned about novel mechanics, moving characters around, and making things happen. It was a good learning experience.

Then I had an idea for a second novel, and I thought: this is it. This is going to be the one. I worked on that one for more than five years. I was doing it before my MFA, then I came to the MFA thinking it would help me learn how to write a novel. I worked on it during the MFA. After the MFA, I had two-thirds of a first draft and told myself I just needed to write the last third, then start revising.

But I never did, because by that point I had planned a lot of that novel. When I got to writing the so-called last third, I felt like I was just trying to make characters do things because they had to, because my plan said they had to. I wasn’t having fun. They weren’t having fun.

Then I had an existential crisis with the novel because I realized it was a success narrative. Basically, the protagonist wants something, various obstacles get in her way, and eventually she more or less gets it. I realized I wasn’t interested in success narratives. I was also not interested in making her not get it. Then I thought: oh goodness, I have spent five years on this. But it felt very real, like a light bulb went off. I realized: this is why you’re struggling, because you’re really not interested in telling this story right now.

Adam Vitcavage: I’ve been asking writers a lot lately about this, because most writers’ first published novel is not their first long-form attempt. With the second novel, you went through an MFA with it and then realized it wasn’t it. How does it feel to not throw away five years, because you obviously learned so much, but to come to America for an MFA with this idea and then have it gone?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: It felt terrible at the time. This was also happening in late 2020, and we all know what a wonderful year 2020 was for everyone. On top of everything else, I was asking: what am I even doing here? Am I ever going to write again? I had this awful feeling.

I knew for sure I wasn’t going to touch that project for a while, and I really did put it aside. I still have it on my laptop, but I have no inclination, no interest in opening that folder.

Then I went back to basics. I started noodling around with brand-new ideas. I thought: maybe I’ll write a short story. Let’s see if my brain knows how to write anymore. Let’s start something from scratch.

In that low-stakes noodling, I had an idea for a short story and started writing it very slowly, very playfully, with no pressure. Then one day, while daydreaming as one does when writing, I thought: what would happen if someone committed a crime, ran away from Singapore, and couldn’t go home? What would that be like?

The next thing I knew, there was this voice chattering in my head with opinions about that. It felt surreal. I started to type because I thought I better write it down before it went away. The next thing I knew, I had a thousand words on the page. I sat back and thought: wait, what just happened? What is this?

It was completely unrelated in voice or style to the things I had been working on. Then I had the first words of the novel. I just had to figure out the rest from there. It was an emotional roller coaster from pit bottom, walking away from a project I’d spent more than five years on, then slowly picking my way back up to a place where I could have an idea that felt fresh and exciting.

Adam Vitcavage: So you have a thousand words, you have the voice, and you have a nugget of an idea. Then you said you had to figure it out. What was figuring out what became this novel like? Did you outline? Did you let it happen on the page?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I decided to abandon outlining because I was afraid it would straitjacket me the way it had previously. I was terrified of outlining at that point, so I wrote it without a plan.

After I had the voice and the idea of a criminal runaway, I started asking: what’s she doing? Who’s she talking to? Why is she telling this story? I knew she was going to go around the world, and I was interested in having her meet other Singaporeans who were around the world for different reasons. Basically, the diaspora. People who had left the country not because they were criminals, but because they moved abroad to work, to study, to follow their loved ones. One character is a political exile.

I wanted my main character to meet these people, and each encounter would cause a re-evaluation of her relationship to home. That was the loose idea. She’s going to go around the world. She’s going to meet one, two, three, four, five people, or whatever the number was, and some stuff is going to happen. Then I just wrote chapter by chapter and saw what happened. I got to know these characters until I had a full first draft.

At the end, when she was done meeting all these people, I thought: now I have to write the ending. What’s going to happen? I printed out all the early pages and read them, not to edit or revise, but to look for clues for the ending. I had written some of those pages a year earlier, so I didn’t really remember what was in them.

It became this weird fever dream of intensive reading. I told myself: don’t edit, don’t revise, just take notes, look for clues. I read my own manuscript, took notes, and let the ideas percolate. Then I figured out that she was going to have to make a choice. She was going to have the opportunity to go home, and she had to make a choice. Then other things happen, without saying too much. That was the emergence of a plan rather than having one at the beginning.

Adam Vitcavage: After you figured out what the ending might need to be, after draft one, what did it look like to tighten it up and really figure it out? You found these clues and read through it without editing. What were the next steps?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Because I was afraid of losing touch with the voice, and because I had two previously unfinished novels, when I started writing this, I tried to write as fast as I could. I still had work commitments, but I really prioritized it. I wrote faster than I’ve ever written in my life and finished the first draft in a year and a half. For me, that’s incredibly fast.

Then I took a break from it and came back. I spent about six months revising it. Revising was really about shaping: making certain things more cohesive, figuring out what the emotional beats were, making them clearer if they needed to be, and moving little details around. After six months of that, I thought I was ready to query.

In fact, I was not ready to query, because it took me a year and a half to find an agent. During that time, I also shared the manuscript with a couple of friends to get feedback. They were very gracious to read the whole thing and give me thoughts. I also took breaks from the manuscript for a month or two, wrote other things, then came back to it with fresh eyes. Suddenly I’d see something and think: this chapter can be a better version of itself.

During that year and a half of querying, I was also revising and revising, using feedback from friends and my own thinking. All told, I spent about two years revising it in various versions.

What’s interesting to me is that the skeleton of the book hasn’t changed since the first draft. She starts telling you her story. It’s been ten years and she’s on the run. She tells you about going to Tokyo, then London, then Colorado, and then the ending. That structure has been in place, and the main characters have all been pretty much recognizably themselves. It was about shaping the story, the pacing of the full novel, and deepening the interiority and emotional beats, which is really fun. That’s the best part of writing for me: everything going on below the surface.

Adam Vitcavage: How successful was querying during that year and a half? Was it just no, no, no? Were there partials? Did you get feedback from agents? How high were the highs and how low were the lows?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I did about three rounds of querying. From the first round, I had a couple of agents ask for the full, which was encouraging. I thought: okay, the query works, the first few pages work. But after that, it was either silence or polite nos.

During the year and a half, even though there were a lot of silences and nos, there were a couple of people who responded to say no but encouraged me. They said: this is not for me, but I’m sure you will find someone soon. That gave me hope to keep persevering when I had nothing else. I also talked to friends who had queried, and somebody said: how many people have you queried? Wait until you’ve queried a hundred. So I felt like I just had to be patient.

I wasn’t querying nonstop. I only did three rounds. I would query, wait a while, work on my manuscript, and then maybe six months later query again. The highs were getting those encouraging rejections. The lows were when you never hear back. You start out so hopeful, but then you have to tell yourself there could be a lot of reasons they didn’t reply. I shouldn’t sit here and speculate. Just move on. That is the business.

Adam Vitcavage: Eventually you signed with your agent, Lucy Carson. Is she editorial? What was the process like once you started to form that relationship?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Lucy really fell in love with the manuscript, which, after a year and a half of querying, was a complete shock to me. Even the first time I spoke to her, what was affirming was that as she reflected the novel back to me, she was picking up a lot of the emotional undertones and things that I knew were there but had never spelled out in my query or to anyone.

It’s one of those things where you want to let the reader discover it for themselves, and she had discovered it and was enjoying that discovery. So I thought: okay, maybe my manuscript works. It’s got something. That was affirming.

Lucy can be a very editorial agent. I know that from her having worked with a couple of friends she represents. But for my manuscript, she felt it was structurally okay. She had comments, and she sent me her notes. I took care of the revisions within about a month. A lot of it was zooming in on moments and asking: can we linger a bit longer here? Can we drop in and stay longer with the character and understand their motivations better? It was stitching everything a little tighter together. After a month of revisions, she said she thought it was great and that we would go on submission. She laid out her plan.

Adam Vitcavage: And now here we are. Was selling relatively easy, hard, demoralizing, fun?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I was lucky. My novel was sold in a preempt to Tiny Reparations Books. I don’t remember the exact dates, but I think it was within a month or so of going on submission. After that came more revisions.

Once the book deal was done, my editor, Amber Oliver, shared her editorial letter with me, which was about ten pages. Similar to Lucy, she didn’t have big structural changes about moving major pieces around. It was more about zooming in on individual relationships and scenes to talk about what else could be done to make them stronger. It gave me a lot of good fodder to chew on.

I spent three or four months on revisions, and I think I did even more than what she asked for because sometimes someone asks you a question about a character in a scene, like: I don’t really understand why Orfeu behaves this way toward the mother. Could you find a way to flesh it out? Then you think about it and the next thing you know, you’re rewriting half a chapter because you have a better idea of how to flesh out that relationship.

One thing I learned from writing Names Have Been Changed, which I didn’t have with my earlier ones because I never finished them, is that I’m not afraid of revision anymore. Once you have the first draft, you can go back with new ideas and fresh eyes and make it a better version of itself. It’s fun because you realize you’re getting a little closer to the platonic ideal of what your novel might be.

Adam Vitcavage: I think that’s something to latch onto: if you’re afraid of revising, maybe the story or the novel isn’t it. Maybe you want to be excited about revising.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: A novel is so big. You can’t see it in full until you have a full draft. Then you can read the whole thing and have a different perspective, not the same perspective you have when you’re writing at the micro level. That back and forth between big picture and small picture is something I really love. It’s so much fun to move things. I’m writing something now, and I can’t wait until I have a first draft so I can revise. I can’t wait to get to revision.

Adam Vitcavage: I just talked to ‘Pemi Aguda, who wrote Ghostroots and whose debut novel One Leg on Earth just came out. She talks about the idea of a zero draft. She just wants to get through it so she can really start revising and really start writing. I think that’s smart.

I love talking about editing and writing, but I also love talking about the business side: publicity, marketing. You were part of Poets & Writers’ Get the Word Out publicity incubator, which is a cohort of first- or early-career writers. I love that they do it. How did you find out about it, and why did you pursue it?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: A friend of mine had done it the year before: Jessie Ren Marshall. Her short story collection is Women! In! Peril!, which is a great read. Because I knew Jessie had done it, it was on my radar. As soon as I got my book deal, I wondered what the deadline was. In fact, the deadline was in a week or two, so I quickly got my application together. Fortunately, the application was very succinct. When I got the acceptance, I was thrilled because I knew nothing about book publicity.

Adam Vitcavage: What did you not know, and what came out of it? What do you have a better grasp on now? Not a master grasp, but a better grasp at least.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: Definitely not a master grasp. Far from it.

What I knew before was next to nothing because I had never publicized a book in the U.S. before. The basic nuts-and-bolts information everyone needs was helpful. But our facilitator, Jennifer Huang, was also such a calming presence and a voice of reason. She encouraged us to think about our dreams for our novels beyond the book launch. How would we like it to find its readers? What kind of life can you imagine for this book? What’s important to you as a writer, which may not even be something you want to share publicly? It might just be a private desire. She made us feel like we could claim those things for ourselves and have individual priorities for what we wanted our books to do, which didn’t have to be exactly what the publisher or agent wanted.

She also reminded us that most things are beyond your control. No matter how hard you work, or your publicist works, or your publisher works, some things are wildly beyond your control. If you obsess about them, that way leads to madness because you can’t control it.

We also had great guest speakers, including you. Some were authors who had done the publicity and book-tour thing, and they gave frank advice. One person said to be careful not to burn out because you can really easily burn out, and then you don’t feel like doing anything at all. Hearing that from people who had been down the road already helped us know that just because it’s your debut novel, you don’t have to do everything.

Adam Vitcavage: That’s my biggest advice: more is not always better. Sometimes it’s better to do a small selection of things, do them well, and then reuse them as much as possible. Here’s this article. Here’s this one podcast I did. I’m going to share it monthly instead of doing a monthly podcast, or whatever. The burnout is real. You’re not a publicist or a marketer. You’re a writer who’s become a public face, but you don’t have to do all of this. The global you, not you specifically. All debuts.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: And most of us only have the experience of our one book. We have no idea what journeys our books have been on, or how the industry works at that level. It’s too much to know.

Adam Vitcavage: Speaking of journeys, I know you used to be a bookseller, so I’ll let you put your bookselling hat back on. What books have you been enjoying lately?

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: I just finished Good People by Patmeena Sabit. It came out earlier this year. It’s set in a community of Afghan immigrants in Fairfax, Virginia. There’s a mystery. You’re trying to figure out what happened to this particular family, but it’s told in the form of interview transcripts, which is why I picked it up. A writer friend recommended it, and I thought: let me take a look at that.

It’s really pacey, and you get different voices because every other page or so is a different person giving their version of their recollections of what happened and what this person was like. It builds and builds. The mystery gets thicker and richer along the way. I’m not going to spoil it, but it was a good ride. You also feel like you’re getting to see a microcosm of a world at a particular moment in time. A lot of the characters were refugees from Afghanistan, so they were caught up in the winds of history. Then they landed in this community in Virginia and rebuilt their lives, their hopes, their dreams. It’s a good read.

You already know about The Memory Museum by M. Lin, but I just finished that a couple of weeks ago, and it’s excellent. That resonated with me because a lot of the characters are between countries, between societies, between worlds. That kind of thing pulls me in a lot as well.

A book I’m in the middle of, which isn’t fiction, is a collection of essays about translation called Violent Phenomena. I think it was published in the U.K. a year or two ago, and the U.S. edition is out now. It’s edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang. Different translators talk about contemporary translation, decolonizing language, who gets the right to tell which stories, and how gatekeepers decide whether a story is readable, accessible, or marketable.

As a writer, even though I don’t translate, I sometimes also confront expectations about what constitutes a quote-unquote good manuscript or good story. Hearing different translators’ experiences and expertise has given me a different way of thinking about language, storytelling, and what stories get to travel the world. Whose stories get told in English or in other languages? That’s an important political question.

Here are the Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2026, Part 2!

It also inspired me to finally write fiction (but that’s a story for another day).

, who is represented by and was edited by Liz Velez, was on the Debutiful podcast (which you can listen to here or here), where we chatted about aliens, finding an MFA program, how her agent helped her find the shape of the novel, and why teaching writing is so rewarding.

As the years have gone by, the podcast has become a smaller and smaller part of the Debutiful ecosystem. Its listeners account for about 12% of all those who discover debut authors with Debutiful.

So I wanted to ensure these conversations aren’t lost to time. Moving forward, edited and condensed versions of the podcast conversations will be exclusive for Substack subscribers.

Starting with the Voyagers podcast makes sense. I don’t create hierarchy for the Best Debut Books lists, but if I did, Voyagers by Meg Charlton would be my number one book of the year.

Adam Vitcavage: Your bio is short and sweet: you live in New York City and Voyagers is your first novel. But what’s your unofficial bio? Who are you?

Meg Charlton: One identity, I suppose, is Debutiful listener. I knew you were going to ask this question, and I was thinking about it because one of my old professors in my MFA said that all of my writing was about the instability of the self. I was sort of like, what does that mean? But I also loved it because I think it’s true. Who we are is context-dependent. There’s this William James line I love where he says that “I” is a noun of position, like “this” or “here.”

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that who I am right now is honestly mostly being a debut novelist, because this has taken over most of my time. But I’m also a teacher, a friend, a wife, and a film lover. My husband, very sweetly, was talking with a neighbor recently about what people are sort of coded to do. He said, “You create beauty. You see beauty in the world.” So I’ll go with that very sweet description as an identity for the moment.

Adam Vitcavage: I love identities for the moment. We’re recording this in June, when your book comes out, but it’s also the month my first child will be born (editor’s note: Baby Debutiful is due any day now), either before this podcast or after this podcast. Who knows? Right now, I identify as a nervous dad-to-be more than anything.

Meg Charlton: Oh my God. Congratulations, Adam. That’s wonderful.

Adam Vitcavage: Thank you. It’s interesting because I think I’ve become the Debutiful guy for a long time, and I’ve always had a day job. But Debutiful has taken over my identity in a way. And Dad will soon. the current self is something interesting.

Meg Charlton: Alan Watts had this line that the self is almost like a knot on a piece of cord where each part of the cord is a different material. You can pull the knot down through the part that’s twine, then through the part that’s cotton, then through the part that’s silk. It’s the same knot, but it’s composed of completely different things. It’s wild to be at this moment where you are not a dad yet on some level, but soon that will be such a huge part of who you are.

Adam Vitcavage: Yes. And it’s similar to being a debut writer. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. How do you market something that’s not out yet? Or not even market it, just talk about it. It’s done. You can’t change it at this point. It is done, and we’ll get caught up to this point in time, but I am very curious about your voyage to writing. This is your debut fiction, but you have written journalistically, professionally, and you have an MFA.

Going back to the dawn of time, why writing?

Meg Charlton: I was a kid who read the dictionary. I read everything. I literally would read the dictionary at breakfast, and I grew up in a household that valued that. My parents ran a book-packaging business out of our apartment, where they were essentially pitching what I would describe as books that you either kept in your bathroom or that no longer exist because of the internet. They published a book of baby names, which was truly a list of names. They published a wedding planning book that was almost entirely blank. As my father put it, I believe his phrase was something like “uncluttered by text.”

I grew up in a household that valued reading and words. As a result of that, I rebelled and decided to work in film. I moved away from writing for a long time. I sort of always knew I wanted to be a writer, and yet I thought I would have more interesting things to write about if I studied other things and tried other jobs.

I studied politics and international affairs as an undergraduate. I took some time off from school to work on a political campaign. I graduated and went into documentary. I took a detour into comedy, sitcoms, and improv comedy, then landed at Vice, working in film, video production, and journalism for a long time. Right before the pandemic, I was working at Spotify with some of my old Vice compatriots. That fall, after attending Bread Loaf, I very impulsively applied to MFAs and got into only one: Brooklyn. But it was the right one.

That was when I started to take writing more seriously. I had written bad screenplays, a bad novel, and a couple of short stories that got published. But it was in the MFA that I made writing the center of my life and really focused on it in a new way.

Adam Vitcavage: I’ll track back to that. I wrote freelance about pop culture for a while, for places like Paste Magazine, and that part of our career was maybe when the internet was booming, print magazines were dying, and Vice was popping off. What were you interested in? Obviously a job, but what was Meg’s obsession during that time? You did documentary work, political work. What were you writing about?

Meg Charlton: I was always really interested in stories about science and technology. I think one of the first pieces I wrote for Vice News was about how dating apps make money. It was right when Tinder Plus was being introduced. I loved it because I got to call up the CEO of Grindr, OkCupid, and others and talk to them. It was so much fun.

I also did a piece where I went to Roswell with a famous skeptic. A lot of the work I did was on assignment, but I was always interested in science, technology, and the environment. I was also doing some volunteering and organizing with Sunrise at that time. I was interested in stories about the intersection of science with reality: how those things manifested in people’s lives, how invisible forces like economics, algorithms, or weather patterns showed up for real people. That’s something I think has been a constant even in my fiction now.

Adam Vitcavage: During that time, when you said you were writing bad screenplays and bad novels, what were you attempting to write creatively? What were they about?

Meg Charlton: Maybe “bad” is a strong word. I had to write them. But it’s funny. I really believe all writers write the same story over and over again. When I look back at those projects, they were all pointing toward the same thing, and the short fiction I published at that time did too. They were all about perception versus reality and belief. They played at the edges of genre, but maybe didn’t leap fully in. I was always writing things that were genre pieces, but were really about character first, because that’s what interested me most.

That dating apps article ended up becoming a short story, because the reporting left me with all these more emotional questions. I wrote a short story about a dating app that told the truth. It harvested all of your data and produced a completely honest profile. You could make the profile less honest, but that would be reflected in an honesty score, so people could tell if you were lying. That story ended up being about what it meant to be honest with yourself, the secrets we keep from ourselves, and our perceptions of ourselves. For better or worse, we all write about the same things over and over again.

Adam Vitcavage: I definitely think that’s true, just in different ways. It’s what our obsessions are and what makes us move. So 2020 comes around, and you’re writing at places like Vice, writing short stories, writing scripts, and on a whim, you’re like, I’m going to do an MFA. Was on actually on a whim?

Meg Charlton: It was a bit on a whim. I had gone to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference up at Middlebury. A friend who had been there recommended it to me, and at the time, I had no idea how transformative it would be. I thought it would be an exciting opportunity to be among other writers.

What it ended up being was really the first time that I was in a community that seemed to take my writing seriously. It made me feel like I wanted to be in a community like that as much as I possibly could. I wanted to be with other writers, discuss our work, discuss published work, and feel like I was part of this vibrant, ongoing conversation.

After I got back, I was so lit up that I applied. I say on a whim, but perhaps a better way to put it would simply be last-minute. I got back in August, made the decision to apply in September, and those applications were due from November to January. It was a tight timeline and a real scramble. I actually applied with the opening of what was then Voyagers, which changed pretty radically over the course of the program.

Adam Vitcavage: I talk to writers all day, every day, but not about my own work. I’ve started to share that I’m writing fiction. Once I talked about it, once I felt like an artist in that sense, all I wanted to do was be in those spaces.

Meg Charlton: Exactly. It was so intoxicating and invigorating to also see that in other people. I teach now, too, and that is one of my favorite things: the moment in workshop when I see a student read aloud their work for the first time and begin to feel the thrill of other people responding to their work. It doesn’t always have to be positive, but it’s that feeling of someone taking it seriously and taking you seriously. That got me so excited.

Adam Vitcavage: I need to know: what was Voyagers 2020… 1.0? What was it? Why is it so radically different now?

Meg Charlton: It was so different. I love revision. I’m a real believer that there’s a kernel in every story, and you have to keep chipping away at all of the stuff that we as writers put around it to get down to the hard, deep truth of what the story is. It wasn’t there yet.

A crazy fact about Voyagers is that Alex and Ana used to be twin siblings. I realized pretty quickly that was not the right relationship for these two human beings. It couldn’t encompass what I knew I wanted the book to be about, and it couldn’t encompass the stakes of their relationship. There’s something about sibling relationships where a sibling relationship is defined in a lot of ways by obligation and constancy. Your sister is your sister. Your brother is your brother. That relationship will always be there.

I knew I wanted Alex and Ana’s relationship to be more expansive than that and more defined by choice. Friendship is our most nebulous social tie. It has the fewest requirements, restrictions, and conventions around it. I really wanted to play with the edges of that.

Adam Vitcavage: You talked about how intoxicating Bread Loaf was. Your MFA was at Brooklyn College. What was that time like as an artist, not just writing Voyagers?

Meg Charlton: It was wonderful. I loved Brooklyn College. I met so many amazing writers there, not just my professors, but my fellow students. We’ve kept in very close touch and still read each other’s work. It completely expanded me as a writer and, more importantly, as a reader.

I hadn’t been an English major in college. I didn’t have any formal training in literature aside from loving to read. That was actually the most transformative part of the MFA: relearning how to read with that level of craft, care, and rigor. Being able to look at a story or a novel and think about how it worked, and how I could make something of my own work in the shadow of a similar way.

Adam Vitcavage: Other than Alex and Ana going from siblings to friends, how did Voyagers take shape during that time?

Meg Charlton: There were so many things that got added in. I remember Allen appeared during the MFA. The Signal appeared during the MFA.

These defining elements of the book, which I now can’t imagine the novel existing without and which are so core to it, were discovered. I hesitate to say added on because it felt more like I found them there. But they were discovered during the MFA.

Adam Vitcavage: Those are integral parts of how people will talk about the book now, especially on the plot level. What was the pitch of Voyagers then? What did you think it was going to be if Allen and the Signal weren’t part of it yet?

Meg Charlton: I knew I wanted to write a story about experiencers. I mentioned that I had gone down to Roswell in 2015, and I was really moved by that experience and fascinated by that whole culture of the ufology world. I came back and started reading more, and I read a book by John Mack called Abduction that affected me very profoundly.

He was, I believe, the head of the psychiatry department at Harvard - or psychology, I can’t remember which. He interviewed alien-contact experiencers and wrote this book of case studies and his analysis of those conversations. The thing I remember that really struck me was that he said, “I came very reluctantly to the conclusion that this was a true mystery.” He believed the experiencers he spoke with had had real experiences, even if they challenged his notion of reality.

That idea of people going through an experience that pushed the edges of what other people would consider true, and then being called to account for that memory, really interested me. There was no evidence that this happened to them, but there was also no evidence that they were delusional. All they were left with was the contents of their own memory and mind, and their trust in their own experience.

I thought that had emotional resonance far beyond UFO experiencers. It spoke to universal questions about memory, belief, and self-trust. I always knew I wanted the story to be about those things, and about the divergence in memory between two people and what that could do to their relationship. I just didn’t know back then quite how to get at those questions in the best way.

Adam Vitcavage: You went to Roswell in 2015, and the MFA started around 2020. Were you writing Voyagers through those five years, or was it in the background?

Meg Charlton: I was noodling on it. I tend to have ideas for projects long before I write them in earnest, in a way that can sometimes be distressing. I’ll go back and fact-check myself and think, oh God, I had that idea eight years ago, and I’m still just getting around to working on it.

It was something I was fiddling with, humming in the background like a computer program running in the background. But I really began it in earnest, with more seriousness, in 2019.

Adam Vitcavage: Then it goes through the MFA, and you discover everything. Do you have a draft at that point, or do you still have a lot to figure out?

Meg Charlton: I actually have a crazy confession to make about how I wrote this novel. I always knew what the last scene would be, and it did not change. I wrote the last scene in some form quite early, but I did not really finish a complete draft of the novel until after I had signed with my agent and we were getting it out to publishers. It was a strange process in retrospect. If there’s something sticky for me in a story, at least with this particular story, I found it hard to write through to the end. But once I did, it all came together.

Adam Vitcavage: So fascinating. Part of Debutiful is that journey, so now we’re going to time-jump to getting an agent. Without a finished draft, then? Walk us through this.

Meg Charlton: This is an even longer-winded story. Someone in my Goodreads reviews, which I know I shouldn’t read, was like, “God, Alex as a narrator really takes the long way around. Very long-winded, discursive narration.” I was like, buckle up, babe. It comes by it honestly. That’s how I talk and how I think.

Anyway, I will give you the short version of the long story. When I had first started the MFA, a friend from my film life reached out and said she knew some producers who were looking for science-fiction short stories. They read mine, and one got optioned. They were like, great, we’ll send over the contract. I was like, totally, let me just call my agent. I did not, obviously, have an agent.

I frantically called everyone I knew and eventually got connected, right before Christmas of 2020, with my film rights agent, Alice Lawson over at Gersh. Then I was working on adapting that project, working on lots of other things for the MFA - short stories, another novel. At the Brooklyn College agent panel, I met my current agent, Danielle. I told her about Voyagers, and she was like, that sounds great.

Every six months, she would email me and ask, have you finished Voyagers yet? I would have to very shamefacedly write back, no, I haven’t finished it yet. She had worked with my film rights agent before, and finally Alice was like, just send her what you have and see if she likes it. She short-circuited my perfectionism and anxiety.

I sent Danielle the first 80 pages of the novel and gave her a pitch for the rest of the story. She signed me off that. Then it took another year for me to finish the draft and get it to a place where we could send it out.

Adam Vitcavage: From the first 80 pages to the finished draft that year, how involved was she?

Meg Charlton: We tried different strategies to trick me into producing the work. At first, I would send her pages, and then we would do brainstorming phone calls. Ultimately, the thing that was the most useful for me was what has always been most useful for me - maybe a holdover from my journalism days - one big, scary deadline. That was the strategy that worked best, and that was how we got it over the finish line.

Adam Vitcavage: Danielle, your agent, is someone whose books I have read a lot of. Among the agents I love to read, Danielle is definitely near the top of my “I’ll read anything she represents” list.

Meg Charlton: She’s phenomenal. I adore Danielle. She’s so patient with me and has been such a good business partner and creative sounding board. I feel very lucky that I have her in my corner.

Adam Vitcavage: I used to say I looked at the blurbs, then the imprint, then the editors. Now I really look at the agents. I understand agents are in it for business, but they pick good writers to represent their business. Danielle Bukowski is one of the top literary agents I follow - who she’s signing, who she’s working with. It’s great to hear that your relationship with her has blossomed into this beautiful book.

Meg Charlton: Thank you. She’s a huge part of why this book exists.

Adam Vitcavage: What were some of the hurdles you had to get over? You had the 80 pages, the pitch, the ending. What was difficult with Voyagers?

Meg Charlton: One of my professors at Brooklyn College, Josh Henkin, the head of the program, would always say that one of the most difficult things is getting your characters into the car. Meaning the logistical interstitials of life are challenging to write. So much of the plot of this book is literally getting a character in the car. It was classic second-act trouble. How do we get Alex across the country and make that feel interesting and lively, and make it a worthy skeleton upon which the rest of his memories can live?

Then, of course, once I sold the book, it changed further still. There were even more things discovered and added that I’m now like, God, I can’t believe that wasn’t in there.

Adam Vitcavage: These are the stories I love to hear from writers, because I talk to a lot of writers at varying stages of their careers. Writers starting out often have this vision, and I’m like: you have this vision, but it’s probably going to change. The truth will be there, the kernel will be there, but there are things you don’t even know need to be in this story for it to be your best story.

Meg Charlton: Completely. I feel like this goes back to what I was saying at the beginning about momentary identities. The book has changed so much and shifted so much. That’s something exciting about thinking about it coming out into the world and belonging to readers now: it’ll keep changing, hopefully.

Adam Vitcavage: I asked what the 2020 version of Voyagers was, and I haven’t really asked writers this in a while. There’s the publicity copy. There are people who are going to say it’s the alien novel - the easy ways to get it into readers’ hands. But what is it to you? What is Voyagers now?

Meg Charlton: That’s such a good question. I think it is still, in a lot of ways, that 2020 version. It is about what it means to share a reality with someone, and what it does to a relationship when that reality starts to destabilize, when that shared story begins to come apart.

I think it’s remained about what narrative, memory, belief, and change can do to a relationship and a friendship, and then uncovering what remains beneath that. How much can change and still keep that bond the same?

Adam Vitcavage: When I was reading this last year - it was November or December for sure - I was going through a metamorphosis with certain friends. It was the idea of: is this friendship worth the new version of what the friendship is versus what it has been? I was also back home with my mother for the first time during the holidays, and it was just a lot of: who are we? What are we doing?

Meg Charlton: I feel like this isn’t an explicit question in the book, but it’s an implicit question that Alex and Ana are asking themselves: would we be friends if we met now? Would that spark we saw in each other as six-year-olds still be there if we met when we were 34?

That is a question for so many lifelong relationships. How will this bond transform over time? How much can it contain and hold of the different versions of ourselves that we pass through? That was really interesting to me, and I wanted to explore it in this book.

Adam Vitcavage: Throughout the entire journey, you also started teaching writing fiction. Why? Because not every writer wants to teach writing.

Meg Charlton: Part of it is that I am the rare writer who is an extrovert. I remember the Zoom orientation for my MFA, because it started during the pandemic and was all online. They were asking icebreaker questions, and they said, who here identifies as an introvert? Fourteen hands went up. I was the only one who raised my hand for extrovert.

Part of it is that writing is a very lonely process, and I really love seeing other human beings. I love seeing people get excited about writing, talking with them about writing, and sharing my own experiences and idiosyncratic philosophies about story and character - all these things cobbled together from my own reading. It’s been a wonderful turn in my life to be able to teach. I feel very lucky, and I find it very energizing.

Adam Vitcavage: You teach at Sackett Street, which is - for those who don’t know - what is that, and why should writers seek it out?

Meg Charlton: It’s a writing school in New York, and they also offer online classes. I teach in person in Brooklyn. They offer workshop-based classes and craft-focused classes for adults who are interested in writing. It’s all people who really want to be there.

I have worked with college students, some of whom are more reluctant to be working on their writing. At Sackett Street, people are pretty excited about it and come in with different levels of experience and different levels of academic or formal backgrounds in writing or literature.

What excites me is getting to see people push themselves as artists. I get to see people in pretty early stages, or middle-to-early stages, of their writing journeys produce things that blow me away. That gets me excited for their own transformation of that into maybe a finished product, or maybe that just becomes the thing that gives them confidence to make the real finished product.

I always try to encourage them that the act of creation is a reward in and of itself. I do a lot of in-class writing in my classes to get people to start generating and creating, and also to trust that they will come up with more ideas, that ideas are themselves generative of more ideas. Looking at the world as a writer or as an artist is such a treat. It makes everything interesting. To bring that lens to the world - or see people, like I’m imagining someone at the optometrist adjusting the little dials and the image gets sharper - to see them sharpening that image is very exciting.

Adam Vitcavage: Outside of doing publicity and teaching, what have you been enjoying lately - books, TV, movies?

Meg Charlton: In terms of reading, I have this whole giant stack of books I’ve been saving, all debuts. One of them is Natalie Adler’s Waiting on a Friend, which I have read before because we were in the MFA together and she’s a dear friend, but you’ve got to read it in hard copy. The Memory Museum by M. Lin, who was also a guest on your show. Harmless by Miranda Shulman. The Undead by Svetlana Dashkova. Names Have Been Changed by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. The Red Sacrament by Sarah Hinckley. New Skin by Sarah Wang. And Nerve Damage by Annakeara Stinson. Those are all stacked up waiting for me to read.

I’m a big Criterion head. I’m always going into whatever their latest collection is. Recently my husband and I have been watching the Emile de Antonio collection, which has been fun. I mean, fun is maybe a strong word for a verite documentary about McCarthy, but it’s been a fun project to work through his catalog.

Here are 10 of the Best Debut Nonfiction of 2026 (So Far).

June brings the Best Debut Books of 2026 (So Far) list. It’s a culmination of reading dating back to Fall 2025. Still, there are books I missed (and hope to read soon). The adult debut from Melissa Albert is one such title.

The list was included in a roundup from Book Riot, and I think this highlighted sentence really hits my taste right on the head. I’ll read any debut book with damn good writing, but my bias really just wants messy characters navigating the complexities of life. The sadder, the better. The weirder, the better. The hornier, the better.

Coming soon, I’ll release the Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2026 — Part 2. There’s a handful of July-December 2026 books I’ve devoured, and stacks of books I have started. I’m turning my reading attention to October, November, and December soon.

I’ll refrain from listing books I recently finished, so you have to go check out the anticipated list. But trust me when I say some bangers are coming out.

— Adam

Debutiful | Instagram | BlueSky

Book Recs

• The Best Debut Books of 2026 (So Far)

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in June 2026

Podcast Conversations

• Recently… Waiting On a Friend by Natalie Adler — Apple | Spotify

• Coming Soon… Sonia Feldman, Meg Charlton, and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

My Reading Life Q&As

• A Sense of Occasion author Brodie Crellin admires the ambition and agony of My Brilliant Friend

Interviews

• How Shasta Grant Turned Loss, Silence, and Friendship Into Her Debut Novel When We Were Feral, interviewed by Rita Hickey

• Tomás Q. Morín on Dystopia, Grief, and the Feline Voice Behind Cat Love, interviewed by Doug Jones

• 6/6/(2)6: A Devilishly Fun (and Serious) Q&A with Phoning Faust Author Sophie Mutiara Nova

Cover Reveals

• See the cover for Blue Selvage by Preeti Parikh

Let’s keep this short. Click this giant image below to discover the…

The Best Debut Books of 2026 (So Far)

When Debutiful started in 2019, it was supposed to be one interview and one book round-up a month. Maybe it would have been better served as a newsletter, but I really wanted to make a site that could be in conversation with sites like Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the Millions. Their baby brother, so to speak.

I never imagined hosting a podcast; however, publicists were asking if I had plans for one by the end of 2019, and I decided to spin off the website.

The podcast has helped me grow an audience. Monthly traffic is now greater than all of 2019’s traffic.

The dirty little secret? The podcast accounted for only 17.18% of total traffic in 2025. It’s down to 10.42% this year. Episodes still do great, but here’s what people are clicking on, reading, and listening to.

So, What Are People Reading and Listening To?

Here are the types of content I do most frequently, along with the percentage of traffic they account for. I took the top 100 most trafficked articles and podcast episodes from 2026, which include those published in pre-2026 and still getting traffic. (Note: I am terrible at math, data, and analytics. But I think I got all of this correct!)

% of Total Top 100 Most-Trafficked

• Most Anticipated… 15.7% (only 2x/year)

• Best Of… 12.9% (only 2x/year)

• Monthly Roundups… 12.1% (2x/month)

• Podcast Episodes… 11.2% (~3x/month)

• My Reading Life Q&As… 9.7%

• Website Interviews… 9.4%

• Author Recommendation Lists… 8.7%

• Cover Reveals… 6.3%

  

What Exactly is the Most-Read?

The Internet loves discovering books via lists. They dominate the most-read articles. Here are the most-read articles from January 1 to June 9, 2026. Some of the articles listed throughout the rest of the email were published before the new year, and it only takes into consideration data from this year. I did not account for any traffic pre-2026.

• The Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2026, Part One (Dec. 16, 2025)

• The Best Debut Books of 2025 (Nov. 17, 2025)

• 13 Works of Sapphic Asian Historical Fiction by Wen-yi Lee (Oct. 24, 2025)

• The Best Debut Poetry Collections of 2025 (Nov. 23, 2025)

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in March 2026 (Mar. 2, 2026)

• See the cover for Appetite by P. Paramita (Feb. 19, 2026)

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in January 2026 (Jan. 5, 2026)

• The Best Debut Books of 2025 (So Far) (June 16, 2025)

• Murder Bimbo author Rebecca Novack is always looking for a perfect Michael Crichton smell-alike (Feb. 11, 2026)

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in February 2026 (Feb. 2, 2026)

Only three of those weren’t roundups. Wen-yi Lee’s themed recommendations, P. Paramita’s cover reveal, and Rebecca Novack’s My Reading Life Q&A truly cracked through the noise.

That’s A Lot of Lists… Any Interviews?

While lists are Debutiful’s bread-and-butter (and why I take them so seriously, often losing sleep over the Best Of and Most Anticipated), interviews on the site are surging. These are the top 10 from both the website and podcast, including the aforementioned Novack Q&A.

• Murder Bimbo author Rebecca Novack is always looking for a perfect Michael Crichton smell-alike (Feb. 10, 2026)

• Imani Thompson on Writing Honey, Misogyny, and the Lovable Psychopath (May 7. 2026)

• My Reading Life: The Compound author Aisling Rawle’s first book love was The Wind in the Willows (July 17, 2025)

• Inside The Body Builders: Albertine Clarke on Dreams, Identity, and the Psychology of Writing (Mar. 5, 2026)

• Debut Author Tara Menon Explores Friendship and Grief in Under Water, Spanning Tsunami to Hurricane Sandy (Mar. 19, 2026)

• My Reading Life: The Hounding author Xenobe Purvis admires the toughness of Jane Eyre (Aug. 19, 2025)

• Harmless by Miranda Shulman - How To Write Four First Drafts And Still Love Your Novel (Apr. 8, 2026)

• Take It From Me by Alia Hanna Habib: Let’s Talk About Nonfiction Careers (Jan. 22, 2026)

• She Made Herself a Monster by Anna Kovatcheva - Surprising Yourself With Every Draft (Feb. 12, 2026)

• The Fountain by Casey Scieszka: The Ever-Evolving Journey to Writing a Book (Mar. 18, 2026)

Of the top interviews, three are My Reading Life Q&As (two from last year), four are podcasts, and three are conversations conducted by guest interviewers, something new I am trying this year to free up more time.

But Isn’t Debutiful a Podcast?

Because Debutiful has been listed as a Best Book Podcast by various outlets, it’s easy to think of Debutiful as a podcast. So, here’s the data for those who only listen and miss out on 80% of what we do!

Overall, the most-listened to episodes hover between the 30th and 50th most-trafficked of the year, including all lists, cover reveals^, and other articles.

• Harmless by Miranda Shulman - How To Write Four First Drafts And Still Love Your Novel (Apr. 8, 2026)

• Take It From Me by Alia Hanna Habib: Let’s Talk About Nonfiction Careers (Jan. 22, 2026)

• She Made Herself a Monster by Anna Kovatcheva - Surprising Yourself With Every Draft (Feb. 12, 2026)

• The Fountain by Casey Scieszka: The Ever-Evolving Journey to Writing a Book (Mar. 18, 2026)

• Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran: Queer Academia and Gothic Horror (Mar. 25, 2026)

• Squirming by Monika Ostrowska - Writers Should Be Readers (Apr. 23, 2026)

• Escape! by Stephen Fishbach - Behind-the-Scenes of the Great American Reality TV Novel (Jan. 29, 2026)

• Scavengers by Kathleen Boland: How the American West Inspires Her Writing (Jan. 14, 2026)

• Debuti-Vault: Brandon Taylor Discusses Real Life (2020) (Mar. 11, 2026)

• Salvation by C. William Langsfeld - Dispatches from the Western Slope (Feb. 5, 2026)

^Outside of Paramita’s cover reveal catching fire, both reveals for Women in Marigold by Mansi Dahal and Voyagers by Meg Charlton received more traffic than the any of podcasts listed above!

So… What’s Next?

The website will continue to expand the types of coverage we do. The podcast will continue to be hand-selected guests (please, you don’t need to pitch a “guest” — pitch the book, and the rest will follow).

Debutiful started as a side-project. I was hustling, begging for copies of books and access to debut writers. Now, I have over 2,000 pitches for 2026 titles ranging from Big 5’s lead titles to university and indie presses to self-published writers. I get dozens of galleys and PDFs sent to me a week. It’s become a major part of my life. Some say it’s become an unhealthy identity. (Sometimes my therapist hears me question if it is worth it because there are outlets and podcasts doing way bigger numbers and bookstagram accounts posting photos and getting countless likes.)

I want to keep helping readers discover debut books and provide a place for writers to share their voices.

If you’re still reading this, thank you.

I read so early (3-8 months ahead of pub date) to not be influenced by trade reviews, social media hype, or other Most Anticipated Lists.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When it comes to June’s Best Of (So Far) and November’s Best Of the Year lists, I sit down with a blank piece of paper and list all of the books I can’t stop thinking about. I don’t hem and haw over what month the book came out, the demographics of the writer, what imprint published the title, or anything like that.

I simply ask: Do I remember loving the experience of reading this book?

These become Debutiful’s Best Debuts.

This year’s Best Debut Books of 2026 (So Far) features 30 titles. That’s a lot. I aim for 26 — one book for every week of the year. My lists are usually mostly novels, short story collections, and poetry collections. There are usually a few nonfiction titles, but not always.

The list comes out on June 10th.

— Adam

Debutiful | Instagram | BlueSky

Book Recs

• 12 noteworthy debut books to read in June 2026

• 20 debut books to discover from May 2026

Podcast Conversations

• Waiting On a Friend by Natalie Adler — Apple | Spotify

• Coming Soon… Sonia Feldman, Meg Charlton, and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

My Reading Life Q&As

• F. Scott Fitzgerald is Debut Author Haili Blassingame’s Literary Daddy

• P.C. Verrone read through all of Toni Morrison while writing Rabbit, Fox, Tar

• Valley of the Moms by Hannah Selinger is a thriller very much rooted in place

• Fancy Meeting You author Louise Marburg wishes she had read Our Bodies, Ourselves as a teenager

Book Lists

• Seven Novels About Trips Gone Wrong Recommended by Vincent Chu

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.