The plot is moving forward, the point of view changes are crisp, and I like the characters. I feel the pressure of the bigger political world impacting the small community where the story is set. The writing is strong. I can see and smell the landscape.

So why isn’t the book working for me? Plots are supposed to feel inexorable, like we are being pulled forward, and I think this novel has that in terms of its craftsmanship, but I just don’t care whether I turn the page. It’s fine. It’s a book that’s fine. It’s not necessarily predictable, but there are no surprises either. Every piece fits with every other piece. And of course the scene that follows the scene I’m reading will push the characters closer to the ending. Because it’s a best-selling book. And that’s how storytelling is supposed to work. I’m just not into it.

This spring, I took my teenager on my sales conference trip to the Bay Area. She loved the food and the thrifting, but when she spotted Alcatraz in the distance? It became her obsession. Even more so because all boat tours were canceled that weekend. For weeks after, my teen would come up to me and say, “Mother, I yearn for Alcatraz.”

The human brain is astonishing. When I’m reading, I want to be delighted and surprised and charmed the way I was when my teen said “I yearn for Alcatraz.” The contrast between the verb—yearning, such a great word—and the notorious prison island as the subject of her desperate wanting, preceded by the stiff formality of Mother. (And yes I asked her permission to share her longing in this essay.)

If AI can talk to people and tell them what they want to hear to the point of disrupting relationships with real human beings, and if stories that sell the best are ones that are predictable, then what’s our course as artists? As readers?

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, and for sure I do love predictable books when I need a soft space to cradle my heart for a while, but more and more, I want to double down on the not-expected. To be surprised as a reader and to surprise as a writer, not with blood and gore because those aren’t my jam, but with invention and metaphor, with humor and peculiarity.

Mother, I yearn for Alcatraz.

I yearn for the unhinged bit of dialogue. The strange thing said earnestly. The messy misstep. The story that looks like it’s going one way, but then it turns.

Which brings me to The Sea-Glass Shore by Julie Salmon Kelleher. Forest Avenue’s Sept. 1 release is a selkie story that is not about entrapment and escape like the original seal-person myth. It’s a novel about what it takes to stay—in a marriage, in a family, in a community, in an environment—and the cost of that commitment. We’re calling it a midlife selkie story and it’s set in a fictional version of Bellingham, Washington. Rona, the selkie, agrees to live on land with the archivist, Jack, who falls for her—because in Julie’s version, Jack opts out of the myth. He knows better. He swears he won’t steal Rona’s pelt. He wants her to stay for love, for him and their twins, not because she’s trapped. It’s also the rare fantastical novel that has parenting at its core.

I’ve read synopses of other literary selkie retellings and they all stick to the bones of the myth: the selkie, often female, gets trapped by a male human on land until she finds her stolen pelt and returns to the sea. But what about a real love story? Where there is love on both sides? And what about the middle of their lives? The middle is full of surprises—in real life and in Julie’s debut novel. Which is available starting Tuesday at your local independent bookstore or online at bookshop.org.

I remember finding this manuscript in our digital submissions folder and saying to myself, Oh. Oh! It’s gorgeous in terms of the writing and the clarity of the landscape. It’s otherworldly but deeply human. It never stagnates or settles, the way a big idea can sometimes fall flat a handful of chapters in. It’s accessible; Julie takes good care of the reader in describing how their pelts work and the call of the sea. And it’s surprising. Nothing about The Sea-Glass Shore is predictable.

It’s the kind of book nobody but its author could have possibly written.

When I sit down to draw a cartoon, it might not come out the way I expected, but it’s 100 percent original. And that is what I look for in my reading, in acquisitions, and in my everyday life. Originality, and the surprise and delight that come with experiencing a real person’s creativity.

You might even say I yearn for it.

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Julie and Ken Jones had a fabulous conversation about the novel, selkie tales, and the path to publication on Ken’s KBOO radio show, Jonesy. You can listen to that episode here.

The launch will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 1, at Village Books in Fairhaven. My friend Dian and I are traveling north for it! Expect to see some photos on my social media and on Julie’s; you can find her on Insta at julieskelleher and Bluesky at julieskelleher.

She’ll be in Seattle at Third Place Books Ravenna, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 10.

And for Portland friends, at 7 p.m., on Monday, Oct. 5, she’ll be in conversation with Michelle Ruiz Keil at Annie Bloom’s Books.

Does The Sea-Glass Shore sound like your kind of novel? Have you read a best-seller that’s fallen flat for you? Should I give up on the book I’m reading? Do you yearn for Alcatraz?

Jon Mayes, a former PGW rep and an absolute legend among book-biz folks, reviewed the novel, saying “The characters—Violet, Minnow, George, Sally, and Matthew, all of them are essential to this story’s telling—prompted me to put the book down repeatedly and sigh over how good it is.”

Swoon! This is not only amazing because I respect Jon so much—he sold Forest Avenue books to southern booksellers when I first got distribution—but because it’s my first actual review for this novel.

Jon interviewed me on his blog, Advance Reading Copy. You should totally pause and read our conversation if you haven’t. I was so charmed by his questions that I want to share some of the stories behind my answers.

This photo was taken after hours at the Berlin Zoo. It was before the Berlin Wall came down. My parents brought me as part of a Musical Box Society International conference, and the currency conversion rate between the dollar and the West German Deutsche Mark was in our favor. One of the conference organizers worked at the zoo, I think? I remember being noticed as the only kid there, and invited to hold this baby orangutan, but most of all, I remember how soft and comfortable she was glomming on to me, like she trusted me immediately. I held her until my arms got tired.

I used to always wear these headbands with bows on them, even though the metal ends dug into my scalp. It was very important to color coordinate my outfit with my headband.

This isn’t the best photo—I snapped it years ago in Virginia, when my parents were preparing to move to Oregon—but I refer to my post-graduation summer reading list in Jon’s blog, and here it is.

I specifically remember finding How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents in the Chautauqua Library in Chautauqua, New York, during our two-week visit in late July. I remember reading it outside, probably down by the lake, and being so excited to have found such a great treasure in a library that had a lot of elder patrons and a lot of nonfiction.

When I was working on the answers to these questions, my mom shared my dad’s last issue of Horn & Whistle, the magazine he founded at our house in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Publishing is in the family! And The Neighborhood Dames takes place in that house.

My dad’s letter from the editor in that edition was particularly touching; he had decided to step away from the magazine. He wrote, “If I can help someone else to take over the editing and publishing of H&W, I’d be pleased to do so. In any event, I now look forward to enjoying the luxury of a deadline-free life for a while—until I get involved in something else!”

Who does that sound like? Oh right. Me.

Here’s my dad in the office where he, not that many years after this was taken, worked tirelessly on Horn & Whistle. I wore a lot of red as a kid—it didn’t show stains—but have no recollection of my footwear. Are those slippers?

My dad used to spread the pages and proofs across that long desk. Also: check out that computer! Is it even a computer? I know we had a computer before anyone else did, and my dad set me up with my own monitor, which I thought was a separate computer. Ha! I spent time right there, at my dad’s desk, to play “Hunt the Wumpus,” a text-based computer game I loved. Maybe that’s why I was there in this moment. Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved bats. They used to come out of nowhere to whisk you away to another cave while you were hunting the Wumpus.

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Assorted news and links

Liz Prato’s guest post about lists, and not appearing on them, was followed by Purgatoire appearing on two actual lists!

Huge thanks to Wendy Fox and Electric Lit for this list, “The Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Summer,” which includes Purgatoire and Vincent Chu’s Nice Places—our two spring books at Forest Avenue. Check it out and add to your reading list. There’s still plenty of summer left!

Purgatoire also made a summer list in Westword, the Colorado magazine: “Your 2026 Denver Summer Reading List.” Since Liz’s book is set in Colorado, having local coverage feels extra special.

And in addition, Who Killed One the Gun? by Gigi Little appeared on its first list in Book Riot! The novel came out in October 2025, so that makes it extra exciting to see some organic buzz show up way longer than three months post-publication.

I took this photo on the last day of the Lloyd Center here in Portland, Oregon, and it makes me think about time loops and Gigi’s book.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear from you about any childhood memories or childhood books that come to mind after reading my interview with Jon Mayes. (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble fans, say hey!)

By LIZ PRATO

In the world of book publishing, there are (way too) many sources of external validation that will hopefully also increases sales: reviews in a major(-ish) media outlet, being picked for a book club bigger than your mom and her neighbor, a social media influencer gushing over your book, and appearing on “a list.” You know, those recommended reading lists called “Best Historical Fiction of the Year” or “7 Books We’re Loving This Week” or “Top Summer Travel Reads” (I threw that last one on there because my book Volcanoes, Palm Trees and Privilege actually hit that NYT list in 2019, a phenomenon I now refer to as “lighting in a bottle” or “that joint hallucination that occurred the summer before Covid”).

So far, my new novel, Purgatoire, has been on a grand total of one list. It’s a good one, don’t get me wrong: The Denver Public Library included it among 15 works of fiction they recommend for Immigrant Heritage Month. I’m in the award-winning company of Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees), among others. But because writers are generally insane, I keep thinking about all the lists my book didn’t appear on, that I sort of (absolutely, totally) hoped it would.

What follows are actual published recommended reading lists with specific themes that Purgatoire fit perfectly—but was not included on—divided into three categories: Join the Club, If I Had a Time Machine, and Okay, Now They’re Just Mocking Me.

Join the Club

Purgatoire is a perfect fit for these lists—as are about 10,000 other books. I choose to believe that my book didn’t make these mostly because there were so many to pick from and a limited length for each list. Like, if it was a list of eight novels, mine would have been ninth. Humor me here.

1. Small Press Books About Motherhood

Nearly every chapter in Purgatoire is, in one way or another, about motherhood. The first chapter is about Jan, in a loveless marriage and trying to figure out how to care for her children. The next chapter, titled “In the Name of the Mother,” chronicles Sabé coming over to America alone in 1910. Her sole focus is making enough money so she can reunite with her children, who she left in Italy. Another mother exchanges letters with her son in Turin studying violin. In “Partita,” siblings coming together to bury their mother. There’s even a chapter written from the standpoint of a mama cat.

2. Books About Bad Fathers

A big question driving Purgatoire was “Where—and who—was Sabé’s husband, the father of her children?” His abandonment drives secrecy and shame that haunts the family for generations. Not that he’s the only bad father. Jan’s is a barely employable alcoholic. Sabé’s second husband (and stepfather to her sons) never wanted to be a father. Pete Sr. is a real piece of work. And then there’s Steve, a good father in many ways, but his bootlegging results in some trips to jail.

3. Essential Novels of Sisterhood

Listen, I loved the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan quartet—they got me through Covid lockdown—but I was so annoyed at the competition between Lenú and Lila that continues until they are grown-ass older women. Pitting women against each other in rivalry is a theme that has been mined for centuries, and Purgatoire subverts that narrative, showing women who support each other in sisterhood.

If I Had a Time Machine

Okay, to be fair: these lists came out before my book came out—by a number of years, in some cases. So I’d like to believe that if these lists were concurrent with my book, Purgatoire would be on them. A girl can dream, right?

4. Books That Investigate Family History with Imagination

This is literally how Purgatoire is described! In researching my family history, I hit brick walls that I couldn’t break through—and I’m a pretty good researcher, to an almost-creepy extent. It drove me absolutely nuts that I didn’t have access to this part of my family history. So one day I thought, “What if I just make it up?” And that’s what I did: I imagined my family history into being. All the characters in Purgatoire were my ancestors. I combined the few facts I knew about them with a whole lot of imagination to create a complete world.

5. Books that Unpack A Complicated Family Inheritance

The reason Purgatoire starts in 1975 and then goes back to 1910 is to unpack the question of “How did we get here?” How did we become the kind of family that operates in secrets and shame? Inheritance isn’t always—or even usually—about physicals objects and financial resources. It’s the dynamics of how family members treat each other, and how they handle good and bad times. Purgatoire traces how those choices echo across generations.

6. Books About Haunted Motherhood

Ghosts—yep, I got ‘em! Las Animas, or the “fantasmi,” are the spirits stranded between realms that talk to a main character, Perina. When Perina was a teenager, her own mother was so worried about the chatty spirits that she moved the family to another state to escape them. Ultimately, Perina returned to the land of las animas, where she became mother to Junior and Betty. The spirits don’t mean harm, but sometimes their poorly-timed lamentations create tribulations for Perina. And there’s one ghost in particular who does end up haunting her.

Okay, Now They’re Just Mocking Me

These recommended reading lists are so exactly about what Purgatoire is about that it’s like they’re messing with me. Mostly, it’s proof of how difficult and random it is to make a mark in the publishing world. You can write a great book and have a great publisher who really puts their all into publicity, and still get bupkus.

7. Books About Women Migrant Workers that attend to the realities of labor and trace the intersections of gender, economics, and migration.

When poor, uneducated men migrated to the U.S., they could work at a number of different jobs: miner, farm worker, saloon keeper, laborer, clerk, butcher, etc. Women could be maids, or . . . somewhere on the spectrum between entertainer and sex worker. Usually, their best bet was marrying a man. But when Sabé thought she was joining her husband in the U.S. and he ended up not being there, what was she supposed to do? How was she supposed to support herself, to not just survive, but also reunite with her sons?

8. Books That Use Family Archives to Break Generational Silence

See above: “Books That Investigate Family History with Imagination.” I did a crazy amount of research, utilizing Ancestry, old newspapers, the National Archives, and family artifacts (pictures, birth certificates, naturalization papers, etc.) to create a bigger, fuller history, and specifically to try to answer the question: Why did my great grandfather abandon his wife and children? And what had he done that was so terrible, that it was literally unspeakable, and became my family’s most closely guarded secret?

9. Books About Cats (and Their Owners)

Perina—the spirit talker—brings a cat, Luna, into the family. Luna is not only immortal and therefore shows up across several decades, but she narrates her own chapter. Oh, and my cover designer, Gigi Little, even put Luna on the cover!

10. Novels That Showcase Queer Domesticity

Okay, this one might be on me, or on the way the book works. Because there is a sort of a SPOILER in revealing the specific queer domesticity in Purgatoire that comes late in the book (don’t fret: I won’t be specific here). The book’s cover description includes the phrase “queer folks escape to secret spaces,” which makes it sound like they’re all in dark, hushed rooms. They’re not. They’re at parties and in kitchens and front parlors. They cook, they shop, they care for the household and each other. They are each other’s family.

It Goes to 11

But then there’s this other list, one that isn’t quantifiable but has immense value:

11. Your Reading List

Whether it’s your nightstand stack, your wish list, your holds at the library, your Goodreads “want to read/did read,” or “You know, I’ve been thinking of picking that up” list, it’s the one that really matters. Because always, no matter what, books exist and books thrive because of readers. Small press books like Purgatoire tend to succeed not through big splashes, but by reaching individual readers. It’s about making a connection. Maybe it’s because your ancestors came over to the U.S. and struggled to make a life. Or because you want to read a story that has stakes, but not trauma. Because you, also, have wondered how to turn family history into fiction. Maybe you like ghosts. Or maybe Purgatoire is on your list because we’re friends and you support me, and you support Forest Avenue Press. Whatever the reason, your list is the one that I hold in my heart.

Buy Purgatoire at Powell’s, which named it their 2026 Pick for Portland, or wherever you buy books.

Conversation starter: If you’re a published author, what’s a list your latest book would be perfect for? Go ahead and dream with us! Feel free to leave a comment here or reply to this email if you are a subscriber.

I wrote The Neighborhood Dames because I wanted to put a theater organ in the middle of my plot. Which meant the story had to be set in the Roaring Twenties.

This epiphany occurred at a writers’ meetup, where I met someone who had a theater organ in his book. My dad actually restored and saved a Wurlitzer that was originally in a Hollywood radio studio. I had grown up with pipes being re-leathered in the barn and tuners coming from out of state and my dad climbing around in the pipe chambers to find a cipher, which is a pipe that’s stuck open.

.So when I heard of an author putting an organ in his book, I was gobsmacked. I could do that too! Which meant I needed a plot to support an enormous musical instrument.

I started my brainstorming with where the organ ought to be installed. The answer was immediate: our living room, in our small New Jersey town. If an organ had fit there, we wouldn’t have moved to Virginia my junior year of high school. I could have stayed with my friends and community and favorite teachers.

In fiction, a writer can make the choices that weren’t possible in real life. So I set my new manuscript in that beloved house, an English Tudor on the National Historic Register. I didn’t realize, in creating this setup, how delightful it would be to wander through the rooms of my childhood. I revisited the front bedroom, with the handmade glass panes, and the radiator where I used to play. I crawled around on the basement floor, peeling dark green paint off the concrete in the machine shop, even though I wasn’t supposed to.

I didn’t lose months or years to figuring out the logistics of place; I knew everything about that home and the streets around it.

The young woman who grew from my imagination had a lot of anxiety about leaving her house. She knew each room with the warmth and comfort I equated with living there. I somehow knew she was unwilling to marry because… why? Well, I had to figure that part out.

Her name, Violet, appeared because in my twenties, I used to love violet pastilles, these circular old-fashioned candies with anise seeds in them. I didn’t love the anise. Violet is privileged and sheltered, and she cares deeply, but she doesn’t know how to express that to her community. Or how to help. She yearns to be connected and supportive, but she’s too cut off from her neighbors to actually interact with any of them. So she channels her wanting into being a devoted daughter.

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Since Violet belonged in my childhood home, which was full of instruments and music boxes, she also had to have some connection to music. Which brought me back to the idea of a Wurlitzer.

I didn’t know how I could get an organ installed in my plot—to engineer a reason to have one inside a private home—but I knew they’d have to have lavish parties. Gatsby-esque parties. And to justify having a giant musical instrument that took a skilled performer and a team of maintenance people, the person throwing the parties would need to have a reason. I decided her father would be a bootlegger. That fit with the party idea, needing to schmooze with large numbers of people.

So then I had Violet, the house, the bootlegging, and parties.

In the novel that became The Neighborhood Dames, I put a piano in the living room. Where, I expected, the Wurlitzer organ would eventually go. Except a funny thing happened when Violet began taking piano lessons. She started making up tunes and lyrics to amuse her father. I still thought the organ would appear—eventually. But then a new girl moved in next door and they became best friends, growing up and fighting, and reuniting, and Violet yearned to be as cool and as pretty as her friend.

What’s their story? I wondered.

I guess I just have to put a Wurlitzer in the next novel.

The Neighborhood Dames will be out from Ooligan Press on Nov. 2. If you’re a reviewer and would like a copy, reach out and I’ll put you in touch with my publicity team! If you’re a librarian going to ALA, stop by the Ingram booth on Sunday at 11, and I’ll sign a copy for you. Everyone else: you can pre-order from your local bookstore.

In other news…

Local journalist Zane Sparling, 33, died from cancer yesterday. He was a phenomenal reporter, fearless and funny. I admired him so much. You can read the Oregonian’s tribute here. I’m gutted for his family and loved ones and for all the readers who looked eagerly for his bylines.

Vincent Chu’s Nice Places came out on June 2 and it has been reviewed in The San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, and Alta Journal!

Imagine a Door won two silver awards in the Foreword INDIES in the craft and reference categories. That brings its total up to four medals: The Memoir Prize in the craft category, a silver in the Nautilus Prize in the creativity and innovation category, and two INDIES. If you’re a writing or publishing teacher and want a desk copy to consider for classroom use, please reach out!

Purgatoire by Liz Prato was named a staff pick by the Denver Public Library! For Portland folks, she’ll be in conversation at 6 p.m. tomorrow, June 23, with Suzy Vitello at Broadway Books.

A portrait of me by K.B. Dixon was featured in Oregon Arts Watch as part of the photographer’s series “The Cultural Landscape.” I’m honored to be among the many artists, authors, and photographers he’s captured with his lens.

I am working on our spring 2027 titles now: Everything Is Freedom by Angela Ajayi and The Red Heads by Rachel King. Can’t wait to share these projects with everyone!

For discussion: Writers, what are you working on? Is it inspired by, or set in, a place that’s meaningful to you? Feel free to respond in the comments so we can get a conversation going or email me directly.

The scammers are using hope to trick authors into engaging. Of course we all want our work to be discovered by someone who believes in it! But if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably false. These emails are no different than the people claiming I need a (nonexistent) compliance key on my website, or the “bills” that urge recipients to click on phishing links.

Writers started reaching out to me and one of my editors this spring, asking if we really want to work with them. The people I heard from all had self-published work on Amazon, which if you know me, isn’t where I’d be looking for new projects. None of the projects had anything to do with what I publish. The “editor” who had reached out to these authors clearly identified themself as an acquiring editor for Forest Avenue and included a real photograph of the real person. Creepy.

The person claiming to love your already published book probably has a solid reputation in the industry, or their identity wouldn’t have been stolen. This is good news: you can look up the real person.

Tip 1: Read some interviews with the actual person to get a sense of how they sound. The flat AI-driven voice of these scam emails will sound different and this can help you quickly get clarity.

Some of the targeted authors got into conversations with the fake “editor” before reaching out to me directly. I worry that for every person who reached out to ask, others believed Forest Avenue really wanted to introduce them to an agent, who would then “sell” the book to our press. I worry even more that authors have been scammed out of money because they think someone from my company cares about them.

Tip 2: In publishing, money should always flow from the press to the author, unless you’re working with a hybrid press or an author service (publicity, editing, etc.). The first scam emails try to develop trust before the financial ask is delivered.

We’ve worked so hard to build something special, to be trustworthy for our readers and to centralize open communication with our authors. Milking authors by building them up and then asking them to pay is the opposite of everything we stand for. I can’t tell you how discouraging this is.

Tip 3: Read between the lines. What is the person asking? Is it concrete or general? The less specific, the more likely they’re playing you for information, which they’ll use to exploit you. (Remember, this is all a lead-up to a request for payment.)

These scams run on AI-generated compliments for books already in print, and they can be very flattering. We are all starved for readers actually spending time with our work—especially after the launch buzz dies down. That’s how and why this scam gets people. They (we) feel seen. Which says so much about our literary culture right now. How hard it is to find readers after we work so hard on creating work that is meaningful, especially as book sections at newspapers continue to shutter.

Even when authors post to warn others about receiving scam emails, they often share the lush compliments they’ve received—like, isn’t it great that the scammer really understands what I was trying to do? I get that impulse. It’s hard to receive praise and delete it immediately, as the writers, are hoping for heartfelt reactions exactly like the computer-generated ones. That’s how these people are getting authors to believe in them and eventually buy in financially to whatever “services” they offer. Making authors feel seen.

Tip 4: Ignore the praise—don’t even read it—and look at what other clues are in the email. Can you spot the ask? If not, if it’s unclear, it’s probably spam. A real person would come right out and explain their request.

Just this week, I received a phishing email claiming to be from a major editor at a large independent press. I love this press. But I knew right away: this editor isn’t taking time to reach out to me about a book published by another, still-in-existence press in 2022. That editor’s best-known projects have nothing to do with what I write. I sent the email to the publishing house, so they can try to shut it down.

Here are some other insights gleaned from this barrage of fakery:

• It’s unlikely an editor or publisher will reach out to you about an already-published book. Especially if your book is in a different genre than what the “editor” usually acquires.

• Lately, all the scam emails have come from gmail, with “.editor” or “.agent” as part of the gmail address. I suspect at least some of them are the same person, or group of people, creating false accounts.

• Not all gmail accounts are fake! Bigger presses with IT departments are not using gmail, likely, but some of us small presses do. The .editor or .agent marker may help you sort out the fake ones. Although, again, some legit places probably use that kind of marking.

• For all the authors that think they heard from Forest Ave and have asked us, not one has a book that fits with what we actually publish. Our submissions language and our actual catalog should confirm this at a glance.

• If you get into talks with an “editor” they might try to pass you to another person, who is probably just the same person with a different email address. The language I’ve seen is some version of this: “Are you currently represented by a literary agent? If you are, I’d be happy to continue the conversation through them. If not, I can certainly outline how that process typically works and explore whether there may be a good fit for your work within our publishing program.”

• I’ve noticed that the scammers either use exact names of real people with slightly altered business titles, or they use names that are slightly different from real people in the industry.

• Even if the first email is polished, later ones tend to have grammatical mistakes that point to them coming from people who are not working professionally in publishing. I’m not talking about typos; I’m talking about facility with language, run-ons, and missing punctuation.

• The most recent phishing email I received had less flowery language than previous ones. The scammers might be learning to tone it down a bit in order to sound more realistic.

• I haven’t heard from anyone who actually paid—yet—so I’m not sure when or how the conversation shifts into asking for money, but people don't steal other people’s identities without a reason.

• One of the authors who talked to me told the scammers that they had been in touch with the real Forest Avenue Press, and instead of disappearing, the scammers argued! First they tried to claim confusion and repeated our editor’s real website address, like it was theirs. Then they tried claiming that THEY had put out a scam warning, “after becoming aware of a small number of complaints and misunderstandings regarding outreach that had been imitated or misrepresented by third parties.” Finally they gave away the game: “If you feel you no longer trust me this will be my last message to you however if you still want to proceed and explore my services.” AH HA! Services had never been mentioned until then.

Be aware. Protect yourself. Share these tips and any others with your writer friends. I think it’s going to get even harder to tell real outreach from fake. The Authors Guild keeps a scam reporting resource that is useful, so keep tabs on that. https://authorsguild.org/resource/publishing-scam-alerts/#publisher-impersonators

There’s not much to do, besides deleting and reporting to whoever the scammer is pretending to be.

Although this deluge of fake praise maybe can remind us all to tell authors when we love their books. Real praise means so much more than computer-generated puffery.

Show up for each other. Read each other. Keep making new work.

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Spring 2026 News

Liz Prato’s Purgatoire is now out from Forest Avenue, and it’s earned a starred review from Library Journal and the distinction of being named the 2026 Powell’s Pick for Portland! Earlier this week, she and I appeared in conversation at Annie Bloom’s. Liz is headed to Colorado next. She'll be at the Trinidad History Museum at 5:30 p.m. on May 13 and the Denver Barnes and Noble with Wendy J. Fox at noon on May 16.

Vincent Chu’s Nice Places is forthcoming June 2, and you can see him at these venues. Let me know if you can attend, and/or if you take photos!

If you are a bookseller or reviewer and you want an ARC of The Sea-Glass Shore, the debut novel by Julie Salmon Kelleher, reply to this email! It’s on Edelweiss but I have a number of print ARCs to share as well.

The audiobook edition of Trust Me, Scott Nadelson’s brilliant Oregon-set novel, is 60 percent off right now.

Ooligan Press released a trailer for my new novel, The Neighborhood Dames, due out Nov. 10!

Speaking of The Neighborhood Dames, if you’re a bookseller or reviewer on Edelweiss, you can request a PDF copy from Ooligan!

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Have you been targeted by author scams? Any tips for other authors? Feel free to respond in the comments or to email me directly. I love hearing from you. And I hate that we’re being preyed on collectively.

It feels like we’re living in upside-down world here in Portland, Oregon, based on the president’s assessment of our city as “war-ravaged.” Neighbors linger over coffee and vegan pastries. We push containers of homegrown grapes into each other’s hands now that the tomatoes are done. We share favorite books and recipes. We wear sparkly top hats to walk our dogs—or maybe that’s just me.

The thing is, as many of us keep insisting on social media and to our friends and family in other cities, there’s no crisis. Nothing’s on fire. Don’t believe what they’re saying about our city. It’s not perfect, but it’s not burning.

Two weekends ago, I protested at the local farmers’ market with four other people, about seven minutes’ drive from the ICE facility. We earned waves and honks and conversations. My sign said NO TROOPS on one side, and FIGHT FASCISM on the other. I drew a flower on the fascism side and colored in the bubble letters with paint pens

There are lots of small-group protests at various intersections around Portland on any given day—peaceful but insistent locals intent on not being the silent ones. On not standing by while our neighbors are disappeared. And yes, there are also ongoing protests at the ICE facility in South Waterfront, and there’s news coverage and video footage about the feds who use tear gas and other munitions on mostly peaceful protestors. But that is taking place on one city block in a neighborhood that also boasts excellent coffee, a sweet little park, affordable housing, senior living, medical buildings, the streetcar, a ballet studio, and Blue Star Donuts.

I have spent hours of my life standing in that exact location, picking my kids up from the school that used to be next to ICE, which was forced to relocate this fall. The clouds of tear gas, pepper spray, and other munitions that fall on the playground when the feds respond violently to protestors aren’t poisoning our children, because the children are elsewhere now.

My kids, when they went to school on the same city block as ICE, could walk to and from their favorite spots without adult supervision. They loved being responsible and having agency. They also loved the hot chocolate with flavored whipped cream at one particular coffee shop, because it comes with sprinkles, but even more, they loved the baristas who knew their orders.

Last Tuesday, Oct. 7, the day Kristi Noem, the US Homeland Security Secretary, stood on the ICE building in Portland, local authors and the readers who love them were celebrating the launches of new books. Keith Rosson’s Coffin Moon came out, as did Polly Dugan’s The House of Cavanaugh, Debbi Flittner’s The Ten Thousand Things, and Gigi Little’s Who Killed One the Gun?

Gigi is my author at Forest Avenue Press. Who Killed One the Gun? is a cozy mystery with time loops, noir vibes, and old-time radio lingo. Her big launch party happened that evening at Powell’s City of Books, which is one city block filled with new and used books. Which means it’s brimming with ideas, facts, art, and imagination—and avid readers. Tuesdays are the traditional book-launch days, and Powell’s often puts its featured authors on its iconic marquee—lights up their names in a rite of passage for those fortunate enough to get events there.

Which is how Gigi’s name ended up on CNN, in an Anderson Cooper segment about Noem’s visit and the peacefulness of Portland.

My first time getting an author on a national news show—and it had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with countering propaganda.

A few days later, a similar image landed in The New Republic.

The five-minute CNN segment includes footage of the Trump administration’s claims about Portland, juxtaposed with interviews and voiceovers. In the Powell’s clip, a musician plays his guitar outside the bookstore.

On a block a twelve-minute drive away, where ICE is, there are protests. Where, not that long ago, my children learned to test water quality, how a heart pumps blood, and what a lamprey’s mouth feels like when it sucks your skin.

Seven minutes from there, along my dog-walking route, someone has painted wooden triangles to look like candy corn. They are pressed into the grass with wires that look like spindly legs.

Different blocks, same one city. We can hold them together in our minds, can’t we? Any one by itself isn’t the whole picture. In fact, pick a block, any block, in our wonderland of quirky neighborhoods, and you’ll find street performers, oat milk lattes, neighbors out for a stroll, bakeries and breweries and dance studios and more bookstores.

After Noem’s visit, the White House put out this official statement: “For years, an Antifa-led hellfire has turned Portland into a wasteland of firebombs, beatings, and brazen attacks on federal officers and property.” I have never seen any of these things, despite years of weekday visits to the school next to ICE.

According to multiple news reports of Noem’s visit, she stood on the roof peering down at a small group of protestors and a person in a chicken costume. While this was going on, people in Gigi’s writing group were preparing their own costumes for her book launch. Like the ICE protests, and the flagship Powell’s, Who Killed One the Gun? takes place in one city block. Characters have numbers for names, and each number rhymes with an identity word or phrase. One the Gun, as you’d might expect, is the third-rate gumshoe trying to solve the murder of Five the No Longer Alive.

At the Who Killed One the Gun? launch at Powell’s, Four the Door came in a sandwich-board like costume, complete with a brass doorknob. Six the Kicks was the widow dressed in black. Two the True Blue, One’s brilliant assistant, arrived in blue, of course. A foley artist used a hand-crank wind machine, a pair of black shoes, stubby bar glasses, and other instruments of the sound-effect trade to bring One the Gun’s world to life for the overflow crowd. Just like an old-time radio show, one of Gigi’s inspirations for the novel. One the Gun relives the same day over and over again, making different choices and trying to shift his fate, all in that same city block.

What would our president’s number-name be in this time-loopy tale, one of our Forest Avenue editors wondered afterwards. Forty-five the Contrive? Because what’s being said about our city doesn’t match up with who we are, with how we live? With what we see every day? Our community’s leaders have asked the administration to leave us alone. A judge has blocked the National Guard from being deployed against our city, at least temporarily, although the appeal is being heard now.

Forty-five the Please Don’t Arrive, because our city’s leaders don’t want federal intervention? Or perhaps in true Portland fashion, we can spin some humor into what feels bleak and dangerous. With a doff of the top hat to our farmers’ market culture, how about Forty-Five the Endive? Or Forty-Five the Garlic Chive?

Forty-five, Let Us Thrive. We’re doing just fine. Believe the people who live here, the ones who check in on their neighbors and dress up like frogs to protest and ride bikes naked and make their own candy corn lawn ornaments.

Outside Powell’s on the night of the launch, twelve minutes from ICE and my kids’ former school, I said good night to Two the True Blue and her friends. I almost collided, around the corner, with Four the Door, who was sauntering past the book-cover posters in the store windows, his rectangular placard still slung around his neck. Then I walked Six the Kicks to her car, one city block from mine.

If there were helicopters circling, and there probably were, I was too wrapped up in a good story to worry about them.

Laura Stanfill is the publisher of Forest Avenue Press and the author of Imagine a Door. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where all the bookstores are her favorites.

I’ve felt seen and cherished with Ooligan Press, which acquired my second novel, The Neighborhood Dames, for publication in November 2026. I’m working with teams of students, and so far we've been through developmental edits, marketing plans, and a cover design brief. The next steps will happen this fall—copyediting and a cover! Not only have I reached out in response to my project manager’s queries; I’ve felt empowered and valued.

Recently I got kind of nerdy about distribution and publicity at a cafe meetup. I love these conversations! But then I pressed pause on my mechanics-of-publishing information to share this: communication matters most. You can sign with a fantastic publishing house with top-notch distribution and in-house publicity, but if the staff is slammed and the publicist has too many titles, it can be frustratingly lonely. Working with a micro press with a tight budget, whose publisher invites you to ask questions and weigh in on topics, might feel better to you. Trading reach and visibility for hands-on attention.

Ideally, we would all get the love and support we deserve. And the sales too. I wish wanting this for every author would make it true.

Good communication might not solve everything, but when a timeline changes or a misperception escalates your anxiety, being able to ask questions and get reassurance really matters. After all, you’re the creator. The talent. The person behind the work to be turned into a product.

Over and over again, I meet writers who are in constant conversation with themselves about how much they can ask of their editors (or agents). Is this a legitimate question? Can I ask another a week later, or should I wait longer? Am I being annoying? Sometimes my authors ask me this, and I reassure them that I want to know what they wonder and worry about. I want to be there for them.

I wrote a bit about approaching this feeling as a debut author in Imagine a Door—how I made up stories in my head about communication lags and if I had been too pushy by asking questions. Despite being a publisher, one who often is behind on inbox maintenance, I still felt the need to weigh a question’s importance against the social cost of asking.

Will they think I’m high maintenance if I nudge them?

Am I supposed to know the answer already?

What if they stop liking me/my book?

Part of starting Forest Avenue Press was knowing so many writers who had their hearts broken by the publishing industry, either in the querying phase or after signing an agreement and then feeling left behind as the mechanics of the publishing process took choice away from them. After all, as writers, we linger and agonize over each verb. We replace em dashes with commas and then switch them back to em dashes. We activate our characters and scenes and sacred objects, making artistic decisions alongside the practical ones.

More and more, as a product is elevated as an item to be sold or consumed, the making of that product—that art—fades into the background. But a good relationship with the people working on your book, the fact that you, the writer, made this incredibly original thing should be chiming between you, always. Through every part of the process. Like an aeolian harp set in the window and played by the wind. That sound vibration, the impact of your work on the person publishing it, and vice versa, should be at the center of every conversation about your book.

I don’t ever want to have such a packed catalog that I can’t spend time with my authors, working through the details and the next steps, because I want them to feel supported. Not lonely. Even as I’ve been acquiring more titles than ever in 2025, promising a robustly fantastic catalog in the years to come, I am keeping my eye on that individual attention. Making sure I can deliver it.

Audiobook sale!

If you’re an audiobook fan and haven’t met Belladonna Marie Donato, protagonist of David Ciminello’s queer historical romp of a debut novel, The Queen of Steeplechase Park, the audio edition is 50 percent off though Sept. 5.

Publicity support for 2026 releases

For writers who are heading toward publication and need some hand-holding and support, I run a publicity group called Author Avenues. We meet twice a month over Zoom and also share links and information on our Discord server. It’s $100 a month to participate; I prefer a three-month commitment but will work with you if that’s not feasible. After that it’s month to month. Reach out by writing back to me if you’re curious! If you’re a winter or spring 2026 author, now’s a good time. I started this as a cohort project for 2025 authors, and now that we’re approaching the last launches of the season, we’ll be opening to new members.

My events this fall

The Sisters Festival of Books begins on Friday, Sept. 12, and I’ll be there with Gigi Little, author of Who Killed One the Gun? I’m especially excited about participating in the Story Slam Friday night (scary! exciting!) and hosting a publishing workshop.

I’ll be at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association annual tradeshow, giving away ARCs for our spring books and supporting Gigi, in Spokane, Washington, the last weekend of the month.

Who Killed One the Gun? launches at Powell’s City of Books at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 7! Come see Gigi Little in conversation with Margaret Malone.

I’m speaking at the Creative Writing Festival in Astoria the weekend of October 17-19. I’ve never done this one before and I’m so excited! Join me?

Spoke & Word in Milkwaukie, Oregon, is hosting me for an ask me anything on Monday, Nov. 3. More details forthcoming!

At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4, I’ll be in conversation with the phenomenal Polly Dugan, author of The House of Cavanaugh, at Annie Bloom’s Books.

That’s a busy week! At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 5, find me at Broadway Books in conversation with Gigi Little!

Friday, Nov. 7, and Saturday, Nov. 8, I’ll be tabling at the Portland Book Festival. Stop by and see which authors are signing!

Exciting news!

The great Robin Sloan blurbed Gigi Little’s novel! He wrote: "The most surprising book of the year: what begins noir-ish turns psychedelic, with the delicious time loop of Groundhog Day running darker, and stranger. Gigi Little has conjured a pocket universe of clocks and numbers, archetypes and subversions; Who Killed One the Gun? is one of a kind." I’m still starstruck. Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, among other delightfully surreal and fabulous novels. We named our sourdough starter after him because of his novel Sourdough.

Holly Ringland shared the opening to Imagine a Door with her followers! That’s such a huge delight and honor. Thanks, Holly! You can read it here:

The Joy Rise

Signal & Spark: what dung beetles have taught me about failure

🌸 Signal & Spark — August edition…

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a year ago · 27 likes · 3 comments · Holly Ringland

Imagine a Door was recently reviewed very generously over at Hippocampus!

I’ve been recording podcasts lately; here’s one that’s out! I had a great time chatting with Paul on Dream Chasers and Eccentrics. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I’m using Book Funnel for two promos right now. You can get a free digital copy of Imagine a Door or a host of other nonfiction books at this link. There are a few other writing craft books too, so check it out.

And Who Killed One the Gun? is included in this mystery/suspense giveaway! Please click and see all the books available for free! Apparently Book Funnel tracks clicks so apparently my reputation (wahhh) is at stake!

Forest Avenue recently acquired THE RED HEADS by Rachel King!

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I’d love to hear your thoughts about communication, especially when it comes to the publishing process and publicity! Feel free to leave me a comment, respond to others’ comments, or write back directly to me here.

I’m pretty sure I broke all the rules for publicizing a new book, though. Instead of revving up my social media engine for the first three months of Imagine a Door’s existence, I went (mostly) quiet. I haven’t shared a Substack post since March 22, about a week before my April 1 book launch.

That’s a whole spring’s worth of silence. Yikes.

What is wrong with you? I want to yell.

And yet, I made this decision and I’m okay with it and I want to talk about why, because “best practices” exist for a reason, and we can choose to do things our way. Especially when the world is on fire.

Publishing a book is an incredibly vulnerable act, and we have to take care of ourselves in the course of promotion, whatever that looks like. For me, this time around, it’s been staying present in the real world. Trips to the river with teenagers. Distributing free COVID kits. A few days in Bend, including off-roading in a Porsche and eating at a popular food cart pod, thanks to being invited to speak at the Central Oregon Writers Guild. Sending letters to friends going through hard times. Visiting the new Portland custard shop (twice) and its secret speakeasy (once). Watching roller derby scrimmages. Celebrating my oldest’s graduation. Picking flowers for a hospital visit. Watering a neighbor’s yard. Growing food in mine, so as our trees and bushes get rooted, we can feed more people.

It’s also a terrible time to be in publicity mode because we—and our friends and neighbors—are under attack by the US government. Every day we wake up to headlines an unscrupulous president who wields power with apparent intent to harm as many people as he can. I feel worse when reading the news, but it’s part of my routine, because I refuse to be complacent or compliant; information is the first step on knowing where and how to fight. But I’m not using my time to shout what I’m doing on social media or in this newsletter. I’m just doing the work, offscreen. And I don’t have time to perform social justice and resistance for a social media audience, because the kids are waiting for me to shut my laptop and take them to the river. (Again.) I assume most, if not all, of my online friends are doing their own resistance work and might not have the bandwidth to hear about mine, anyway.

If Imagine a Door had been published by another publishing house, I would have felt the pressure to share photos of my book events, updates about my next tour stops, and gratitude posts about bookstores that carry it. I’d feel that responsibility to the press. And I’d be trying to balance that with responses to the latest horrors, because it feels irresponsible to only post good stuff. Even though, I know, I really know, that kindness and beauty are a kind of resistance and always worth sharing as tiny candles in the darkness.

Despite my lackluster social media performance, what have I done effectively this spring? Aside from my intentional step back from this newsletter and not being “book-launch active” on social media, I’ve been working hard to promote Imagine a Door. All of these tasks have been approached with intent and focus, maybe because I haven’t also been scrambling around for the perfect Insta image.

• Setting up and participating in events, including Janet Clare’s visit to Bold with her new book True Home, and the upcoming About Bliss event with Cristina Olivetti at Powell’s on Hawthorne. (Save the date, Portlanders! Thursday, July 17!)

• Working with a publicist to get coverage I might not be able to reach on my own.

• Attending PubU, the Independent Book Publishers Association annual conference, held this year in the Twin Cities, including participating in a breakout day for established publishers and speaking on a distribution panel and Daniel A. Olivas’s Chicano Frankenstein earning a silver medal.

• Sending desk copies out to creative writing programs.

• Trying out PodMatch, a podcast connection company, and actually saying yes to requests for interviews (gasp).

• Visiting classes of writing students online, answering questions, and talking about Imagine a Door, including with Jordan Rosenfeld and Diane Zinna.

• Responding to emails about Imagine a Door and saying yes to requests for informational interviews with students trying to break into the industry.

• Participating in interviews with other Substack authors, including this one with Alyssa Graybeal and two with Christine Fadden (part one and part two).

• Checking sales through my distributor’s dashboard and seeing where books are shipping, what returns are coming back, and how Imagine a Door is doing.

• Playing with keywords through the tool Publisher Rocket, seeing if I can nudge Imagine a Door into more-correct categories (and dang, it’s still stuck in JOURNALIST BIOGRAPHIES at the A-place).

• Running a book publicity cohort through my Author Avenues project, meeting with our 2025 writers twice a month to talk about publicity, answer questions, and brainstorm.

• Keeping a Write or Die Diary for a week that I’m hoping will get posted on the site sometime soon.

• Putting Imagine a Door up on NetGalley, for review sourcing, through the IBPA discount program. Even though the book’s already out, I figured another boost couldn’t hurt. I also paid for an extra marketing boost.

• Running Forest Avenue Press, including publicity for Gigi Little’s new book, Who Killed One the Gun?; getting galleys ready for Liz Prato (Purgatoire) and Vincent Chu (Nice Places), both due out in spring 2026; and hiring a freelance editor to help with Julie Salmon Kelleher’s developmental edits for The Sea-Glass Shore, due out in fall 2026.

• Selling my second novel, The Neighborhood Dames, to Ooligan Press! That deserves its own post, and I’ll get there soon!

In looking at this list, where I’m lacking is in SHARING what I’m doing on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky. Doing the thing, that I’m solid on; posting about the doing is where I keep dropping the ball.

Some items and photos have made it out, of course, but I haven't approached social media with a focused plan or shared even half of what I might have in a simpler, less fraught time in our country’s history. I haven’t even posted the images of my events at Powell’s and Annie Bloom’s—both captured beautifully by my teenager—because life keeps pulling me away from the computer. And I’ve had a dozen or more ideas for Substack, then written none. At least until today, when I realized, this is getting embarrassing.

Is social media as effective as it was a few years ago, when Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary came out? I’ve never found it successful for selling books, or getting buy-my-book content out widely. But it can be useful in telling the story about your book coming out and rousing attendance for events.

One of the things I did share widely is that Willamette Week named Imagine a Door one of Portland’s Top Reads for May, thanks to Annie Bloom’s Books! A certain series author had the top-top book, but Annie Bloom’s told the newspaper that a local author was second, and so they chose to feature my book. So awesome. Hurray for indies! Hurray for local bookstores promoting local authors!

I also had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Adam Vitcavage of Debutiful and it just aired. Check it out!

I think it’s so funny, and kind of awful, that I posted before Imagine a Door came out and nothing on pub day, or pub month, or the month after pub month, and so on.

But also, I am fine with it! What a relief to not hold that over my head, to not force myself to be accountable to an external standard. Would posting more have sold more books? Maybe, but the activities I chose to do were good for my heart and soul AND a lot of them helped sell books too.

Question for you: How are you finding social media these days? Are you doing it the same as usual? Differently? If you are an author with a book out, what publicity “must-dos” have you ignored or done wrong? I think we need to normalize doing what we can, and not performing to EVERY EXPECTATION. Feel free to answer in the comments, so we can get a conversation going, or email me directly. I’d love to hear what you think.

Beth is the author of many books, including Wife | Daughter | Self, which I published through Forest Avenue in 2021. Her first adult novel, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News, is out April 1 from Tursulowe Press.

It means so much to me that Beth agreed to grace my work with her words. She’s a prolific creator with paper and words. I love writing in journals made by her. I love holding her art and admiring it. I love reading her sentences as they tilt and spin in that beautiful Beth way.

I hope to see some of you at my upcoming tour events!

Susan was a brilliant editor and book coach and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a Forest Avenue anthology that came out in 2021. She was a huge force in the Portland literary community during the years she lived here and her influence has continued.

I asked a few friends and colleagues to share remarks about her for this newsletter, not just for us, her community, but for her family and friends outside the lit space. So they know what she meant to us. What she still means.

Here’s Mo Daviau, author of Every Anxious Wave (St. Martin’s) and the forthcoming Epic and Lovely (West Virginia University Press):

I met Susan exactly ten years ago when I was invited to join The Guttery, a local writing critique group. The Guttery was fantastic: smart, talented writers who really cared about giving strong feedback. But Sooz, as I liked to call her, was on a whole other level. She was a profoundly gifted editor. She saw things in your work that others didn’t. She had a natural and unpretentious understanding of what worked and what didn’t in fiction. Anyone who knew her would say she was smart, but her smart was otherworldly. I hired her to do developmental edits on my forthcoming novel. (I selfishly hate that she didn’t live long enough to read the final draft.)

We became good friends over the years. We called each other Friendo, as a term of affection but also because we both thought it was kind of funny and weird that “Friendo” could also be a term of derision. She got words on the same bizarro level as me. I’ve never known anyone else like her. I miss her so much.

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Here's Ali Shaw, founder of Indigo: Editing, Design, and More, and co-owner of Bold Coffee & Books in Portland, Oregon:

The first time I met Susan, I was a face in the crowd, and she was a performer at the mic.

We were at the Pacific University low-residency MFA biannual retreat. I’d presented earlier that day. I don’t even remember the topic now.

That night, in the bar, Susan’s name was called on the open mic roster, and I was elbow to elbow with so many aspiring authors—an editor’s dream. She took the mic with poise—it was clear she was accustomed to performing, confident about her work, passionate.

I remember the theme of her piece was environmentalism. The refrain: “The truth, Daniel…” Her pauses well-timed. Her voice crescendoing at the poem’s climax. The denouement reverberating through the bar.

I don’t remember if applause thundered or if people were wrapped up in their own conversations, as people often are in bars. I do remember that I was impressed. In contrast to the typical open mic performances with twentysomethings—topics hovering around new sexual experiences, rants about exes, and other vulnerable experiences yet limited perspectives—here was a fully developed poem with personal passion, global concerns, love (her boyfriend, Daniel, I met later), and inspiration. Her delivery made my skin tingle, it was that powerful.

After the rest of the performers had their turns at the mic, I made my way across the room to compliment Susan on her work. She, Daniel, and I talked for another couple of hours about what makes a story, a poem, a novel work. What an author must bring to the page to succeed in capturing a reader’s full attention.

“Have you ever thought about being an editor?” This question surprised me as it came out of my mouth. I’d accepted the invitation to speak to the program to help future authors with the pragmatic steps of publishing. I’d hoped, a little, some of them might turn into clients. I had not planned at all to recruit another editor.

Susan smiled. She was about to graduate, she told me. And working with story for a living—while she continued her own writing, of course—sounded great.

And so began Susan’s time at Indigo. Nearly a decade later, in our final Indigo meeting, as she was leaving to focus fully on her own book coaching business, she said to me, “You taught me a trade, and I’m grateful for that.” I’d never thought of it that way, but I suppose she was right. She had the story analytics down—I taught her the client mechanics.

Now, as I read others’ tributes to her, I see that my first interaction with Susan is not unique. The common threads: She was talented and she knew it. She shared her expertise, helping people grow, if they were truly ready. Her self-assurance was either magnetic or intimidating, or maybe both.

Susan knew the potion for a good story in a way I’d never seen before or since. I wish her own story had more of a crescendoing climax. Her denouement surely reverberates, though.

In my mind, she’ll always be on that stage—passionate, poetic, and very much alive.

I’ll close this tribute with a statement from Ariel Gore, who teaches writing online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen. Her new book, Rehearsals for Dying, is now out from Feminist Press:

When Susan moved to Santa Fe we just knew each other by reputation and on social media, but she reached out and we started getting together on Wednesday nights when my son had chess club at the downtown library. We’d meet at the Lowrider bar and talk about writing and teaching.

She was just putting together Dispatches from Anarres and really wanted to talk about being a literary citizen—what it meant not just to be a writer but to serve the literary community.

The same went for teaching. She wanted to lead workshops, but she knew about the racist, imperialist history of the writing workshop, so she created Workshops Against Empire.

During the pandemic, she started teaching World Building in the Literary Kitchen--my school for wayward writers—and also doing skill shares at our annual camp down in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

At the same time, of course she was always working on her own writing—the collection that she was working on with me in a yearlong program I was teaching in the Literary Kitchen in 2023 was this magical interconnected short story collection that took place largely in the American West around the areas that she was most familiar with—Prescott, Arizona, Portland, Oregon, and Santa Fe, New Mexico—but also where she grew up in Michigan, and in all of these stories there was a real time storyline and a dreamtime storyline. I don’t know whether or not she was a Murakami fan, but the stories had that quality that the best Murakami stories have in which we begin to understand the writer/artist as a kind of magician who is able to move between the conscious realm and the dream realm and in doing so go deeper into themselves, but also show the reader something about themselves—and change the world. When I bring those stories to mind now, what stands out to me is how much realer the dreamtime so often felt than the “real” time, and that seems poignant now that we know her cancer had come back and was overtaking her body through that year—and poignant now that she’s not with us in real time anymore. Now I’ll be watching for Susan in dreamtime, and in the underworlds of my own stories, and in magical time. I hope everyone else will be, too.

I’ll close with a note Susan sent our Dispatches from Anarres contributors on April 4, 2022, after we had our first in-person party to celebrate the anthology. Most of our launch events were online, because of COVID, so it felt extra special to meet outdoors and celebrate each other.

It's been a whirlwind since I returned from PDX, but I just wanted to drop a line to say thank you to all of you who came out for our "cast party" for DISPATCHES!

Really, I can't tell you how meaningful it was to connect with each of you in person, and to celebrate this great thing we've made together. =)

I love that new readers continue to find this anthology and rave about it online, I loved seeing it featured so prominently at Powell's, and I hope we'll continue to nurture these literary connections between ourselves, from near and afar.

Susan helped a lot of us get our words into the world, to be meaningful with our art and our social justice work. I know she was proud of how many copies of Dispatches have been selling and I am honored to be part of her legacy. I hope we, together, continue to nurture our literary connections just as Susan bid us.

If you knew Susan DeFreitas, and especially if she was your book coach or editor, please consider leaving a comment here. I want to hold space for our community to send our collective appreciation up. I also encourage others, especially her editing clients, to share reflections in their newsletters. To honor the magic she brought to the page.

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ABOUT MY NEW BOOK…

Imagine a Door, my book for writers, comes out Tuesday, April 1. I’ll be at Powell’s at 7 p.m. in conversation with poet Armin Tolentino.

On Thursday, May 1, also at 7 p.m., I’ll be at Annie Bloom’s with Liz Prato to talk about Imagine a Door.

I started working on this manuscript in 2016 and it’s full of my publishing stories and interviews with more than 75 experts and authors. I loved sharing it with readers at the first Gorge Book Festival, sponsored by Columbia Center for the Arts and Waucoma Bookstore, last weekend. So far readers are really responding to the book, which makes me so happy. If you want a review copy or to set up an interview with me, reach out!

Substacker Dot Hearn recently shared this lovely shout-out about Imagine a Door and books by Lidia Yuknavitch, Ariel Gore, and Jenny Forrester. Thanks, Dot!

Imagine a Door clocks in at 522 pages. I revised for years, but I kept adding material, wanting it to help everyone. You might learn a lot from it. You might also use it to press tofu. A writer can hope for both, right?!

IN OTHER NEWS…

Scott Nadelson, author of Trust Me, won the 2024 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a prestigious Jewish literary prize.

The Forest Ave submissions committee, headed by Liz Prato, has been busy with our most competitive submissions period yet! Thanks to all who let us spend time with your work. If you haven’t heard a response yet, consider yourself a finalist! We’re working on the first few acquisitions and making some really hard decisions.

Daniel A. Olivas, author of Chicano Frankenstein, is at the Tucson Book Festival this weekend. Stop by and listen to his panels if you’re there.

The Publishing Post featured Forest Ave in its Indie Spotlight. I’m excited to learn more about the Post!

David Ciminello, author of the debut novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park, is a finalist in the Foreword INDIES for historical fiction!

Daniel A. Olivas’s Chicano Frankenstein is also a finalist! And it was recently reviewed in Runestone Journal.

Thanks for reading! And please leave your thoughts about Susan in the comments.

And when do you need those files?

I’ve signed the printer contract for copies of Imagine a Door, my new writing book, and I have a finished PDF on my laptop. With its pretty index! I’ve done the math about when books need to be in the warehouse, leaving some slush time for delays and shipping, so all I need is a magic date.

A due-by date.

I obviously need to know so I can submit my project in time to make all my deadlines, but as 2024 bleeds into 2025—and by bleed I mean the printer terms, ink spilling over the edge of the page—I’m happy to perch in the in-between, cradling my work in my house, keeping the finished files safe in a folder, savoring the last few days of my book’s privacy.

What’s in Imagine a Door is my voice. My story. My mistakes and lost hopes and a publishing journey that didn’t take me where I thought I wanted to go. There’s vulnerability in what I’ve put on the page. There’s even more in imagining what readers will see in my story. How they will react to what I give with love. With openness. With hope that I can ease their writing journeys by providing information wrapped in kindness.

Advance copies of Imagine a Door are already out there—with trade reviewers, blurbers who have kindly responded and some who may still respond, booksellers who attended the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association conference this fall, and Edelweiss users who have chosen to request the book for review. I have two more cases of ARCs set to be mailed out in the next few months.

But getting the finished files to press is like setting everything in stone. My project will really, fully be done at that moment. Cooked. When I attach the PDF, and hear the whoosh of sending, my book will be out of my hands. In the printing queue. Becoming.

I will get one last chance to proof files. To signal my approval.

And then it will be. Not mine—readers’. I won’t be sitting next to anyone explaining or confirming that I started these interviews back in 2016, but it’s been a lifelong project, learning about publishing and then putting what I learned into print.

Imagine a Door has had many other titles and names, and whole swaths of content that got cut along the way. I never expected to write my own definitions—to define terms from scratch!—and yet that’s what the manuscript required of me.

I know there’s a lot in here. Looking through the index reminds me: I covered this, and this, and this.

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Actually, at this time, I can’t add anything or the whole index will shift, and that’d be terribly unfair to Alyssa Graybeal, my indexer, so hold on. Even though I haven’t asked for a due-by date, even though I haven’t released the file to the printer, it’s done. Finished. I can do one more pass, just making sure I don’t have any hyphen stacks or extra spaces, messed-up sidebar borders, that kind of detailed stuff. But as a book, it’s in its final form.

Now I just need to let it go.

To the printer and also to the audiobook producer, Tantor Media.

Maybe I’ll light a candle after I hit send. Or maybe I’ll bake a vegan treat. Or maybe I’ll write something new. That moment will be deserving of a small ceremony of sorts.

In other news, on Jan. 6, we open for novel submissions at Forest Avenue Press. Do you have a literary novel that might be a good fit for us? Please consider sending it our way between Monday, Jan. 6 and Sunday, Feb. 9.

We’re accepting novels via Submittable and you can read more about what we’re seeking, our word count guidelines, and what types of projects might be right for us on the Forest Avenue website. We’re looking for two or three more novels for the 2026-27 catalog.

Feel free to pass our call to submissions along to writer friends, your social media audiences, and your critique groups. We’re so excited to read everyone’s work!

It’s always so hard to winnow down great projects to the final few, but there’s always that sense of opening, of possibility, and I’m thrilled to start 2025 that way. Reading. Thinking. Appreciating the hard work of so many writers who are seeking homes for their manuscripts. Every submission that matches our guidelines feels like a gift.

Every submission that ignores our guidelines is another reason I wrote Imagine a Door. To bring writers inside the process of publishing and to center the act of creation, of being focused on the page with your words, because that’s the part we can control.

Your turn: How are you spending these last days of 2024? Where are you with your writing projects? Please let me know by responding to this email or leaving a note in the comments. I want this to be an interactive space for all of us.

Since starting Forest Avenue Press in 2012, I’ve grown into the role of consultant and publishing navigator as a friend and teacher. Imagine a Door is my manifesto about being both of the industry—as a publisher—and outside the industry—as a writer and running a micro press far from hallowed New York hallways.

I started interviewing for this book, seeing a need for it, in 2016, and those early pages were stuffed full of other people’s perspectives and insights. All valuable, but they didn’t gel. Yet.

By the time I circled back to this project and won a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant (2023) to support its publication through Forest Avenue, I had realized my voice was the missing piece. My experiences as a publisher and an author weren’t just interesting bits and bobs; that perspective could be—should be—the glue.

I believe in kindness and community and that the value of writing shouldn’t be inextricably linked with acceptance for publication. The value is in the work itself. The thinking. The way putting words on a page is how we can explore and express and understand.

Spin the wheel of time ahead a few more years, and my project earned its own title, subtitle, and publication date, but it still needed a professional index so readers could find what they want in the pages.

I hired Alyssa Graybeal, pro indexer and author of Floppy, who meticulously went through the pages and subjects and author names, categorizing and building a reference in the form of seventeen pages, two columns per page. I printed the document so I could go over it in detail but also so I could marvel at the clarity she’s created out of my chapters and sidebars and case studies.

An index! My first index!

It’s like Alyssa has decoded my brain and organized it in a way that I could never in a million years see from the inside of the chaos. After all the years struggling with this octopus of a project, with all the facts and anecdotes and more than 75 original interviews,

Imagine a Door is for seasoned writers seeking insights into differentiating small presses or trying to overcome an emotional block, but it’s mostly for newer writers who are just starting to see themselves as real writers. That their commitment to pages is enough of an identity even before they start racking up publication credits.

Gentle is the word a new friend used to refer to my tone.

This gentleness shows up in the topics in Alyssa’s index. Solitude is one. So is success, defining your own. And genuineness. See authenticity.

Under Laura Stanfill the index lists (among other topics):

• as a community builder

• as a roller derby player

• overuse of em dashes by

• unpublished manuscripts by

Heh. I do love my em dashes and I’m going to press in January with a book that announces that tendency out in the world. On the page. In print. How great is that?

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By describing Imagine a Door as gentle, I am acknowledging my view of the world. My belief in the value of real relationships and how our voices matter, even if the piece of work we wrote for the world gets rejected. But I’m also being gentle with myself. I’ve coined terms in this book. I’ve made up definitions. How my brain operates is all over every page—and it’s scary to definitively use my voice. To put myself out there.

But reviewing Alyssa’s index has helped me calm my nervous system. Whatever I’ve missed, whatever topic another publisher or editor or writer might approach in different ways than how I’ve done it, what’s in Imagine a Door is what I intended.

Authenticity. Defining success for yourself. Community for the sake of community.

So I will be gentle with myself in these pre-publication months. As best I can.

Imagine a Door is available for preorder at your local independent bookstore or on Bookshop.org. It’s forthcoming from Forest Avenue Press on April 1, 2025.

YOUR INVITATION: What are you reading in these last weeks of the month? Are you in escapist fantasy mode like I am or are you delving deep into nonfiction or heartbreaking fiction? Can you sneak some extra reading time in when you’re at your busiest?

Feel free to leave a comment! I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about writing, creativity, and publishing. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too.

It feels too soon to have a bigger plan. To fight. To insist that art matters. To revel in the small joys that helped me survive some of the darkest days of the recent past. To look for the bright side. I am just not there.

I need a minute to pick my heart up off the floor and to collect my thoughts. Or maybe I need a month. Or a year. Or four years.

There’s nothing I can contribute to the conversation that will change where we are as a country. Hate is at the heart of our nation and we can’t pretend otherwise. We can’t unsee it or console ourselves into okayness.

The only path forward that feels right to me now is to continue working and parenting. I’m proofing my book on publishing, Imagine a Door, due out from Forest Avenue Press in April 2025, which is lending this space its new moniker. I’m working on a new novel. I’m also helping publishers with their metadata and soon-to-be-published authors with their publicity campaigns. In all of these roles, I’m doing my part to counter toxic narratives. Helping to spread stories of kindness, of queer joy and inclusivity and ethical behavior and disability visibility and women supporting women. Forest Ave will open for submissions in January, too. We’ll become a funnel for more stories. For more imaginations. For more people seeking change and hope and peace.

This is something I can do as a publisher and editor and author. To make stories. And to make other people’s stories more discoverable.

I don’t have the energy, after our first four years of Trump and then a pandemic, to question whether I’m doing enough. I just need to keep doing what I can. Head down. One word at a time. One dinner made. One quick sketch. One more day.

As a book publisher and author, writers often come to me for advice. A few years ago, I met one for coffee. He had an excellent concept and grand plans for his literary career. His journey, from writing to having written, from dreamer to best-selling author, was just beginning. 

With joy and encouragement, I told him, “You should aim for the sky. But it’s okay if you get the tree.”

A spindly specimen waved its branches outside the coffee shop window. I gestured at it as a way to talk about art and commerce. To find a gentle, safe way to suggest that we, as creative beings, can wish for everything, while also being glad for what does roll our way. Sure, reach for the sky! But the tree is great too. Yay trees!

If we want X for our literary careers, and get Y, we often find ourselves trussed up in jealousy, frustration, and not-getting-X panic. To insert specific values into this equation, let’s say an author wants a review in The New York Times (the sky!) but gets The Washington Post (the tree, to this author’s way of thinking).

Those of us who have earned reviews in neither the Times nor the Post might shake our heads and think about how lucky the author is. How successful. How stellar this publicist must be! How special this book! But the author wishing for the Times and not getting it decries the miss. Feels the loss. He cannot appreciate the tree in front of him: the excellent coverage that did manifest.

Often the tree is something small—an interview with the local paper or a sweet podcast appearance or a friend sending a text about staying up late to finish your book. These achievements count too! Because they do. We must decide they count, because when we let those good small moments flow through our fingers while wanting more, we are apt to find ourselves empty-handed.

I don’t think it’s greed that causes this situation of always wanting more; writers are always wondering and our imaginations are apt to run into traffic. By traffic I mean difficult emotions: anxiety and jealousy and self-doubt and desire. Sales and major reviews are fantastic, but there are a lot of other beautiful, attainable goals out there. One of my favorite pieces of advice to debut authors is this: keep a list of everything good. That way, when you’re not on an awards shortlist, or your royalty statement doesn’t match your expectations, you have a physical object to ground you. A reminder that lots of great moments have happened because of your book. And they all count. Every single one of them.

This thinking informs the why behind my forthcoming book, Imagine a Door: A Writer's Guide to Unlocking Your Story, Choosing a Publishing Path, and Honoring the Creative Journey, due out from Forest Avenue on April 3, 2025. I sent the manuscript out for copyedits last week, so I’m shaking off the bleary deadline mindset and catching up on email in my back yard hammock. Pre-orders will be available later this summer.

Besides setting a publication date for Imagine a Door, which I started writing way back in 2016, a lot of other great things have been happening!

Chicano Frankenstein

Author Daniel A. Olivas was interviewed on NPR’s Code Switch! You can listen here. We’re also celebrating going back to press for a second print run. Chicano Frankenstein came out in May; a Spanish language edition is forthcoming from Planeta USA.

The Queen of Steeplechase Park

The long-awaited novel by David Ciminello, loosely based on his great-aunt’s real-life story, came out in May to a starred Kirkus review. You can also check out his New York City appearance with Blair Fell (The Sign for Home) on YouTube.

Oregon Country Fair

I’m moderating a panel of writers, featuring Reggie Watts and Laini Taylor among others, at the Fair this year. I’m a bit starstruck! If you’re going to Eugene, Oregon, for this annual magical experience, come see us on Saturday, July 13, at 2:30 at the Front Porch Stage.

Powell’s Books

 I have two Powell’s City of Books events coming up at the flagship store on Burnside in Portland, Oregon.

7 p.m. Tuesday, July 16: Dian Greenwood, author of Forever Blackbirds, will appear in conversation with me and designer Gigi Little. I’m reading this novel now and it’s gorgeous.

7 p.m. Sunday, September 8: Joyce Maynard will be at Powell’s for the release of her new novel, How the Light Gets In, a sequel to the magnificent Count the Ways. I’ll be in conversation with Joyce. I’m saving reading the novel until August, so I can savor the anticipation for a few more weeks!

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YOUR INVITATION: Have you struggled with writer friendships? How about with being fulfilled and proud of your work earning praise? Why do we always want more? How can we reframe our relationship with our writing community to be one of nourishment and support instead of trying to use our friends as mirrors or ladders?

Feel free to leave a comment! I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, publishing, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too. 

That’s because I’ve been writing.

Not producing content intended for an immediate audience, but digging into the creative process, relishing the slowness. I’ve been working on IMAGINE A DOOR, my mental-health-for-writers book, and the stirrings of a new novel. And it feels great.

When people want to know what it’s like to be a publisher and a writer, they really want to know how I get my personal creative work done. It’s a question that plagues those of us who use our writing and editing skills on a daily basis, whether for a full-time job, as freelancers, or as a volunteer helping other writers. And I don’t always know what to say, because I’m not the best at finding a balance.

For many years, I put Forest Avenue Press tasks first.

Why revise chapter three when I can send out five galleys for our spring book?

It’s not like anyone is waiting for my novel.

I can get these next five (twenty-seven!) tasks done for the press and THEN I will write.

It turns out, almost eleven years into running an independent publishing house, I can admit that writing fuels me. It’s how I like to be in the world: quiet. With a notebook, a laptop, a phone on silent. Writing lets me think and process on my own timeline, without the pressure to comment, reply, or click-heart someone else’s words.

Writing lets me be myself without social scripts.

When everything in my life gets buzzy-loud and needs attention, I have two choices. I can handle the distractions and power through the workload. Or I can shut down, close the doors and bar the window to my mind. The latter happens without my permission if I don’t yield to my body and brain saying, Stop. You need a break. If I push myself to get through too many days without enough rest, I end up in a total health crash. Sick from the inside, not from germs, but because my body says enough.

It’s only recently that I’ve begun practicing aggressive self-kindness. Which means pressing my hands against my ears and tucking into my imagination. Instead of ordering my task list as highest priority to lowest, I ask, What can you do to be good to yourself? Writing and resting are two of my best answers. Dinner can get figured out later. I can send that email tomorrow. The post office trip can wait. Especially in this time of world crisis, horror after horror, these small comforts and task deferrals feel ridiculously self-indulgent. And yet. I will be of no use to anyone if I don’t listen to my body. If I don’t get sleep. If I don’t carve out writing time.

I’ve always been a high-maintenance holiday person, making my own cards, squirreling away gifts months ahead of time, but I’ve let much of that go this year because IMAGINE A DOOR is turning into a real manuscript. I even have a subtitle I like! The edits are happening. And spinning in my head, off to the side, is this new novel. The characters clamoring for attention. To do that intensely creative work, I have to tend my body and brain with sleep and good food and extra spells of silence.

Some of this reorienting of priorities has been related to acknowledging my identity as a disabled writer, which in turn has a lot to do with publishing Soul Jar, an anthology by disabled writers edited by Annie Carl, now available at your local independent bookstore.

.Some of this shift in thinking, too, has been just missing writing when I’m not making time for it. Last month I attended a Corporeal Writing generative workshop at the Oregon coast with the intent to let my brain spark and play, not to produce pages. Not to bang out content. Just to be in a space with other writers, to relish the silence in my hotel room between workshops. I honestly spent much of the weekend drinking glasses of water and watching the rain.

Running a business that is about producing content, and having to talk about that content and the process of making it, makes it easy to slip into a routine of information maintenance. I always am working on metadata and accounting and publicity spreadsheets. When I write, I slip out of the analytical constraints I’ve set for myself. I lose track of time. I get messy with words, wrecking perfectly decent paragraphs so I can see what I’m doing and make them better. I need that in my life to manage the structured business work without burning out.

Speaking of the business side of publishing, my dear friend and colleague Liz Prato is the author of three fabulous collections and the editor at large of Forest Avenue Press. She’s available for consults, so if you’re in the market, here’s her website. Liz and I are running three low-cost workshops in January—$25 each—on agenting, small presses, and querying. You can check them out here. The hope is to make a lot of behind-the-scenes information available to writers who might otherwise not have access to it. If you (or a writer you love) needs some information about how to find a home for a manuscript, these classes make great stocking stuffers. We promise lots of fun stories from our years writing and publishing. The recordings will be available after the classes if you sign up but can’t attend live.

Since it’s that season, here are a few other gift ideas:

Niyyah Handcrafted makes wonderful soaps, candles, and other goodies. Recently I’ve been burning one of her candles when I have an hour to write. When I do that, it feels like I’m creating a ritual around my work instead of just fitting it in between the cracks.

I’m obsessed with Rancho Gordo’s heirloom beans. Buy some for yourself and a few extra bags to gift. There are recipes on the website, too, including fabulous holiday meals for vegetarians and vegans.

Beans pair nicely with Fat Gold olive oil, which I have been ogling for a while via author Robin Sloan’s newsletter. I can’t wait to gift two bottles to a person in my household (haha) so I can partake of the deliciousness.

I met Julia, the owner of Rather Puckish, at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association this fall and I’m definitely giving some of her work as gifts this holiday season.

YOUR INVITATION: What can you do to be kind to yourself from now through the end of the year? How can any habits or rituals you come up with find their way into your 2024 plans? If you struggle with the idea of taking care of yourself while children are being murdered, I’m right there too. I feel that so hard. Ari Honarvar wrote this beautiful essay on joy during times of crisis, and reading it a few years ago was the beginning of allowing myself to have this conversation with myself. To grieve and fight for change and also to sleep when I need extra rest.

Feel free to leave a comment! I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity and publishing. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too. 

(You can read the article here; it’s part of their disability representation series.)

IMAGINE A DOOR is my take on breaking into publishing without letting the industry break your heart, and it’s forthcoming from Forest Avenue Press in fall 2024 or spring 2025. I won a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant of $5,000 in June to support the project. Here’s the working description:

Capitalism doesn’t value story the way the heart does. As a small-press publisher and a published novelist, Laura Stanfill has been on both sides of the desk, giving and receiving thousands of rejections. IMAGINE A DOOR—with original reporting, advice from award-winning authors, and personal stories from the publishing trenches—is a rallying cry to focus your creative life on what really matters: the work itself.

I’m not sure if Publishers Weekly scooping me says something about the intrepid staff as much as it does about my priorities this summer: finishing the manuscript and recovering from a broken foot. It’s my right one—fifth metatarsal, snapped when I didn’t see a curb at the park—which means I can’t drive.

But those two variables worked in sync: spending weeks of summer on the couch means I now have a 70,000-word draft of IMAGINE A DOOR in the hands of my developmental editor, Liz Prato.

In 2016, I started interviewing agents, editors, and publishers for this project, because I kept meeting misinformed, frustrated authors. Much of their sadness came from the lack of transparency; when you don’t know how the system works, it’s easy to take every setback personally. Those trying to break in—myself included—dutifully followed the sacred steps of building up our bios, racking up publishing credits, growing our social media presence, reading contemporary work to understand the commercial landscape, making lists of like-minded agents and editors, workshopping our query letters, and… despite all this work, all this time and effort, we still racked up rejections or heard nothing at all. We bought into the do this and you’ll be a successful writer concept, only it didn’t pan out—at least not the way we had hoped. And now we collectively clutched our unpublished manuscripts, thinking, if all that didn’t get me published, then maybe I’m just not good enough.

Published authors didn’t seem to be faring any better, emotionally, when I started reporting for this project. They struggled with long lag times between acquisition and getting first-round edits. They didn’t get enough say on covers or jacket copy, forcing them to shill a book that didn’t look or sound like theirs. They felt ignored by their overworked in-house publicists—and often unable to able to afford a $20,000 multi-month retainer to hire a freelancer. And small press authors signed contracts with excitement only to realize their publisher’s business model meant it was nearly impossible to get their books onto bookstore shelves: more heartbreak.

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When I started collecting all this information as an antidote to sore feelings, it came from the same place as Brave on the Page, the micro-essay collection that launched Forest Avenue Press in 2012 (and which was recently featured by The Masters Review). I wanted to make a statement about how doing the work of writing matters. I wanted writers—us—to feel better about ourselves. To hold our creativity sacred. To have tools to tune out rejection. To make choices about how we want to spend our time. To create better measurements for success—not just the capitalist ones.

Eventually, I let the new project simmer on the back burner because I had new Forest Avenue titles to publish and a debut novel to revise. I picked this idea back up last year, after my debut novel came out, feeling more confident about what I wanted to say.

The Guardian recently published this article about mental health in the publishing industry, focusing on how everyone is busy and burned out, how that impacts debut authors, and how UK publisher Canongate wants to create a resource to help. I’ve been working on this issue since 2016, I want to shout! But while The Guardian’s article focuses on the post-deal experience, IMAGINE A DOOR begins with the process of writing, weaving in personal goals and centering creativity as antidotes to the noise of capitalism.

I hope to position IMAGINE A DOOR as a resource for everyone who doesn’t want to become famous. If you love getting followers and want to create a brand around your product—and your product is writing classes or a skincare line or wines produced by your family vineyard—that’s awesome. But I’m hoping to create an alternative resource for writers who have stories to tell, who want to reach readers with their art—everyone who doesn’t want to be famous.

If performing “platform” according to the rules mattered to me, I’d publish this newsletter on a schedule like everyone says you’re supposed to. (Oops.) Instead, I send out a note when I have something to say. I’d rather readers think, Oh! It’s Laura in my inbox! Instead of thinking, Not again. There’s so much content out there and I don’t feel obligated to add to it. I know I’m doing it “wrong” by marketing standards, and that’s my decision. I wouldn’t have finished this new book if I had been churning out newsletter content every two weeks.

I think sometimes, when we listen to industry advice, we forget we can decide to ignore it. That we can listen to ourselves. That we can define success as getting great feedback from our critique group. Or reading a poem at an open mic. Or finding a better title for an essay. IMAGINE A DOOR is my way of reminding writers that every step of the process is important, not just the publication and its aftermath.

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YOUR INVITATION: What’s a piece of industry advice you really struggle with? Do you still try to follow that advice—yes or no? Why have you made that choice? Another question: I’m struggling with a subtitle for IMAGINE A DOOR. It’s a resource for writers, and I could go with that: A RESOURCE FOR WRITERS. But that’s pretty blah and it doesn’t say a lot. Do you have an idea for me? Maybe something about publishing and heartbreak? An earlier iteration was A WRITER’S GUIDE TO SUBMISSIONS, REJECTIONS, AND THE CREATIVE LIFE, but that felt too focused on the process of submitting. I’d love your help.

Feel free to leave a comment! I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, publishing, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too. 

Sarah and I met at the Pinewood Table, a writing workshop taught by Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose. Over the years since she moved away from Portland, Oregon, we’ve kept in touch, visited each other, and continued to talk about the craft of writing.

Sarah is a queer, Arab American author and a well-known, sought-after developmental editor. She runs the Threepenny Editor and has worked with many successful author-clients to help them hone their drafts into publishable material.

Years ago, when Sarah was working on an early iteration of The Skin and Its Girl, I fell in love with the story and I’ve been cheering Sarah on ever since.

It’s interesting to think about all the characters and plots those of us in writing classes experience while sitting around the table with writers. Some of them existed only in that communal space. I brought two novels to the Pinewood Table, neither of which will find their way into print, because I’ve let them go.

But having that time with my writer-colleagues, participating in discussions about my language and plot decisions, gave those characters life. They really existed. Not in a printed form on the bookstore shelf, but in the room where my writer-friends made space for them. Listened. Suggested. Offered notes in the margins.

Sarah was one of those friends.

I’m sure The Skin and Its Girl is a radically different novel than the one I remember, but I love that I had the opportunity to engage with a long-ago version. Those early pages deeply impacted me as a reader and a writer. Sarah’s courage and curiosity and use of language made me braver in my own work. I’ve carried that appreciation forward, hoping someday to read this story in bound and printed form, and here we are.

I’m thrilled to share this short interview I did with Sarah to honor her debut novel’s publication.

When did you write the first draft?

I started exploring the characters in 2005, but I finished a draft I was proud of in 2009, in time for my first writers' conference. I received a few revise-and-resubmit responses from agents I met there, but when those hit a dead end, I moved on to a different project. I returned to it off and on until I started from scratch in 2018, working from the narrative strategy outward, and finished a draft on March 8, 2020, just as the world was shutting down in response to the pandemic.

How many drafts did you do? Or is there a better way of measuring the journey from where you started to earning this book deal?

I typically say the project lived in me for about 15 years. But if we’re talking about THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL—the novel it became—I worked my way forward through a single draft in two years. I write slowly, revising as I go, so I did no further structural revisions. I nudged the narrative strategy a final time at the end of 2020 in response to some rejections, so it was the second draft that got an agent offer ten days after I sent the manuscript.

Were you working on other manuscripts between drafts of this one?

After I wrote a different novel, an agent was interested in representing it—just the project, not my career overall. It had its chance, didn’t sell, so we went our separate ways. I needed time to retrench in my craft, and after a couple of years of noodling around with short stories, I decided to go back for my MFA. I wrote several short stories and some critical work in the program before picking up the first novel again.

I needed to find the courage and confidence in my own identity before I could approach the work of telling a queer, unconventional story with the creative courage and confidence it deserved. Ever since the notion of an Palestinian American baby born with cobalt-blue skin came to me in the middle of writing a scene about something else, I knew I needed to find a way to write about that kind of magic, but do it in a way that gave that character full agency.

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Thank you so much, Sarah!

You can subscribe to her Substack, The Bird’s Eye, where she offers insights about editing and the publishing journey.  

And you can buy The Skin and Its Girl wherever books are sold; ask for it at your local bookstore or here’s the Bookshop link. You can also catch her hybrid launch event tonight (April 25) at East City Bookshop.

I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, publishing, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too. 

YOUR INVITATION: What characters or stories of yours have existed in the presence of writer friends or event attendees but never in printed form? Think about who has held space for your words over the years—especially the words that didn’t manifest as finished work. Do you remember any special compliments or conversations about those pieces? Reach out and thank someone who has been a witness to your hard work over the years. Tell them what their insights and attention have meant to you as a writer.

Even though I knew having my debut novel published would impact my productivity, I didn’t realize how long it would take to get back to writing regularly again. I started a few essays and did a little revision work on my new novel, but I didn’t amass more than a handful of pages and I didn’t finish anything. For nine whole months.

Until January, when I reshaped my idea and started working on it.

The manuscript has something to do with my newsletter’s new logo, designed by Gigi Little. Isn’t it sweet? It’s exciting to replace my hand-drawn sketch with something more professional. I love how the circle matches the shape of the Forest Avenue logo.

In addition to writing and reading these past few weeks, I’ve been waiting for the sun. I’m dreaming of hammock days, of rainbow picnic-table days, of being too warm on dog walks instead of sloshing around the neighborhood with my dog. I’m writing this indoors, curled up under a blanket. I can’t remember ever being this cold and wet for so many months in a row. Surely soon I’ll be able to put away my winter boots, right?

Maybe my new logo also speaks to this yearning for sun and new blooms. For what’s to come. My daffodils look like an invisible giant stepped on them. Their faces are dirtied, their stems bent. I have high hopes for the tulips on the verge of blooming, though.

Every time I imagine setting a calendar for my newsletter, committing to regular posts, I get busy with real life. The making of books. The walking of the dog. Saying yes to speaking gigs and then coordinating the dates and necessary travel. Communicating with school carpool parents. All the social media advice out there seems to focus on regular practices—what to do, why, and how to incorporate the work as part of a sustainable routine.

But I’m not doing that and I’m giving myself permission to do what I can, as I have the energy. I stop typing when my fingers hurt. I read for pleasure, not just for work. I’m starting to add new vegan recipes to my dinner rotations. I’m practicing transitions and plow stops in my derby class. Getting stronger. And my new manuscript, the one that inspired the logo change, is growing every day. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or finished; we are all, always, in progress. Our work. Our art. Our selves.

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My energy has been the interior kind lately—staying at home, putting more words down—but as spring springs (supposedly), my speaking schedule is revving up. Last week I traveled to Eugene, Oregon, where I gave a short talk about a few small press titles at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s spring pop-up. Earlier today, I met with Ariel Gore’s Wayward Writers and tomorrow I’ll have a Portland State class visit with Justin Hocking’s students—both via Zoom.

Then it’s off to Berkeley for sales conference, where I’ll talk about Soul Jar, our SFF anthology by disabled authors and edited by disabled author and bookstore owner Annie Carl. Her store, The Neverending Bookshop in Edmonds, Washington, was just featured in Publishers Weekly. (Go Annie!)

I’m a keynote speaker at the Terroir Writing Conference on Saturday, April 29; if you want to hear me talk about perseverance, surviving rejections, and related lessons I’m learning from roller derby, register here.

On May 15, Zaji Cox’s Plums for Months: Memories of a Wonder-Filled Neurodivergent Childhood launches at Powell’s City of Books. It’s my press’s third-ever memoir; Zaji is an autistic BIPOC artist and dancer and each chapter is full of curiosity and the gorgeousness of growing into her identity as a creative person. Come to the launch if you’re in town or order it from your local bookstore.

In June I’ll be in residence at the Oregon Writers Colony weekend at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon, with Kate Gray, poet and novelist; Carry the Sky came out from Forest Avenue in 2014. Join us if you’d like!

In other news, my debut novel, Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, turns one on April 19. I’m still getting emails, texts, and photos from readers—and I can see on Bookscan that copies keep selling. Not as many as last spring, but they’re moving.

And my novel is shortlisted for the Story Circle’s May Sarton Book Award for Historical Fiction!

I think, when we dream about publication, we often focus our wishes on the first few months. The reviews rolling in. The pretty bookstagram posts featuring your cover. Signing a stack of copies at the local bookstore. But it’s also important to imagine later on, when your book is old news. How will you feel? What will you look back and regret? What can you do, going into your search for an agent or publisher, to help minimize those regrets? What can you do in the months leading up to publication, and then the months after publication, to look ahead and stay focused?

I’m still thinking about this—asking more questions than finding answers—so feel free to comment with your ideas and what’s worked for you. I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, publishing, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too. 

YOUR INVITATION: What’s something you do in your creative life because you’re supposed to but you actually dread it? I keep intending to follow a newsletter publication schedule, but I don’t want to clutter anyone’s inbox. And regular posts feel like one more obligation. It’s more fun to write when I have something to say. So I’ve opted out of that common wisdom of regular posts. I can always change my mind and become consistent in a few months—or a few years—if I feel like it.

Once you identify an obligation that cuts into your creative time, can you let it go and spend that time doing something that fills your creative soul? Even though my writing output has been limited this year, I’m reading more than I have in years, thinking with clarity and joy, and getting stronger and faster on skates. Maybe a twice-monthly newsletter would be good, but I am loving my reading and skating time. And I’ve been focused and emotionally present for every moment of my Singing Lessons experience.

This is a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up exclusively for my subscribers — kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion. Want some insight on a form rejection? Curious about how to find an agent? Lost on where to start submitting to small presses? I’ve got you.

To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, now available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens.

How to get started

1. Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Substack Chat is now available on both iOS and Android.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Join chat

As readers who write, we know that sending your manuscript to an agent or editor makes you vulnerable. Puts us, writers, in the direct line of being judged. It’s how the system works.

But when you’re sitting outside the process, on the sidelines, waiting for a response, it’s easy to make up stories about what’s happening. Storytelling is a way to keep our minds busy during what is often an excruciatingly long wait time. But it’s not the healthiest way we could be spending our days, because everything we imagine from the outside is a guess. And our wildest guesses are often far from the mark, which makes rejections, when they come, sting even more than they might have if we had spent that time writing.

Here are a few guesses and myths, debunked, with a focus on the Submittable platform, since that’s what Forest Avenue uses these days.

My submission moving from RECEIVED to IN PROGRESS in Submittable. A reader might love the query! Or the opening pages! Oh wow!

In reality, if a press has multiple readers and uses the label function or the comment boxes to communicate with the team, an in-progress marker appears when someone touches your submission. That could be to add a label. Publishers can customize their own labels, depending on what they are looking for, what they absolutely don’t want to see, and how they operate as a team.

Ours are a mix of positives and negatives—didn’t follow guidelines, offensive, needs more readers, priority, total contender.

It could also mean one of the readers has left a note in the queue—sharing their interest (or lack) in the manuscript. Comments can be good signs that someone is interested, but then again, they can be notes like, There are so many typos or This person single-spaced their work and it’s hard to read. If I find a piece of work emotionally difficult because of my lived experience brushing up against the author’s storytelling, I’ll mark that as a way to be gentle with myself while browsing the queue.

When you see your submission change status, it’s exciting, but don’t read too much into it.

My submission stayed marked RECEIVED until I got a decline notice. That means they didn’t read it, right? How mean! How awful!

It’s impossible to know for sure what a press’s process is—unless you’re one of the readers inside the system. Not all teams use the label and comment functions in Submittable, both of which move a submission into the IN PROGRESS category. If one person is in charge of the queue, they might read everything without making a single mark that would show up on the author’s side. So you can’t assume that you didn’t get a fair shake; you probably did.

I can’t imagine rejecting a manuscript without (at the very least) taking a look at the query and seeing if it fits my vision or offers an interesting plot or set of characters. Other submissions readers likely feel the same way; after all, we sign up for this task because we want to be surprised and amazed.

I tend to think of submissions readers as sweeping through a room, seeking something that catches their attention. If a query doesn’t interest me, or the title doesn’t grip me, I’ll keep moving through the list. We always have multiple readers in the queue to make sure we don’t miss something special.

If I’m rejected, that means my manuscript isn’t good. Maybe I should give up.

Whoa—this is one of the reasons I love to talk to writers, especially unpublished ones. A rejection can certainly feel like this, devastating, like every no is an editorial knife cutting through your pages. But in reality, the process is a lot more nuanced.

I’ve rejected plenty of projects that sound absolutely incredible and go on to sell to other houses and earn awards.

Rejections aren’t strict valuations of your work. They’re a decision based on a variety of factors; quality is only one of them. What each individual reader’s interests are, the books we’ve published in the recent past, the kinds of stories we’re hoping to see—all of this combines in our heads as we sift through the many options that are in front of us. It’s hard to say no to a great book, but if it’s not for us, we try to offer encouragement, suggestions for other presses, and hope when we write those letters.

If this process feels too personal, imagine someone at the local ice cream shop, choosing mint chocolate chip over butter pecan or a non-dairy lemon sorbet. The not-chosen flavors might appeal to the buyer, but they only have enough cash in their pocket for one scoop.

What if I left some typos in my work?

Not a big deal, I promise. It’d be really petty to reject a whole novel just because there’s a mistake on the third page. That being said, a manuscript riddled with errors might not last as long in consideration as one that has been polished to a resonant shine. Same with the query letter—if it’s full of mistakes and doesn’t clearly share the arc of the novel, that’s not as compelling as a query that makes a strong case for the project.

After all, we’re sweeping through the room, or peering in the ice-cream case, looking for reasons to not choose something so we can narrow the field a bit and hone in on our favorites.  

What if I panic and decide I should have sent a different version of my novel? Can I withdraw my manuscript and resubmit?

Please don’t do this. We totally get the tendency—how perfectionism and anxiety can make withdrawing and resubmitting seem like the best choice. But if your manuscript is for us, is the one we want, we’ll revise with you. It’s like meeting someone with a terrible haircut; the haircut will grow out.

If you withdraw and resubmit, it confuses the readers who have already made notes on your project. And we’ll all sigh a bit, having to redo that work when we’re dealing with a high volume of manuscripts. And we might worry that you are the kind of author who will ask too much of us all throughout the process and step over any boundaries we’ve set together.

If I get an offer, should I tell you? Will you be annoyed? Will you send me a counteroffer right away?

We celebrate every time an author gets an offer while they’re being considered by our press. It’s honestly a relief, too, because we get so many more quality manuscripts than we could possibly publish. We usually make an offer on about one percent of the pile, which amounts to two or three novels in a group of several hundred. There are so many great presses and deserving authors out there, and if a match is made before we can decide on a project, we are happy for everyone involved and we try to promote those books when they hit the shelves.

As far as our process, we have never rushed our final decisions to make an offer when faced with this situation. We winnow the pile down to a semifinalist group, then a finalist group, and making an offer before all the choices are even on the table isn’t something we do.  

Have a submission question I didn’t answer here? Drop it in the comments!

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In health news

My bout with COVID took me down for all of November and much of December, despite being fully vaccinated. On the positive, my autoimmune issues are finally getting diagnosed and treated after decades of strange symptoms, debilitating pain flares, and shrugs from the medical establishment. While I’m still in the maze of unknown symptoms and confusing jargon, it’s become ever clearer that I can’t keep up my usual quick pace. Which means prioritizing and organizing and handing off tasks that are physically difficult these days—including laying out our books and opening jars in the kitchen.

As a result, I’m rebalancing my life to include more Zoom consults, which aren’t so hard on my finger joints and wrists as working in InDesign. I’m hoping to schedule three more consults by the end of the first week in February so I can hire a freelance designer at a fair market rate. I’ve picked out my freelancer and she’ll work on the interior of Soul Jar, a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories by disabled authors and edited by disabled bookstore owner Annie Carl. Anthologies are especially tricky for me, with all the pieces and parts, and now that I know that pain means actual damage is occurring to my joints, I’m trying to let go.

If you want professional advice on which project to focus on, or why your manuscript isn’t getting attention, or wanting to set up a DIY publicity plan, I’d love to use my ten years of publishing experience to help you figure it all out. My rate is $150 for an hour focused exclusively on your projects, questions, and worries, with a follow-up email of links and notes. Hit reply if you’re on my mailing list to start a conversation or contact me here.

(And just to be clear: if you’ve recently submitted your manuscript to Forest Ave, now’s not the time to work with me. Once our decisions are final, I’d be happy to see if your needs and my skillset are a fit.)

I’ll be rolling out some more coaching options in the coming months, and when our new Forest Ave website goes live, the process to hire me and schedule a date will be streamlined and easy to follow.

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YOUR BRIGHT SIDE INVITATION: How do you take care of yourself when you get a rejection? Do you have a certain ritual or phrase you share with yourself? Do you submit to new places right away? If you don’t have an answer to these questions, take some time to create a regular practice you can put into place the next time you hear a no about your creative work.

Feel free to leave a comment! I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, publishing, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too.