Poured Over Double Shot: Keziah Weir and Katie Williams

By Jenna Seery / June 15, 2023 at 6:00 am

These two new novels ask a crucial question: who gets to tell our stories?

Keziah Weir’s The Mythmakers follows one young journalist as she seeks answers within the unpublished manuscript of a recently dead author while her own life starts to crumble. Weir joins us to talk about likeable female characters, what makes the literary canon, AI storytelling and more.

My Murder by Katie Williams is a fast-paced, inventive mystery where the victims of a serial killer are brought back to life to solve the case. Williams talks with us about how she came to write her book, including technology in her fiction, what she learns from teaching and more.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.         

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.     

Featured Books (Episode):
The Mythmakers by Keziah Weir
My Murder by Katie Williams
The Guest by Emma Cline
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson
The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
Delicious Foods by James Hannaham
Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
The Muse by Jessie Burton
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Full Episode Transcript:

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Keziah Weir is one of my favorite humans on the planet? So if we sound a little looser today, yeah, we are. But also I’m going to ask you, my friend to do the elevator pitch for The Mythmakers, and then I’ll explain why I’m asking you to do that. But yeah, would you do that.

Keziah Weir
Yes, yes. So The Mythmakers centers on a woman named Sal, who is a young magazine journalist living in New York City, she is sort of at loose ends at work dealing with some strange work stuff, and picks up a literary magazine reads a short story realizes that the short story feels very much like it’s about her life. It’s by an older author who she had met at a party years earlier. And she goes off in search of answers. The author has died. So she tracks down his widow who lives in upstate New York, and all kinds of shenanigans ensue.

MM
Okay, and I’m going to add, she is one of the more unreliable narrators I’ve met recently. But one of the things too, and you and I have talked about this on and off for a while leading up to the publication of this book, but it’s kind of an old-fashioned novel, right. Like, there’s no time travel, there’s no dystopian, like, it is kind of a super, like, people have terrible secrets. And people do bad things. And people love literature, and they bump into weird stuff. And they put themselves into weird situations. But and that’s not to say that those other books don’t have like, I think people know I read really widely. This was kind of exactly the novel I expected from you. I mean, yeah, we gotta talk about this for a second, because you have been working on this for a while. You also have kind of a fancy day job.

KW
I do. I. So I started writing the book in 2014. I had been working at Elle Magazine as an editorial assistant for about a year by the time when I started writing this book. And I was at Elle for around five years. And then now I am an editor at Vanity Fair.

So that’s the day job, and you’re doing some celebrity stuff and some fashion stuff and a lot of books stuff. But I bring that up because Sal has decided that she’s going to write about her adventure. Yes, chasing down the story. And I kind of also want to be clear that this is not auto fiction, like we do. Like, this is not auto fiction. This is I have some cool stuff that I want to talk about. And I think it’s important to raise that too, because a lot of the stuff that you bring up in The Mythmakers, which some of which we are super not talking. This is airing right around the time you pub. So we’re not there’s stuff we are not, you know, the way people assume that they somehow owned someone else’s story.

Yeah, yeah, I think so when I started writing the book, I, you know, I had graduated from college where I had studied literature the year before, and I had been reading a lot of Bach and Philip Roth, so I was already really interested in ideas of storytelling and how to tell a story and who gets to tell a story. But then, when I started working at the magazine, and started sort of seeing the behind the scenes of how profiles are put together and magazine profiles, you know, that’s just one of my absolute favorite things to read. And now to write, I think, you know, you do start thinking about the questions that arise when you are holding somebody else’s story. And when you’re a person who’s in charge of putting that story out into the world, you are also thinking about the fact that the person who you’re writing about, can be withholding or can, you know, shape their story to various degrees? I think all of those questions came up when I was writing.

And, you know, I was thinking to Emma Cline’s new novel has just come out, The Guest. Which and yeah, okay, you’ve read The Guest too. And are now Alex, the protagonist of the guest. I’m not saying she and Sal are totally similar, but there are echoes of each and the other. And I think Alex would probably not notice Sal and Sal would be very judgy about Alex.

Yeah. Alex, I think as a main character was so interesting to read because she has so little backstory so much of who she is, is just right on the page. I think that there is a little bit of that with Sal as well. Sort of this reluctance for her to share certain aspects of her biography that, don’t you find out a lot about what she would like you to find out about.

I love an unreliable narrator, because I like to puzzle through and I like to occasionally be a little judgy about my fictional characters. But Sal, you know, she’s young, she’s messy. She’s not necessarily making great decisions. She really likes a cocktail. She does, like the cocktail. Like her, it turns out, yeah, and maybe she needs to take a step back from that. But she really she’s self-absorbed in the way that young people who are really ambitious can be self-absorbed. Like it doesn’t occur to her that she isn’t actually the main character.

In this story, of this particular story.

And watching her work her way through and the way you’ve structured The Mythmakers, right? Like, we’re gonna leave some characters out, but we’re gonna focus on Sal and the writer himself, Martin, and his wife, Moira. Yeah, I also have a daughter, Caroline, who may or may not pop up later as we go. But we’re going to leave out some other folks so that people can really enjoy the ride as much as I did. But I think the three, the three of them are sort of the soul of The Mythmakers.

Yeah. And Sal, you know, she, when she first meets Martin, she’s very young. She has just left school, and she’s attending a literary party that’s held at the New York Public Library. So she’s sort of in an impressionable spot already. And then she meets this man who’s in his 70s, she has no idea who he is, while she’s talking to him, except, as she talks to him, she realizes that he’s a writer, one of his former students comes over at one point and says, you know, like, I was rereading your first novel, and I loved it so much. So Sal sort of gets the impression that he’s, you know, an important-ish writer, and he starts start saying all kinds of lovely things to her about how she is a writer and how, you know, she just needs to sort of, you know, go out and take this for herself. And so that makes an impression on her. And so then when she comes across this story, six years later, having not maybe reached the professional heights that she hoped that she would, by that point, it sparks something in her. And so she’s devastated when she finds out that he has died. And this all happens quite early in the book. So I think that this is too much of a spoiler for anybody. But she realizes that his widow is alive and well and living in upstate New York. And she, for various reasons, is sort of ready to airlift herself out of her life. And so she gets on a bus and goes to see this woman who sort of reluctantly allows her in.

Moira is also a scientist.

08:13

Moira is a physicist.

Nice choice.

There was so much reading and talking to people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to physics, that I sort of had to try to wrap my brain around to even just get a small amount into the book.

Part of what I appreciate, though, about The Mythmakers is the way marriage is handled, right? Like Moira is not here to preserve Martin’s legacy. He was her husband; he is the father of her daughter. He was the love of her life I suppose we could say.

There’s yes, there’s a really deep love between the two of them, you know, they meant the world to each other. You know, I had been reading all of these, you know, Nabokov really sort of was my north star when I was writing this book, and I adore his writing, I think, you know, his, his relationship with his wife. Vera was very specific. And, you know, Vera did everything for him and you drove him places and held his wallet and transcribed his writing. You know, she was like secretary, first reader, editor, everything and Moira is very much not that and Martin is very much not Nabokov. So that was an interesting dynamic to be exploring.

Martin shows us who he is in the book. And I sort of have to let that hang in the air. He just shows us who he is. And I laughed every single time something popped, where it’s like, yeah, of course. Of course, that’s who the student is. Didn’t Martin and Moira and Sal sort of show up together? Did you start with the idea of the book? Or did you start with the voice? Because they’re all very distinct,

I think Moira really came first. I’m not really sure where she came from, but but that character was sort of floating around in my head for a while. And then I had an experience that was very similar to the one that Sal had at the New York Public Library. I was very young, and I, you know, ran into this older screenwriter who, you know, was in his 70s at the time, and he said, all kinds of lovely things to me as well. And, and, you know, I never had anything to do with him ever again. But I think that experience sort of crystallized an idea that maybe I had been kicking around for a while, of this younger woman writer who sort of, you know, goes off in search of her idol at different times, I thought Martin maybe would be more or less successful. He sort of just, you know, he’s, he’s an author who was able to publish a number of books, but he, you know, didn’t win prizes. You didn’t, you know, if you were walking down the street, he’s not somebody who anyone would just— he’s not a household name.

We call that a midlist career and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just harder to do. Yeah, I think it’s kind of important to point out that you had to go back in time to establish that because the book world has changed a little bit. And it is much harder to live this sort of bookish career that Martin had, where he’s not sitting on top of the bestseller lists. And he’s not publishing a book a year, we’re kind of like, he’s just, okay, this is what he does. But he’s relatively obscure, except you have this great line. This made me how it’s made me totally how something like Martin always looked for applause. But the applause of one person was simply not enough for him. And I’m paraphrasing you poorly. But I was howling when I read them. Because it’s like, yeah, basically, he’s kind of doing this in a vacuum. Yeah. But he would like to have a much bigger presence.

Yeah, he’s, I think, you know, he wants to be famous for his for his writing, and, you know, sort of doesn’t ever get to the place that he wants to. And I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of people have to have that in their careers. There’s always somebody who’s doing a little bit better than you.

Martin does remind me that sort of exchange between Martin and Moira and Sal kind of reminds me a little bit of Commonwealth the Ann Patchett novel. Like, who’s who has the right to tell a story? And who does the story belong to? And the opening of that oh, man, the opening of Commonwealth? That’s still one of the best, best openings of a book. Yeah. But you’re playing with this throughout, like, you know, we’re sitting in the present day, obviously. And you do there are some, there’s a little bit of backstory that you give to Martin and Moira, but it’s like the 70s. Right. It’s like the early 70s sort of stuff. But it feels very much like it could have been, I mean, to me, like, it could have been the 50s. Or it could have been the 60s, like, you know, there are still cocktail parties, and people still dress up. It’s just this idea of nostalgia, right? Like Martin totally buys into nostalgia Moira was a little like, I’m gonna make my own life, whatever. And Sal is just like, she might be more nostalgic than anyone. And she’s never even lived through this stuff, right. Like, she’s significantly younger than everyone.

And I think that’s such a specific feeling, you know, the nostalgia for a time that you didn’t live in, especially if you’re in books and print media, and the idea, you know, looking back at other eras as the golden age that you missed, but then of course, there’s all kinds of complications that come along with that. And I think, you know, Martin is sort of trying to scramble his way into this certain group of group of people who is sort of ends up on the outskirts of and then and Sal in a certain way is, is having that happen as well, in her own career, and so I think that in her interest in Martin, a lot of that is interested in herself.

You know, there have been lots of conversations in the last few years about likeability of characters and how much some people need some readers want likeable. I’m not one of those people, but the thing about the likability conversation that is so interesting to me is it’s mostly talking about female characters, almost like well, the women have to be likable and like why?

it’s interesting. My editor when I, when we were working on this book was saying that, you know, so much of the question of likability is less about, like their actual characteristics and more about whether or not the reader can understand what they want. When you do start bringing up the ideas of women and likability, I think that that becomes complicated because I do think the idea of women wanting anything or striving for anything, people read that in in negative ways, in a way that men and male characters, you know, maybe, maybe are just allowed to want things in, in a different way.

Yeah, like if I think of Elif Batuman’s, novels, right? The Idiot and Either/Or, like, there are people who have had very visceral reactions to Selin, her narrator, who is like, you know, when we first meet her, she’s an 18 year old kid, by the end of Either/Or she’s all of, wait for it— 20 years old. I mean, come on. And, you know, I see all of these bits, written in different places and I’m like, you know, she’s basically a kid, right? Like, think back to when you were 18,19, 20. And as much as I’m kind of making fun of Sal because she really, there are a couple of moments where she does some very dumb stuff or she’ll say something, and I’m like, oh, sweetie, this is not about you. But okay, but sounds at what at most, like 25, 26?

26, 27 yeah.

So she’s really young, and doesn’t really have a point of comparison for anything, certainly doesn’t know, what might constitute a healthy relationship. Like her parents are kind of bananas and her relationship with her boyfriend too was not good.

It is not good. And, and I think there is, you know, just different parts of your life you become, or one can become more or less solipsistic. And she’s in a particularly solipsistic phase where, you know, she’s gone through this issue with her job, she, you know, no longer has that job. She sort of like lost a big part of her identity. And I think when the chips are down, off, and you know, everything, everything suddenly becomes about you. And so she’s, she’s in that for sure.

She wants so much. And I’m certainly not saying she shouldn’t have something. But there are a couple of lines, neither of which I can throw out here, because if I do, I’m giving too much away, where it’s in response to information that she is not given. Right. And Moira turns around and says, Well, you didn’t you never asked and that’s kind of big. I mean, and Moira is not wrong, she’s not wrong at all. But here’s Sal, she’s a little bit of a bulldog. But she does like when she’s not bulldogging it she’s also being really passive and just expecting people to open up and share these sort of big secrets, I guess, is the best word to use. And it’s funny watching this, work her way through, like, how do you even get words on the page?

I think it’s also that thing of you know, how easy it is to have blind spots. Or if you think that you know, what the story is? How much you close off, I think that happens for Sal in big and small ways. And that is something, you know that, that I think I have continued to learn in interview people just that if you go in thinking that you know exactly how a conversation is going to go, it probably will go that way. But you might be missing out on, you know, huge, huge sections of information that if you are a little bit more willing to sort of follow cues of the other person, then you might go somewhere more interesting or surprising. And I feel that way, you know, in friendships and relationships and just talking to, you know, talking to people, but if you actually listen to people, which can be hard, like it’s sometimes it’s hard to not be thinking of how you’re going to respond. I totally am guilty of that. But if you listen and then ask questions, often people do want to tell you more and that I think is always where the most interesting things come up.

You know, I want to get back to The Guest for two seconds because you something you just said made me think of Alex where Alex is really good at reading the room. But then she makes terrible decisions because she’s young, she doesn’t know what to do with the information. She doesn’t quite know how to process it. And then Sal also, like I wonder who she’s going to become as an adult and I realized, you know, technically 26, 27 Like you’re paying your own rent every year. Yeah, well, I mean, you’re closer to adulthood than you were but does Sal grow up to be the narrator of the novel Vladimir. Right, like the Julia May Jonas, you know what I’m talking about this English professor who’s just like, she’s so we’ve met men like his woman before and literature, but we’ve never met her. And she’s so kind of, like, she’s not evil. She’s just really deluded.

Yeah. And I think, like, what’s interesting about all those characters, you know, Alex in The Guest has sort of made, you know, her life’s work is sort of a study of the men around her and men in power, I think that Sal has done that in a certain way with her literary tastes. And I think, in Vladimir, that’s also, you know, in keeping, you know, one of the things that was happening when I was writing the book, is that I had been studying all of these really brilliant male authors. And, and, you know, was just in love with that writing. And then when I started working at Elle, which is, you know, obviously, a women’s magazine, and all of my bosses were women, and I was reading a lot of contemporary fiction by women authors, I was reading, you know, like, finding Zadie Smith’s essays for the first time, and I was reading a lot of Nicole Krauss and I think R.O. Kwon’s, The Incendiaries came out, a few years in into that job. And I think, you know, I my understanding of what literature could do, or could be and who could be writing, it was definitely shifting in the early years of writing this.

So it goes back to who becomes canon. You’re right, like, who does the anointing, right, like, you think about so? I mean, when I was young, I used to be able to recite the last paragraph of Wapshot Chronicle, the John Cheever novel and it’s great I mean, it’s letter it’s Leander’s letter to his sons and that’s to say go back and find it because it actually it is a very beautiful Yeah, but the idea that like Cheever and Cheever is a writer I still hold close like those short stories, man and certainly Wapshot. There’s some other novels where I’m like not so much. But the stories and the first Wapshot novel are to me, like both of my original copies are like tattered and falling apart. And it’s just because you go back to them again and again and again. I don’t necessarily want to lose that connection to Cheever. There are other writers like Henry Miller, I really don’t ever need to read Henry Miller again, like I’m good. I actually tried to like, you know, Miller is one of those people you read when you’re 18. And you’re like, Oh, my God, this is great. This is, you know, in your eyes get big. And then you go back later. Oh, man, I was just like, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think yes, the way you feel about Cheever, I feel about Roth where, you know, read and reread The Ghost Writer and American Pastoral and Human Stain. I think that my reading of those books changes over the years is I think, is one of the joys of returning to books that you love. But you know, what I always still love is, is that investigation of the person telling the story. And you know how that shapes the story that’s being told.

You know, it’s funny, the way you talk about Roth too, because I have finally officially given up the ghost.

I know we have very different…

Well, here’s the thing. My copy finally went, went to the donate pile because I and it was I like pointing this out only because this is how long I’ve had it. It was like a $12 trade paperback. Like I had had it for a long time because I was like, Yes, I did. In fact, it moved from like Chicago to New York. And I just every time I picked it up and like, I get it, I’ve read the criticism. I’ve listened to other people talk about this book. Sweet as a character fascinates me is like, all of the ideas of this novel fascinate me. And by all accounts by everything, I can’t do it. I finally just had to get I’ve just finally had to admit that this book, and I were just never going to connect.

Life’s too short to trying to bludgeon a book into being something that you want to consume. You know, there’s so many books that you do read and love, so why, just let it go on to the next.

It’s just so funny to me. Like, really, I had to scream uncle. I was like, I can’t, I can’t do it. I really, you know, and when I hear people riff on what their idea of canon should be, I also think canon It needs to change, right? Like it can and should not be stuck in time. Like, okay, I’m gonna take a really goofy kind of example for a second, but like Arthurian legend, or any of that kind of sort of Old English poetry like Beowulf, all of that kind of it has its place. But like, it doesn’t mean we can’t have new translations, right?

And I have to admit, I’m not a Beowulf scholar, but I feel that way about The Odyssey.

Like Emily Wilson.

Exactly. Different, different interpretations and different translations of The Odyssey. It’s so fascinating and listening.

And just for the purposes of the show notes to Maria Dahvana Headley is the translator, I’m thinking of this new edition of Beowulf, but yeah, like Emily Wilson got me to read The Odyssey again,

As humans. You know, like, of course, I think some literature is the reason why it sticks around is because it speaks to things that continue to be relevant, you know, the idea that only one perspective is worthy of carrying on is sad and limiting.

Martin doesn’t strike me as a dude who’s thinking the cannon needs to be expanded.

26:23

The only change that Martin make would make to the canon is to insert himself into it.

Right. That’s yeah, and part of me, though, wonders, you know, talking to Sal. And yes, we’re about to do the oh, we’re talking about a fictional character, like she’s real. But we are the idea of talking to Sal about what her idea of canon is, we don’t really hear her talking about writers outside of our even just giving context, right? Like, I’m not saying we need her reading list or anything like that. But I get the feeling that women writers are not necessarily sitting at the front of her brain, right.. You know, because there’s this idea, or was this idea, which I hope is being challenged a little more that only a certain kind of person could write literary fiction, like, Well, yeah, actually, let’s have this conversation. And I did an event recently in one of our stores where one of the audience questions referenced, you know, literary fiction being something that sort of only white dudes did. And I was like, well, we can take this conversation offline, because we were in the middle of another event for something else. She was very groovy. And she’s very smart. And we had a very nice conversation about it. But what passes for literary and who decides? And yeah, some of it’s just straight up marketing. Okay, we know this. I do love to read something that I know someone has aggressively thought about the sentence level work, right. And you are one of those people like, it’s just you slide in these moments. And again, I don’t want to reveal anything, just because it’s so much fun to read this book. But you get these lines in, where suddenly you know exactly who that person is, or who they were in that moment, I should say, and that is really satisfying to me. And so much happens in your very old-fashioned novel. I’m guessing there are a couple of drafts of this book that you completely throw out the window and reworked. I mean, not because I can see the seams, but it’s just it’s so seamless and seamless doesn’t show up. Yeah, seamless doesn’t show up. Because you just went Hi, here’s my draft, and I bombed through it. And here you go. It’s seamless. It’s hard.

Yeah, I mean, so much of it was just trying to fit these different people together. I couldn’t, I couldn’t even tell you the number of drafts and half drafts. And you know, and then when I was fortunate enough to start working with my agents, then we went through revisions. And then when I started working with the editors, then more revisions, I think what I really love, you know, when I’m reading is when there are those moments where there are sort of these transitions happening or, you know, there are sort of subtle interactions between people that are maybe like blowing things up more, either for the characters, then the reader understands or the characters understand. And yeah, it takes, I certainly was not able to do that in a first draft.

But in general, I mean, you’re covering what, 50 something years, almost 50 years, right? Okay, so if art reflects our culture, right, which we know that that’s kind of primary purpose, right? That’s the primary purpose of the novel is capture time reflect our culture, the way you play with women’s roles in this book and the way you play with marriage, which is kind of the anchor. Yeah, like partnership and marriage and relationships are the anchor of this novel in a way that I didn’t necessarily expect. I mean, we live in the 21st century, like, I mean, you know, how I feel about marriage. What is it? Is it that much of a primary primordial thing marriage that we can’t not talk about it?

I think, Well, I think one thing is I really did not want to write about romantic relationships. That was I was really, for whatever reason, maybe because I did, I had this sort of internalized feeling that if you are a woman writing about relationship, then that sort of immediately putting you in a particular box, but, you know, like going through the world, you fall in love with people, and you break up and you decide to have children or you decide not to have children, and every gender makes those same decisions. It’s, it’s just that for whatever reason, it historically maybe has seemed less serious, when it has been anybody but a straight man writing about that, like, I do really think that that is changing and has changed. I, you know, have complicated feelings, as I’m sure you know, most people do about being a woman in a relationship. And I’m, you know, a straight woman in a relationship. And, and so all of that comes out on the page. And I think also, I’m really interested in the difference in, in the wage, different generations handle parenthood and partnership. And so that ended up being you know, that that comes out, I think, in the book, Moira as a mother, that her relationship with her own mother is also in the book. And then Martin loses his mother, very, you know, very young and, and his father isn’t really ever in the picture. So I think there are different parents dynamics that are going on as well. And I think that parenthood and partnership, you know, are so hand in hand too. So it’s all in there.

It’s true, it is all in there. But I’m also thinking about the fact that, you know, so many people think of the 1960s as this like pivotal point of change in America kind of thing. culturally, socially, people just kind of overlook the 70s, which was total chaos, everyone was raised by wolves, the 70s were a mess. And, you know, here’s Martin sort of holding on to the past in a really different way and Moira’s like, I’m gonna go be a scientist. I will have my child and she loves her husband, she loves her child, but just like, and while I’m at it, I’m gonna solve, you know, XY and Z equation and everything else. And I love the idea that Moira is actually a little clueless when it comes to the world around her. Like, she’s just kind of like, this is what I’m gonna do. Yeah, I’m just gonna do this. Like, I don’t You don’t ever hear her talking about what she’s watching or reading or, like, she talks about planets. She talks about her family, like, I’ve never really met anyone like Moira before.

There were areas in my life, my mom grew up in, partially in Houston in during the space race. And, and then we had sort of these maybe, like basically godparents, who were scientists who were working for NASA and doing all kinds of wild things. And so as a little girl, they were, they were part of my life. Since then, I have acquired various scientific minds. My husband is a scientist, who sort of thinks about the world in a very different way than I do is, you know, I think that’s a really nice kind of relationship to have. For Moira she is so it’s very helpful to her in certain aspects, so that she is able to sort of be a little bit monomaniacal about what she’s interested in. But then she also, you know, runs up against certain circumstances where she sort of reminded of her place in the world. She just assumes that if she is good enough at something, then she’ll be good enough at something and then, you know, it turns out that there are other aspects at play.

She’s also a little bit I mean, some of what she does and some of what she believes, usually is given to a dude. Yeah, in a piece of art, whether it’s a film or a book or what have you, and It’s fun watching her just sort of be Moira on the page. Like she’s just, she’s a great character. And I also I don’t want to sound like I’m being dismissive of Sal at all, I could not turn away from her. She made me itch a little bit. But I would much rather have a character make me itch a little bit, then think, oh, I don’t need to finish this. I don’t need to know what happens to this person, like I needed to know. Because I have no idea where you are going down. I’m delighted to say, Well, I was not wrong. But it was really fun getting there. It was really, really super fun getting there. But part of me wonders. I mean, you talk to people who are parts of all different kinds of major art moments, whether it’s music or film or television, whatever. And here you are writing a novel. Why? I mean, obviously, why not? But like, seriously, you’re working, like your scale is a little different.

Yeah. I have just always loved novels. Like, that’s just what, you know, I love watching movies, but I, you know, my parents would have to stop me from reading a book when I crossed the street when I was little, you know, like, and I don’t know why we love the things that we do. But it just has always been books, and it sort of feels like a compulsion. I think that, you know, both my parents are classical musicians, and they just have to make music. You know, they retired a couple years ago now, but they still play. And they still like, if you have that, and just like it doesn’t, you know, it’s not so easy to just do other things. I feel like physically sick when I have gone too long without writing fiction. And so I don’t know what it is. I just love them.

Is it the journey itself? I mean, that’s slightly cliched. But that’s essentially what a novel is. It’s a journey, right? Like, that’s the thing. That’s the thing that keeps you turning pages, that’s the thing that gets you invested in the characters, whether it’s their journey, like if it’s a physical thing, or a mental thing. And I just, even when the subject is not fun, the art is fun.

Yeah, yeah. And that it, you know, it takes you out of time and this particular way that other things do. And you know, like now that you know, miniseries and streaming, and that you can binge, a TV show for, you know, 30 hours if you want to, you can do that. But I think for so long books were sort of this, the primary long form, narrative art form that you sat with for an extended period of time. And I think that there is something very powerful about that. And it does, like, it just changes the way you think. I think, probably anyone who has ever, like tried to keep a diary, especially when you’re younger, and you know, when I go and I’ve been a very big, I’m very sporadic, bad diary keeper. But when I look back at things I was writing when I was 14, or 15, like I knew exactly what I was reading at that time, because it’s like, oh, like, here is the Didion stage, here is the Austen, here’s the, you know, whatever. And, you know, I think it’s sort of like rewires your brain to live in somebody else’s voice for a long period of time.

Without a doubt, I mean, when I think of some of the writers that I really glommed on to when I was a teenager, like Joan Didion, right, like, when you and I were coming up, YA was not quite the thing it is now. So you know, you start punching above your weight really quickly, there’s still so much Didion and I love and, but to go back to those sentences and to go and to think about how sort of revelatory the whole experience was, you know, when you’re 13, 14, 15. And you’re, suddenly here’s this woman who sort of appears out of the mist, right? leaning against her Corvette, and you’re like, I’m sorry, what is happening here? This is, like any adult I’ve ever seen in my life, like, I don’t even understand what is happening and what I’m ready. And, you know, my eyes are getting big, just thinking about it. Yeah, how much you can shift your perception of the world. And here’s Sal, who’s sort of inherited Martin’s way of thinking more than Moira’s way of thinking, right? Like, sounds inquisitive. But, you know, like you were saying earlier in the show, you’re like, well, sometimes you walk into an interview, you know exactly what you want to do and then it whiffs because you don’t there’s no, give and take, right. And then there are times where I mean, I’ve there are times where I have sat down to do an interview and I throw out my entire thing and you just go.

Just along for the ride.

None of this script matters. Not a whit of research matters. We’re just we’re gonna go and oftentimes it’s really great. Yeah, I mean, it really, like, there are times when you’re just like, okay, and also editing changes the way you interview, like, I’m learning to physically edit audio, which I did early on in the show, it changed the way that I interview without a doubt.

I know I think about this all the time, like when, you know, I think probably like, a lot of people, there’s a certain anxiety about the AI situation going on right now. I hate the idea that, you know, that there’s any possibility that that AI could start, you know, creating the, the books that we’re reading, but I think the thing that probably will keep that from happening is that, and I am certainly not an expert in like neural networks, or, you know, like natural language processing or whatever. But like, the way that works is that it’s sort of its picking one sentence, and then figuring out what would come in the next sentence. And, you know, based on everything that’s ever been written in the history of the world, and I think what’s so incredible about human brains is that they don’t always work like that. And that, I think, when you’re reading a book, that sort of most exciting moments are when the thing that happens next, is building from what’s happened before, but as an unexpected moment, you know, like, we don’t want to just be sort of trailing along on, you know, the next thing and the next thing and the next thing I think, like, what we like about human interactions, and I think that reading books is a human interaction is that people surprise you and, and disappoint you. And, you know, do that there are all these ways that that people are not machines. And most, for the most part, I think that people writing books are always going to have that just a little, a little leg up over.

I mean, story is such a human need, right? It’s like, eating and sleeping and breathing. Yeah, for some of us, right. Like, I just tell me a story. Tell me a story. And you know, I don’t know where it’s gonna go. But that’s what I appreciated about meeting these characters. I had some idea of where I was, and what was going on. But you always sort of kept me on my toes, which I that’s not easy to do. I read a lot. I don’t watch a lot of television, because I don’t have time, like you gotta choose right. But certainly, Sal, and Moira and Martin kept me guessing. And there were a couple of moments where, you know, my notes were not fit for family newspaper. I can say they never settled in to cliche. They never settled into a right. I know where this is going. Because I’ve read this before, it was always kind of like, well, I know how your brain works. And I have an idea of where we’re going. But it was a really excellent journey.

Oh, I’m so so pleased to hear that it makes me so happy.

Because I just I really liked the way you balanced backstory, and the present. And again, there are characters that we’ve left out because it is a very tight cast, which I appreciate it too. It’s a very, very tight cast. But there’s some stuff that could be revealed. And there’s some moments in those relationships that were really satisfying. They were so, so satisfying. And the one thing I will say is you make a reference to a novel called The Wife and that made me laugh out loud. And I’m not gonna tell people where it is when you get to it, you will know it. You know it when you see it, and I just laughed out loud when I saw that. I was like, okay, well.

That is a book that I read later on. I hadn’t read it. I read another Meg Wolitzer book and then I read The Wife and you know, that investigation of that kind of literary scholarship is so good. It’s so so good. And in a lot of ways, it feels like Moira is sort of like the anti-literary wife and that all these all these authors, you know, the nubuck offs and, you know, Philip Roth’s, first wife, Margaret Martinson who I like I think, I read a I don’t know if it was in one of his an obituary or I don’t know where it was. He had a very difficult relationship with his first wife. Then she died a decade later. And the note was something like and you know, that put a significant dent on his literary output or something like that. I just thought like, what a wild, like, regardless of what was going on, like what a wild sort of little footnote to have on a person’s life, you know that the, the importance of this of this person is that she, you know, changed or changed out somebody was writing. And you know, of course, it’s more complicated than that. But Sal even goes into meeting Moira sort of expecting that she’s getting that kind of person and is sort of hoping that Moira is going to, you know, like, be her her husband’s, like biographer assistant, you know, and she doesn’t do that. So playing around with some of those dynamics was fun to do.

Have you started working on the next thing?

I have started, yes, it takes place in San Francisco. And it’s about a group of friends. And well, I’m a couple of years into it. And we’ll see where it goes.

We can wait, we can be patient. I mean, honestly, you did. I mean, you took the right amount of time for The Mythmakers.

I’m hoping this a little bit quicker. I do think that so much of you know, I rewrote the first like, couple chapters of The Mythmakers for three years like I just could not figure out how to get Sal out of New York basically. And I think I was just anxious about you know, like what was coming next and everyone writes in different ways and I think that some people really need to get things perfectly as they go along. But I think maybe even I don’t know what came first but definitely in a magazine writing it’s much easier for me to write a full draft big messy you know, bloated situation that then I can sort of chisel down refine and I found finally when I just did that with the draft of this book that that I had something to work with. So lucky.

Lucky us. And you know, of course this happened because I’m looking in the corner of my screen and we ran down time is like totally, we ran down the clock again. Keziah Weir, it is always really really good to see you.

Such a pleasure to talk to you I also just I mean I have said this behind the scenes but you are just such a like, a beam of light and in my literary world, and so many people’s.

Thank you for that and right back at you but The Mythmakers is out now and everyone should just go read it.

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and wait until you hear about My Murder by Katie Williams. And luckily Katie is here because this book is wild. Katie, this book is so wild and so unexpected it zigs, when you think it’s going to zag and there’s all sorts of great stuff going on. But I have to tell you something before we get started, I thought this was going to be a ghost story.

Katie Williams
Okay, that’s fair. It’s fair. Yeah. It’s My Murder.

MM
I know, it’s called My Murder. But at the same time, like, really, we’ve got cloning. We’ve got artificial intelligence. We’ve got video games, and we’ve got a really cool woman called Lou, who’s trying to piece it all together, but I really, I honestly, I was kind of like, well, okay, so ghost story, whatever. And you know, this is great. And the voice is fantastic. And Lou is great. And her husband, Silas is pretty good, dude. But where did this book come from?

KW
I love that you said it was a wild read, because I just, I wanted it to just be such a good time because they came out of my, my deep fandom, my love of, of murder mysteries. So I wanted to put all the things I love about murder mysteries and thrillers into this book. And at the same time, it came out of this kind of, sort of uncomfortable feeling I sometimes have about being a murder mystery reader and fan, which is that there’s, you know, often a dead woman in the center of the floor. And the whole book is about everyone else going to try to figure out who killed her, what happened to her, and she’s just sort of there and not active at all in what is, arguably, her story. And so I asked myself, if there was a way I could bring her back, not like through flashbacks, but literally onto the page. And that’s where that’s where Lou came from. She is both the murder victim and, you know, the main character, and eventually, you know, sort of the investigator of off her murder.

I really liked her as character.

Oh, thank you.

She’s a really good stand in for the audience, too. Because sometimes, you know, you get the detective who’s so raw, it’s just like, okay, hurry up. Even I figured this out, because I read a lot of this, you know, not to be impatient about these things, but you know what I’m talking about. And then there are other times where you’re like, of course, you’re nine steps ahead of us, Sherlock Holmes, because you’re noticing all the things that mere mortals do not so yay. And she’s kind of the perfect mix of what happened to me. Where am I? And who are these people? And what are they trying to get out of me?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, as a detective, it’s, it’s emotional for her. It’s her. It’s her own life. And this thing that’s happened to her that she is asking questions about and looking into and yeah, and then all the people in her life around her become, I don’t know, questionable.

Everyone’s hiding something in this book. Even her very nice husband Silas, very nice guy. But he’s hot. Everyone is hiding one of her dad’s whose character I quite like he’s hiding something. And she has a support group. And we need to talk about the ladies for a second because the ladies are excellent, but it’s a pretty trippy support group. And I think we can talk about this in a way that doesn’t give anything a way. I think we can do that. Would you introduce Lou’s fellow support group women?

Ah, yes, yes. Well, they are there are five women joined by a singular experience, which is that they are all victims of the same serial killer, Edward Early. And they have been through it, my book takes place in the near future, this government backed and overseen cloning program that has brought them back. And so they’re in a emotional support group. That’s the serial killer survivors support group. Yeah. So there’s Fern, Lacey, Jasmine, Angela, and then and then our protagonist, Lou, and are working through, you know, what’s happened to them. And they’re also dealing with, because these murders were big news, serial killer murderers can be they’re dealing with a strange sort of celebrity that they have as these true crime victims who have been brought back to life.

I mean, I know you’re saying it’s set in the near future, but My Murder is very of the moment it is. So super of the moment, I realize you have to step out in a way, right, like you’ve created this sort of dystopian landscape. That’s just familiar enough. I mean, it sounds like there are self-driving cars. But beyond that, like it really is a world that we would quickly recognize except for, you know, the cloning part.

Yeah. Yeah. I love reading science fiction too. But for me when I write it, and this was true with my last book, Tell the Machine Goodnight, I just like to inch out into the future a little bit. That’s a place that feels very, very real to me and sort of textured and lived in, where I can sort of let my imagination play. So yeah, it’s not, it’s not spaceships or anything. It’s really a world that I think is recognizable.

It’s totally recognizable. And it does to me too, it sort of feels a little bit like living online. And I know I alluded to video games, and there’s a video game that is a piece of this book, we’re not going to go into too much detail about the video game because it might give some stuff up. But you know, this idea that, you know, you need the online like Lou’s job. Can we talk about Lou’s job for a second? Because it’s wild.

Yeah, this is a job that actually exist though not in this format right now. So yeah, she’s a professional, they call her a professional hugger. But like, she holds people for a living and that’s her real job, I think a very important job. But because we’re just a little bit out in the future. She does it through like a virtual reality. They’re called skins in the novel. So while she and her clients are in a sort of virtual space and appear in as they would like to.

It’s that virtual space that made me sort of stop for a second. I mean, I guess, like, people are some people are starved for touch. I mean, we saw this obviously early in lockdown and whatnot, that it was really hard for a lot of people. And I’m not making light of that at all. But this idea that you have to put on an entirely different persona, right, like a physical persona, in order to connect with another human being. I mean, it’s social media. I mean, it’s the exact metaphor for social media. And I’m just wondering to like, as you’re sitting down to create this, because also this book moves like you, I flew through the story, partially short chapters, partially, I needed to know what was going on. Partially, I just didn’t know how quickly I was moving through it because of the way you write, all of which is great. But you’re juggling characters, you’re juggling devices, you’re juggling world building, you’re doing all of these things in a really tightly written. I mean, this is what 275 pages may be like, it’s, yeah, it is, it is very tightly written this book. So how are you juggling all of these bits? And yeah, I mean, the obvious answer is, you’re the writer, it’s your job. But can we talk about process for a second?

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, it took me a while to find my way into this book, I knew Lou and I knew some things that were going to happen in it. I wrote for a while just trying to really stay centered and character, I think, in part because I knew I was writing, you know, a clone. So I needed to push past that idea, a simulacrum of someone to the actual person. And so for a while, I’m so glad to hear you say you flew through it. Because for a while, it was just sort of murky territory with me just hanging with the characters. I tell my students that it’s if they can trick their minds, I teach, if they can trick their minds into thinking of character and plot as one element instead of two fictional elements. That’s ideal. And I wasn’t taking my own advice. I was just, I mean, we were it was like a hot summer afternoon and the characters, and I were like lounging on couches with washcloths on our foreheads, you know, I needed to shake myself out of it. And you know, what I actually did is I had read Long, Bright River by Lismore. I don’t know if you’ve read that book, and that moves, but also like was such a center around character. So I stripped it down for parts, kind of, that’s the wrong analogy, but I did a reverse outline of it. And I looked at like, Oh, she, how she built her structure and then I thought about, like, how can I do the same with my characters?

Yeah, I mean, I realized, obviously, we are talking about, you know, murder mystery as a trope, right? Like, I mean, so many great mysteries, so many great thrillers written and published, you know, every year I, you will never if it is a genre you love to read, you will never run out of books to read, I promise you will never run out of things.

And that’s the terrible thing about wonderful thing.

Like, it’s very cool. But at the same time, like I love what you’re doing, too, because it’s really Lou’s murder, and I’m not gonna give up all the details, but it’s Lou’s murder in this continuum that sort of kicks off everyone, all of the women in the support group being cloned because she’s a wife, and she’s a mother. And I mean, you’re taking a really big political moment. I think it’s kind of cool to build a fun entertaining read around it. Like we don’t have to always read the big heavy thing, the big heavy exploration, right, like we should be having these conversations in our art. You know, because our art reflects our culture and all that kind of stuff. So I’m wondering, did you start with that piece? Is that where this all came from? It wasn’t just the character, but it was also this moment where it’s like some people are valued more than others.

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. And also this question about, like, in so much of our art, and especially this genre, which, as you say, what in our lives, like, why is it kind of romantic or titillating somehow, when there’s this certain murder victim? Like, the sort of Laura Palmer murder victim? What’s that about? And I don’t know that I even like, have answers, because when I write I just tried to arrive at more questions that Yeah, absolutely. It was, yeah, this idea of the quote unquote, perfect or ideal murder victim and what that says.

And the way to that you let each of these women in this poor group sort of explore their own anger, their different levels of response, right to being brought back to what happened to them, the sort of fame that comes along with it. Everyone has a very different response. And Fern, she’s a pistol and she’s a little bit of a weirdo in a good way, but she’s a little bit of a weirdo. And she sort of keeps things going. And two, she has a pretty big arc. I mean, all of everyone has their own arc, but hers, like stuff happens. stuff really, really happens. But you know, she gets some stuff. Lou gets some stuff. And I love the way it’s balanced because their lives are not exactly the same. And Fern, she doesn’t get left behind. And I appreciate she’s not just a sidekick. And I appreciate when you realize you’ve got Lou and Silas. And you know, you’re gonna have to create some other women, right? Who showed up after Lou? Like, how did the women come to be?

So this is the second chapter in the book. The support group was originally the first chapter. So we’re all sitting Yeah, yeah. And then it was we needed a little more sugar, because it was a lot of characters to be introducing at once, a lot of situation. Yeah, so I had them all sitting in those chairs pretty early on. And they haven’t, you know, they’ve been themselves the entire time. I mean, they I’ve gotten to know them better as characters, but no one drastically changed. I like what you said about Fern. She’s definitely a character that I could use, too, as a catalyst to shake things up. Which then, you know, I think Lou has kind of a friend crush on her that was fun to work with. Yeah. And then I had Angela pretty early as a character that the other women are sort of prickly toward in some ways, I find, I found understandable. She’s someone who has embraced that celebrity and almost uses it for empowerment, eventually.

I don’t think that’s a spoiler. I have some moments with her where I was like, you’re not actually better than these other women. Like she really thinks very highly of herself, because she just, she’s doing things in a way where she’s like, well, and no one else is really going to keep up with her because she’s Angela. And she is just that person who’s well ahead of everyone else. And in a place where she can do different things. And everyone else is kind of like well, and I like the contrast. But yeah, I had a couple of moments with her where I was kind of ready to flick her on the ear and be like, lady what.

But again, like she’s annoying for the right reasons. And I’m laughing a little bit too, because you and I are talking about fictional characters like they’re real people.

I mean, for me, yeah, they are for me, right? They’re my imaginary friends.

You do this a little bit well, more than a little bit in your earlier novel too, Tell the Machine Goodnight from 2018, where it’s that intersection of technology and human everything, human frailty, human just being human, right? Like we’re messy. We are, we’re messy. No one likes to be messy. But, you know, not just Lou’s job and not just obviously, the cloning part where we bring women back. But just in general, like this idea that technology is just so omnipresent, that we don’t even really think about it. And yet, like you have characters who are lonely, and you have characters who don’t know how to be around people in a way that actually helps them, like, the characters themselves kind of thing and watching that dance is pretty cool. When you’re building a world like this, and you’re balancing the humanity of it. All right, like because if it’s all tech, it’s not necessarily that interesting. And if it’s all the people, it’s not My Murder. So you’ve got this sort of merging of genre and style and voice and all of these different things.

I mean, I will say I had a lot more tech in it. And my very, very smart editor suggested I pull some of that out because it will distract from the characters that in general, and this was true in Tell the Machine, I like to look from moments where the technology reveals character reveals desire or fear. And that issue that you brought up earlier that by far not the first person to say this, but how technology can sometimes give us the illusion of being closer to each other, also distance and separate us from each other. I think that that tension that’s really interesting to me as a writer and a person.

I mean, it’s a narrative device that’s really useful. I mean, not all of us want to think about our social media accounts being sort of narrative devices. But if you think about what you decide to post on your own feed versus a corporate feed, or what have it, like, there are some people who really live online every minute, and I’m, sometimes I’m amazed. And other times I’m looking through my fingers kind of thing. But I’m sort of very deliberate about how I live online because I’m not necessarily sure, there’s information that I would want to share with people that I only see twice a year.

Yeah, there’s when you start, you know, posting online, a lot you start in your life, or at least I do think about like, oh, like, on this beautiful hike, like, wouldn’t this be a good Instagram photo, and that feels like it’s sort of cannibalizing one’s actual life experiences, in a way?

You think about it, you know, when I was growing up, we didn’t have camera phones in our pockets at all times, right? Like, the stuff now. And there are times where I’ll just take a photo for reference, like a sign. So I remember where something is kind of not necessarily for, you know, the art of it all and the serendipity of getting photos back when they’re printed, right? And you’re like, I have no idea if anything’s gonna show up until you open up the envelope. And it’s like, oh, and sometimes it’s great. And sometimes you’re like, What did I do? And now you can just be like, oh, yeah, I don’t like that one delete, that represents exactly what I want it to represent. And it may not actually be that thing in real life. But wow, it makes a great photo. It’s not like Lou is posting her experience to social media, but it feels like she’s living in that way where she’s like, I don’t know. What piece makes more sense. And watching her puzzle it out is really, I mean, it’s the soul of the book, but it’s terrific.

Thank you. Yeah. I mean, there’s this way in which you’re sort of curating and crafting your own identity and belonging. And I mean, I think it becomes an exaggeration, maybe of the ways we craft actually craft identities in our lives.

You are a graduate of Michener at University of Texas. Which is a great program. I mean, so many great writers on that program. I mean, actually, I have to say, when I saw that James Hanahan had blurbed— Can we talk about Delicious Foods for a second? I’m still listening to Carlotta, I have not finished Carlotta. So we can’t go to Carlotta. Yeah, Delicious Foods and Scottie. And the reason I’m bringing it up, because I’m sure there are people who are listening who are like, what is this tangent, you know, Scottie’s voice and delicious foods. And this character’s voice is so real and so vibrant, and it really drives the story. And you’re doing that, you know, in a in a different way. But it’s again, it’s that voice thing. I’m just, I love the idea that you guys both came out of this sort of very hardcore MFA program, telling great stories with really good voices and we’re you guys in the same class?

Well, I was just gonna say that you’re bringing James up in this interview about my book, is just admire his work so much. We were in the same graduating class. And since we are doing video on this, can I grab something. This is an odd item that James gifted me for my last birthday.

Okay, wait, it’s a glass bowl sitting in a tree. What is this?

He found it an art shop in Providence. Yeah, but just, you know, James is a dear friend, you’re in the same cohort are in the same year. He inspires and challenges me in my work and has since we were, you know, a number of years ago in our MFA program together.

I love this idea too, because also, you know, there’s so much conversation swirling around in publishing and you know, online in a million different places where it’s like genre, not genre. I only read genre. I never read genre and I just I like this idea of being able to use whatever tools you need to tell the story. Right, like you started at the top of the show by saying, Well, I have this kind of love hate thing with murder mystery. I gotta tell you true crime actually makes me rather uncomfortable. And I understand why people like it. And I understand that there are people like I get, it’s just it’s not for me. It’s not for me, it’s not a storytelling that I can, you know, glom onto. But then you’ve got, like Rebecca Makkai’s last novel. And she even has a character who comes out and says, like, it’s a little icky, but like, whatever you need to tell the story, right? And so when did you sort of realize that you wanted to play with sort of these ideas of sci fi and fantasy? Or let’s call it voice, right, like, what James is doing in Delicious Foods, certainly with that voice? Yeah. I really, I read that in a single setting. And I just, I still love Delicious Foods to bits. That book is so good. It’s astounding.

Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing I’d say is that, you know, these genres exist, because people have been telling, they’ve been using these tools or these, tropes, as my students call them, over and over again. So there’s something there that we are, as humans, trying to express that, you know, is endlessly interesting to us that we can’t find, you know, whether it’s fantasy, whether it’s sci fi, whether it’s mystery. So cracking, open, what that is, is really interesting to me as a writer. And then you have beyond that, like, well, would you said whatever tools you have at hand to create the art, it’s a lot of fun for me. So Tell the machine my last book is a speculative novel, maybe it’s science fiction, some people might say, but, you know, there’s like, you know, governess and a haunted house story. In it, there’s a hard-boiled mystery story in it. Yeah. So it’s just incredibly satisfying and endlessly interesting for me as a writer to play around with these genres and put them together and see what they say about us.

Sometimes I wonder, too, like, you know, when you’re a kid, and you’re reading and rereading something, because you know, sort of how it’s gonna play out, right? Or you’re rewatching something because you know, how it’s gonna play out. And I’m not saying we’re looking to see, you know, repetition percent, but there’s something really comforting about knowing sort of what beats something might hit. And I’m not saying you know, the details of the thing, but this idea that you kind of know what’s going on, but you get to challenge yourself a little bit like, you know, a locked room mystery, right? And sometimes those are really satisfying. And sometimes you’re like, it just depends, right? Like, it just depends on how the art is executed. And I’m not sure I would have met Lou, like, if you had sort of written a very standard, dead woman, husband, baby, let’s figure out who did it kind of story. I’m not necessarily sure. I would have been bouncing on the balls of my feet the way I am about My Murder, I think it’s partially like the device and the tools that you’re using to tell the story that make it so interesting, and so fun and so weird in a good way for me. So can we talk about some of your other influences, though? I mean, obviously, James, like a classmate, but also I can see sort of the similarities and sensibilities and how you both sort of approach writing but who are some of the other writers who made Katie Williams, Katie Williams?

Oh, just in general. I mean, Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite favorites for all time. Rest in power. that what she does in science fiction and fantasy to show ourselves Yes, Stunning. Stunning. Some of my favorite mystery writers, Tana French, you know, it’s because the mystery is all about showing the revealing these characters. Yeah. And then Flynn Berry writes such beautiful mysteries, her prose, her art was something I thought about a lot while writing this.

All of that is really interesting. But you started writing YA, which I did not know. I mean, I knew it because Tell the Machine Goodnight was a finalist for the Kirkus prize. So I knew that was out in the world. You know, I knew about that bucket list, but I didn’t honestly know about the YA. Before I sat down to start doing the research for the show. So why the switch? What or was there something you weren’t getting from writing ya that just made you say, I’m going to try this other thing because you also write short stories as well. But like, where’s that line for you?

I didn’t start out intending to write YA. I just happen to have a lot of teenage characters and my short stories is what I started on and I still love that form. I haven’t written a short story in a while. But my first books space between trees published as a young adult, but I didn’t write it us young adult. My agent took it out at that. And we got offers for both young adult and adult. And we went with Chronicle Books, which was a great first home for me, and published it young adult, and he did a second book for them. And yeah, I mean, I loved writing young adult, and I might again, I don’t know, no plans, but I don’t know, it wasn’t like, I sat down and decided, like, I’m gonna write an adult novel. When I wrote tell the machine it started as a short story, and then grew. And it happened to be about, you know, a woman in her 40s. And so I think that more naturally placed it in adult what, but she has a teenage son who’s a very important. So yeah, I mean, I guess, like with the genre thing. Now, I don’t know if I’m still, like, tear the walls down. You know, like, I’m,

I think, you know, watching people move out of their comfort zone, whether they’re writing or reading is always kind of fun. And I always just want to ask, like, what was it really like? Because I mean, honestly, you’re not necessarily getting an MFA to learn. I mean, there’s so many pieces of an MFA. And I’m certainly like, there’s so many sort of artificial lines that get drawn between MFA, non MFA. I think it’s sort of a human response to want to categorize everything, but maybe you just have to tell the story.

Yeah. And I, you know, I now teach in an MFA program. In fact, I teach in two MFA programs at Emerson college. Well, they’re both under Emerson, housed under Emerson and one is in residence program, which is the more standard literary fiction. We do other genres too, literary program. The other program is the popular fiction MFA. And they do define it there by genre. So you know, it says, The romance, mystery, thriller and writers who are working in those areas.

that’s a super good idea, I have to say, because whenever I think of Emerson, I actually just think of Ploughshares magazine, which has been around for forever. And much of my high school career was, you know, reading as much a Ploughhares as I could get my hands on, because, you know, it’s I grew up outside of Boston, but I love the idea that there are that you recognize that there’s space for everything in an academic program like that. I just, I had no idea.

It’s a celebratory space. And they’re all blending genres, the work they’re doing in the popular fiction MFA is really amazing.

What have you learned from your students? Because you’ve been teaching for a really long time. And you’ve taught in different places around the country like this is the current place, but what have you learned over time?

Well, I taught, my previous institution, Academy of Art University in San Francisco, I was teaching creative writing that was the required English class, but they weren’t, well, some of them were writers, but they were all kinds of artists. So you know, graphic designers and fashion designers, and sculptors and photographers, and I love teaching creative writing to all those different types of artists because it gave me different vantage points in ways into the work. At Emerson, I’m teaching creative writers now in MFA programs and bachelor programs that are majoring in Creative Writing, and they inspire me, they reconnect me with that initial like, curiosity and excitement and those big hopes, when you’re first sort of starting to learn and practice the craft. My popular fiction MFA students have definitely taught me a ton about plot and plotting things. And hooks, like making readers want to turn those pages. Yeah, I’m indebted to them. I really, I really enjoy teaching. And my students are tremendously talented.

Yeah, as the person who was turning pages rapidly because of you. Thank you, anyone who had a hand in it. I mean, it was just there’s so many great moments, where you Zig instead of zag and there are a couple of reveals. In this book that were really I’m smiling, just thinking about them, because they were so good. But I couldn’t be lazy as I was reading. And I like that, you know, everyone reads for different reasons. There are times to where I just want to reread something, because you know, and I don’t have that much opportunity to reread unless it’s in the context of prepping for a show. And it was just fun to be really surprised. And I’m wondering if you were surprised by anything as you were working on My Murder.

Yeah, plot wise, you know, yeah, some things definitely came up and surprised me. As I wrote the structure with the short chapters and some of the things that were happening with the structure. That was a surprise that came.

And yeah, how long did it take you to write My Murder? Oh, yeah, three years.

I was playing with the idea for a while actually, I had initially I had some, we’re gonna talk about this. This was a couple years ago, I had an idea that it would be a young adult novel about a reality TV show. So it obviously traveled very far from that.

Well, yes and no, actually, I can see how this could have started there. I’m also you’ve got me thinking about Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s new Chain-Gang All-Stars, which if you haven’t had a chance to read, you should totally put that on your list. It’s amazing. But it has a similar, you know, I can totally see how this could have started in a different direction like that. Do you miss this world that you made?

No, without giving me the ending? I feel like I, you know, did right by my character. Tucked them in to bed and I’m able to tiptoe out of the room and close the door behind me. So

No, I get that. I totally get that. It’s a really satisfying, organic ending. And there is you and I talked about this a little bit before we started taping ours like, yeah, I really liked that thing that we can’t talk about. We can’t talk about that thing. What do you want to do next? Have you started the next thing I mean, this is really complete, you’ve left these characters behind. I mean, you are about to put them out into the world, they’re going to find their audience. But what’s next?

I have a couple of projects in the works, one of which is sitting in the corner in the timeout chair, it’s been giving me a little challenge. I do have another sort of twisty mystery. So I’m thinking of it as a horror comedy, actually, but it has a mystery thread too for sure. The author AJ Finn gave me this like really generous blurb where he said, I’m glad I didn’t write this book, because what would I write next? And I was like, okay, challenge accepted. What would I write next to create a top this one? So this was that my answer to that kind of challenge as I saw it, and it’s about a middle aged scream queen. So she hasn’t worked in many years, but she was like the it girl in horror movies back when she was in her 20s. And her career has faltered and someone starts murdering people using the scenes from her old movies and so she gets drawn back into kind of the limelight through this.

Okay, please write that book. I would very much like to sell a lot of copies of that book. It’s also feeling like for fans of Grady Hendrix, they would really, really, really want to read that. That’s sort of what I’m thinking there’s a ready-made audience. Could you please have that one, too. I mean, I’m delighted that My Murder is here. I just it’s so much fun. But it’s also it’s thoughtful, and it’s smart. But we can have fun too. We can have both. We can have all of the things in a novel. And I just like I can’t stress that enough. Like there’s so much good stuff here. And also, I do really like Lou. I think she’s a great character.

Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed my time with her.

You know, it’s funny when we’re doing these interviews, and we’re trying to like dance around all the spoilers because there’s so much good stuff that happens in My Murder. I cannot wait for readers to meet lude and meet the women in her support group, especially for him. But all of the women in the support group and also even Silas, who you know, he’s Silas. I’m just gonna say he’s Silas. But I’m excited for readers to meet this cast. And I’m really excited for people to have time with you and this novel and My Murder is just really groovy and unexpected and smart and fun and also a little thought provoking. So Katie Williams, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over and My Murder is out now.