Good Life Project - Fierce Sisters, Cool Stories and Poison Plants: Amy Stewart

Episode Date: October 9, 2015

At first glance, you might think Amy Stewart had an obsession with gardens and bugs. She's written a series of bestselling books on the topic and had her garden of poison plants hailed as one of the 18 strangest gardens in the world by Popular Mechanics.Underneath that, though, lies a far deeper devotion, one that's fueled her since she was a kid. Amy Stewart is possessed by the craft of writing and storytelling. It's not so much gardens or bugs, it's the stories of people that arise out of those places and creatures that fascinate her. And the opportunity to tell them in her wonderful voice.After tremendous success as a nonfiction writer, Amy decided to do something most people in the industry view as a huge risk. Having built a large audience around her nonfiction creations, she stumbled upon a bigger story that had to be told. One of three beautifully colorful sisters who decided to take the law into their own hands, leading to an outcome nobody saw coming.But the story was old, the research was incomplete. There were gaps even living relatives couldn't fill. So she as forced to fill them in with her own imagination and write the story as historical fiction. When that book, Girl Waits With Gun, came out, Amy was faced with the usual anxious waiting every author faces. Would people like it? Had she done the story right?Heaped on top of those emotional questions were whether the families of these real-characters would feel she'd done right by them. And, whether her long-won nonfiction readers would follow her down the fiction path.We talk about all these questions, plus an exploration of the craft of writing and storytelling in this week's conversation. We talk about the writing life, and her time growing up in Texas. We also talk about indie bookstores, what it's like to own one (she does) and how that universe is changing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. Stories help us work out for ourselves how we're going to live our lives, you know, how we're going to make moral choices.

The world of writing books is a pretty interesting and sometimes bizarre world one of the sort of unspoken rules is that you either write fiction or you write non-fiction and you build a following you build a readership and a career around one of those things but as a general rule it's brutally hard to switch from one to the other because they're completely different. And if you do that, you take a huge risk at your audience, your readership, and your publisher abandoning you. Well, that's exactly what this week's guest, Amy Stewart, has done. Coming up, she actually built a tremendous career as an internationally best-selling and award-winning author, writing very often about gardening and botany and bugs and plants. In fact, she's even named by Popular Mechanics as having one of the 18 strangest gardens in the world featuring poison

plants. But with her newest book, Girl Waits With Guns, she's decided to make a really big change. She stumbled upon a story researching her last book that she thought just has to be told. And she developed it into historical fiction. Now, a lot of people would say, but your audience doesn't know you as that. And you're taking a really big risk by doing that. So I wanted to have that conversation with Amy. What's it like to be in sort of like the middle of that, to be writing this and just really following a voice saying, this is the thing that I have to write now. And I don't know how it's going to be received. So that's just one of the things that we dive into, along with just her

beautiful career, her deep, mad passion for the craft of storytelling and language and writing, and what drives her and what will continue to move her as she grows her career. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. I'm so excited to just jam with you a little bit. And I have so many questions just about you and your path, your journey, your story, however you want to phrase it.

You grew up in Texas, Arlington, Texas. I have no, so I know pieces of Texas. I know, you know, like, and the only truth, I like, I have friends from the hill country, but the only place I've actually been is Austin, which everybody tells me actually is really not Texas. Right. What's Arlington like? It's just suburbs.

It's between Dallas and Fort Worth. And it's very boring, suburban. But, you know, if you're like me, you know, you're in a family where mom works in Fort Worth and dad works in Dallas, then you live in Arlington. So it's just a freeway decision, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Got it.

You develop an interest in plants, bugs, gardens. And I'm always curious when somebody seems to have this mad passion for something so much so that it ends up becoming a huge focus of your life and you write about it, you do it. Where does this take root for you? Well, really the mad passion for me was writing. So I always wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a writer when I was five. So, but I didn't know what that meant in terms of a career. My dad's a musician. I wanted to be a writer when I was five. But I didn't know what that meant in terms of a career. My dad's a musician. So I grew up with somebody who was pursuing their art and kind of not really making much of a living at it. And he toured with Doc Severinsen or something like

that. Oh, that's right. He did. Yeah. Oh, you know a few things. Just one or two. Yeah. He was in Doc's road band. So Doc would tape The Tonight Show with his band in Burbank, and then he'd get on a plane and go meet the road band in Tahoe or wherever they were. And so dad was part of the road band. Oh, how much fun was that? Yeah. So are there stories of, uh, you know, mad stories from that era? I actually, well, what kind of stories does a musician tell his daughter? Right. It's like the 2% that maybe you can. Yeah. I a few, but Doc could actually be listening to this podcast. So anyway, no, but I always wanted to be a writer. And when I finally got out of college, I didn't understand how you could become a writer. I mean, I went off to University of Texas with the

idea of majoring in English because that was my thing, but nobody ever said to me, well, here's what you do. You major in English, that was my thing. But nobody ever said to me, well, here's what you do. You major in English. You write some short stories or some poems. You get them published in literary journals. This is what a literary journal is. Here's what one looks like. And then you go and you get an MFA. And your thesis for your MFA is a book, and you try to get that published. And meanwhile, if you can't get that published, you are now qualified to teach English to college students, and that'll be your job. Like no one ever explained that to me. So I didn't understand where my paycheck was going to come from the week I got out of college. And I

had grown up kind of broke, you know, not dirt poor, but we were very paycheck to paycheck. And that's not fun. So I wanted a job. I wanted health insurance. So I didn't know how to become a writer. So the way my first book came about is that when I was in Austin, I read the Austin Chronicle, which is like the Village Voice, you know, our alternative weekly in Austin. And there was a guy writing for the Austin Chronicle under the name Petaluma Pete. Obviously, obviously not his real name. And he was writing... Although in Austin, you really never know. His mother could have named him that. But he was writing about food in a really interesting way.

Petaluma Pete was a fictional character that he created who had a very dramatic personal life and a lot of upheaval and a lot of things happening all the time. But that all came back to food somehow or a restaurant in Austin somehow. And it was so creative and interesting. And finally it came out. It was revealed that the writer of this Petaluma P column was Ed Ward, who is the rock critic on Fresh Air. You'll hear Ed Ward. So he was the music critic for the Austin Chronicle at the time

and has gone on since to be a bit. I think he still lives in Berlin. He moved to Berlin at one point. He's kind of a big deal in the music world, but he had this little passion for food, and he created this fictional persona who wrote about food. And I just thought, oh, you can do that? That's an option?

Like, it never even occurred to me. So I moved to Santa Cruz after college and got my first grown-up job, and there wasn't much going on in my life, but I was planning a garden for the first time. And I thought, well, I could write about this. And maybe I could do not exactly what Petaluma Pete did, but maybe I can write about gardening in a way that's more personal and interesting. And that became my first book. And really, every book just came from the one before it. You can find, if you read my first book, From the Ground Up, you'll find enough about earthworms to

understand why I next wrote a book about earthworms. And you know, every one has sort of led to the next. But my interest has always been in writing, I just wanted to write books. And what I'm writing about was in a way less important than just getting to keep writing books. Yeah, it's so interesting to me, too, because there's, I mean, there seems to be this really interesting divide in the nonfiction world, which are, you know, you either you're a writer's writer, like the thing that you really care about is the writing, or you're a subject matter expert. Yes.

You know, and then so every book you write is about this, like a different take on this subject where you become the X person. Right. And then there's like sort of the Gladwell approach, right? Because it's also sort of your approach to turning it where the thing you really care about is the language. Yeah. And you latch onto a topic. Right.

You know, for a window of time where this is kind of fascinating. Yeah. I could get into this. I could, you know, I could make a book out of this. Right. But so it's interesting to hear because like from my perspective, kind of like, you know like trying to figure out, okay, what's Amy about? It's like I'm looking at this body of work and I'm like, she's mad about insects and plants. And I mean, I sort of am because you have to be really interested in something to want to write a book about it because you've got to get married to it for a few years.

So it's not that I'm uninterested. It's just that each of those topics, I just saw a way in to do something interesting from a writing perspective. So like Flower Confidential is about the global flower trade. And I went, oh, I see what I can do here. I can go to South America. I can go to Holland. I can interview these people. But then there's also some interesting history, and there's a little of this and a little of that. And so, like, as a literary project, that sounds really interesting to me, you know? Yeah. And once I'm in that world, all these other ideas start suggesting themselves.

Like, somebody in the flower industry mentioned something about a poisonous plant to me, and I'm like, oh, huh. You know, there's a lot of interesting people throughout history who have been killed by plants. Like, this could be dark and weird and twisted and fun. Right? So it's been that for me. Yeah, which is amazing. But the real through line is it's the craft. And storytelling.

Take me deeper into that. Well, it's just with plants. So a plant does nothing but sit there and be green. Right? That's all it does. So it's when people come along and realize, oh, I can kill somebody with this plant. I can make a drug.

I can make money out of this plant, right? It's what we do to it that makes it interesting. So they're human stories. Even with a book like Wicked Plants or Wicked Bugs, where it looks really kind of lightweight, they're little 750,000 word pieces. But in every case, I was looking for the story. Like I didn't care that it could kill someone, I wanted to know who it had killed. Right? So I needed a victim or a villain.

This couldn't be hypothetical. Exactly. So that even in the space of a couple paragraphs, there can be a story arc. You know, a man was walking in the woods and then, you know, and you start to build a story. So that's, you know, that's always been what I care about. So what, I mean, what's the driver for you around story? Because I'm fascinated by it also. Yeah. And I think, you know, like just as human beings, there's something about story that we latch onto and that transforms us. What is it for you?

Well, I think we really need them. I mean, I think we, on a very fundamental level, really need them. And I think that stories help us work out for ourselves how we're going to live our lives, you know, how we're going to make moral choices or how we're going to handle what might be coming next. I mean, none of us know what's coming next, literally, right? Like we have no idea what's going to happen an hour from now. But we have been thinking about it and planning and sort of scheming and contemplating. And I think a lot of that can happen in the pages of a novel or even on the screen, you know, a great movie or TV show. So, and for me, as I was one of those kids, I was one of those

freakishly early readers. And I was one of those kids who was always in a book. I got into trouble in school for reading in class instead of paying attention, right? Like, so I've always been that person. So I, that's like, that's the world I want to live in more than any other. So of course, I want to get into that river and like splash around in it. Yeah. So what happened at five that made you know you want to do this? I just was I mean, I was just so attached to books. And I was such a freakish, crazy reader. My, my parents say that there were books that they read to me over and over again until I just took the book and started reading it to them. Only I couldn't read.

I just had it memorized. But I would turn the page at all the wrong times, you know, so on the wrong pages. But I would do the whole thing from beginning to end. That's amazing. I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, I think, and probably, in some ways, I hate to overplay the importance of like how we were as kids. Because, you know, in a way, it's like, well, we can't, we can't all go around living our lives

the way we were when we were five, the world would be a terrifying place if we did, right? But on the other hand, I think if you just come out of the gate with an interest, you'd be a fool not to follow it. If you were the kid who was drawing, like my brother is a visual artist and he was drawing, put a crayon in that kid's hand and everybody just went, well, we're done here. Like we know, we know. You'd be crazy not to pursue that thing because it's the only thing you've been working at. I'm 46 and I can honestly say I've been working on this for 40 plus years. But the madness in that is that we don't. For the most part, nobody does that. I've had just

an amazing gift to be able to sit down with hundreds of people right now and just have these great conversations. And many of the people are the people who've kind of dialed into that. But so many people just completely, they kind of know. We all kind of know. Like I never believe somebody who says, I have no idea what I'm interested in. It's like, really? Like, really, really? Right.

Come on, think back to when you were six. Like we all kind of knew. Like we had a pretty solid hint. I remember sitting down with Milton Glaser, who's like this astonishing designer, and he shares how when he was six years old, he said, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life when I was six. He said, I didn't know I wanted to be a designer. Right. But I knew it was going to be art. Yeah.

You know, and he's like, and I've never done anything but that since. And that is such the exception to the way that we pursue our lives. And I think also that it's a mistake for people to call that talent. You know, I'm very suspicious of the word talent. And part of this is being raised by a musician who believes in practice. You know, he didn't believe in talent. He believes in practice and hard work. So I think that what we're born with is not so much talent but interest. You know, there are just certain things that right from the beginning appeal to people in a particular way, and that's interest. It doesn't have to be skill. It doesn't have to mean you're good at it.

So, you know, some little kids are just very athletic, right? They're running all over the place. They're climbing on things, and they're very physical and like, well, okay, you're going to be a mountain climber or you're going to be a whatever. I think that's interest. Yeah. And I actually completely agree with that. Although I wish I agree 98.6% with that.

I do agree. I think that the genetic element for most people is for some reason we emerge and our brains are wired in a way where like when we interact with this thing. Right. Unlike, you know, the thousand other people, we want more of it. Exactly. So we do more of it. We get, you know, like the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in way faster than anyone else on the planet. And all of a sudden people say, wow, talent, so cool.

But what about like that 2% of people where like no matter how hard somebody else works. Yeah. Talent. So cool. Right. But what about like that 2% of people where like no matter how hard somebody else works, they're just astonishingly operating at a level of awe that's like nobody else on the planet. Yeah. You're never going to be John Coltrane. Right. Yeah. No. I mean, I think it's wonderful that those people are out there, right?

Because they make our world such an astonishing, magical place. But that's no reason not to do your thing, right? That's no reason not to play the saxophone. No reason not to write a book or paint a painting. No, I mean, I love it that there are people who are so far above what the rest of us are doing that all we can do is stand there and gape in admiration. That's, you know, my dad is a guitar player. He loves Wes Montgomery.

He worships. He was never going to be Wes Montgomery, but that's no reason not to play every day. Yeah. Apparently I'm never going to be Stevie Ray Vaughan either. Is that right? Man, I would like, I would meet, I might actually meet the devil at the crossroads to be able to play like him. Like Stevie, yeah. Yeah, but it is so interesting to me because I think you're right.

I think a lot of us also, we look at the 2% or the 1% or the one-tenth of 1% and the fact that we kind of say, okay, I have a deep interest, but no matter how hard I work for my whole life, I'm never going to be like that. I do think you're right. I think a lot of people would be like, so why bother trying rather than just, I just love doing this, man. That's right. I think it, you know, I think part of it is just so the daily practice of doing it, the daily act of doing it. So like, I really like to paint. I've been painting for about 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. I started taking oil painting classes, actually more than 10 years ago. And I can't travel well with oils. Like when I come to New York, I take photographs and I paint New York from photographs. But when I'm in the city, like I've got a little sketchbook in my bag. And so, you know, if I'd gotten here a little early, I would have sat in a cafe and just drawn pictures.

And I'm not good at it. Like everybody wants to come over and look at what I'm doing. And then they look and they're like, oh, okay, you know, right? But that's not the point. The point is that the act of sitting and sketching is like one of the greatest things in the world. So I think part of it is the sheer enjoyment of it. But it's not all enjoyment, right? There's a lot of hard work.

Well, that's the whole thing about deliberate practice, right? Right. Is that the idea is it's not just the doing it that gets you to the point of mastery. Right. You know, it's the hard, deliberate, focused on improvement practice, which almost by definition, depending on the researcher you talk to, they'll say, like, if it's enjoyable, it's not deliberate practice. Sure.

But that doesn't mean that that's the only thing that you do. I mean, the other side is you spend a certain amount of time just doing it because you love it. Yeah. And also, I think the idea of just being a practitioner of that thing. You don't have to be the best one. You can be the, to use my dad as an example, you can be the guitar be the guitar player who, you know, did a lot of weddings and bar mitzvahs and country clubs. And, you know, a lot of little road gigs and a little bit of recording studio stuff. And he's never going to be Wes Montgomery, but the world needs a lot of guitar players.

And he got to be one of them, you know. Yeah. So how do you, like, how do you overlay that with your approach to writing? Well, I've always seen myself as very much just a working writer. I get up in the morning and I do my work. And it's not real magical. I actually don't think I'm a very good writer. I think that I have to work real hard to put pretty sentences together.

So when you're starting out, I can see that. But you're seven books in now, New York Times bestselling books, a number of them. Really? Yeah, really. I really don't think I'm a – I don't think that I'm like a naturally brilliant writer. I think that it's just – it's hard work and habits and practices, but I think I'm kind of a mediocre writer. What's the difference in your mind, like in terms of the creative output? Well, for me, the difference is that I've learned a lot of little tricks and tools

to make it better, but it's a deliberate little tool bag of stuff that I have to do. So for instance, I have taught myself, and I learned this from a painter. I have a friend who's a painter who, if you watch her paint, I've taken classes from her. And the very last thing she does is what she calls the bling layer, where she goes and she puts the bling on the painting. And what she means by that are the highlights and the lowlights. So she adds in a few touches of the darkest darks and the brightest brights and sharpens a few little edges and the whole thing just pops. It just comes to life. And you have to do it at the end because with oil painting, you'd mess it up if you did it earlier. So I thought, oh, what is a bling layer in writing?

And so for me, it's a revision that I do near the end where I add a little bit of bling on every page. I take the book one manuscript page at a time, and I look for one place where I can add some brilliant, shimmering, fantastic little word or phrase that would stop me in my tracks if someone else wrote it. But it's very deliberate. It doesn't just flow out. It wasn't there on the first draft. It wasn't there at all before. I had to sit down and go, make something fabulous happen on this page. Now turn the page. Right.

And we're going to do whatever. We're going to do 30 pages of bling a day, and that way we'll have this done in 10 days. You know, it's like very mapped out and conscious. But have you ever met a writer where the bling is on the page, like just out of the gate? I mean— Because I haven't. No, no. No, no. of course not.

But I just think that there are writers out there who are so high above me in terms of what they're doing that I recognize that I'm just sort of a pedestrian working on the street, shoe leather, kind of practitioner of this thing. And then there's Richard Ford, you know, and then there's Ann Tyler. And, and they're doing something else. Right, which is funny, though, because there will be, you know, like many people who will listen to this conversation, they'll be like, Oh, my God, Amy Stewart. If only I could write like

her. Huh? Yeah, I don't know. You know, I think it's that everyone sort of like got their different lens. It's interesting, my approach to writing, especially books, you know, like longer form, Yeah, I don't know. like punching it up, adding the bling to the page. And it's really similar. I go through and I'm like, okay, how do we add a little more humor, a little more pop, a little more pizzazz. So that's the type of thing where I read certain people and I'm like, I'll laugh, not because what they wrote was funny, but I'm just like, God, I would kill to write that sentence. Yes. It just pops so beautifully and it just makes me like I smile just at the craft.

Right. And I think to myself when I'm doing my bling pass, man, I would like to be on like, you know, like I, no matter, I can't, I don't, I can't add enough bling to write like this person too. Exactly. Well, see, that's, I mean, you know, bling is a little bit of a trick, right? You know, it's, to me, it feels like a little bit of a cheap trick and I don't mean cheap dismissively.

I just mean like, it's a thing I learned how to do. And now I can just go and deliberately do it. Yeah. And it's funny, because I was thinking, I recently sat down with John Acuff. I don't know if you read any of his stuff. But he's a similar thing. He's like, you know, he writes what he has to write, gets it off actually. And he says, you know, he loves nothing more than humor. He's a huge fan. He speaks a ton also. And he was saying that a lot of what he does, he watches, you know, for every one talk that he watches to learn about, you know, like business or stage presentation, he watches like 10 or 100 stand-up comics. Yes. Loves, loves, loves to make people laugh.

So his final pass is for humor. Right. He's like, okay, how can I take this thing, which is really kind of dry and melancholy and somber, because he's like, that's my orientation, and actually make it really funny. And so he does an entire in-depth path just to try and make it as funny as possible. But he'll tell you when he starts out, he's like, this is the farthest thing from funny you've ever heard, which I think a lot of people reading the final product would be like, how could that even be possible? Yeah. Right.

And that's a very hard thing, you know, I mean, because humor is just moving so fast, right? You almost have to stand on the corner with a butterfly net and try to catch it as it zooms by. So it is hard to be sitting in your room working very deliberately, trying to make funny things happen. Right. Yeah.

And it's also because you're trying to do it in your voice and then on the page without sort of like the nuance and all the communication of like, I was listening to recently a conversation with Alex Bloomberg, who now, you know, is doing this amazing podcast and was at American Life for so long. And he was saying that one of the big shifts that he made in radio was sort of when he realized that you have to write a script, and then you have to read it in a way which tries to make it sound like it was actually you naturally speaking, but it never will be. Yeah. Yeah. So it's sort of like this interesting thing that you try and do writing

also, where I don't know, you know, my approach is, I try and get as close to what I think is my natural speaking voice as possible, but you know it never really is. Yeah. No, but it should be someone's. I always felt like my last three books, so Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs and Drunken Botanists, were in the third person. So that was new for me because my first three had been written in the first person.

So I always felt like, well, there is a narrator, and that person, that creature has a voice, and I have to write in that creature's voice. Even when it's the third person, it should feel like a human being with opinions is talking. Yeah. No, completely agree. It's fascinating to me also that with your deep interest in story

that you waited until the seventh book to go into fiction. And even then, it's historical fiction. So a lot of it is based on truths. Right. Well, I tried. Between almost every nonfiction book is a failed novel. Take me deeper into this because I know that I have, I'm on my third nonfiction book and I have so much fiction in me that I haven't even dared to try failing at yet. Right, right. Yeah, somebody said, you know, novels are like waffles. You have to throw out the first one. So yeah, because that's what I read. You know,

given the choice, if I didn't have like work-related reading to do, it would all be fiction. So I always, I think I just felt like fiction was the deep end of the pool, and I just didn't dare, you know, I didn't dare try it. So yeah, there are several half-started and completed novels that will never see the light of day that, well, maybe my agent saw them and said, eh, don't quit your day job, or the editor or whoever. Do you think it's harder than nonfiction? For me, it is because I figured nonfiction out. So now I know. I can sit down with someone and I do this to people constantly. I'm always telling people to write books. Um, and I can, I can sit down

with somebody who I've never met over dinner and pretty much do their book proposal for them. I'm like, here's how we're going to structure this. And this is how this is going to work. And you're going to need to do this and this and dah, dah, dah, dah. No one has ever written the book that I've told them to write. So I'm actually, I'm terrible at talking people into writing books, but I can completely in my head, put a nonfiction book together and go, okay, I understand how this is going to work. And yeah, I can get this done in two years and here's exactly how I'm going to go about it. And it feels entirely comfortable and normal. Whereas with fiction, you know, it's so much about the voice and it's about really the

poetry of the thing. And it's about sort of casting a spell on some, on a reader and so that they'll get hooked in and want to stay hooked in and stay in that world. And when it comes time to fix it or make it better, there's no end to the possible ways to do that. There's no restrictions on it at all. So in that way, it kind of does feel like the deep end of the pool. It's like the ocean. Like, it's just infinite. Yeah. It's so interesting to hear you say that. I think one of the things that also stops me is that if I'm writing something that's

nonfiction, you know, I always have, if somebody doesn't like it to a certain extent, that's fine. You know, it's a matter of voice, taste, whatever. But I also have that extra thing where it's like, well, but the fact is the fact. Yes. You may not like the fact. Right. Whereas if you've created everything.

Yes. It's all on you. If the world, right, if the world is bad or the characters aren't interesting enough or not, this scenario didn't play out right. Right. There's no defense to that, but I didn't do the job I wanted to do. Right. That's hard to take.

Yes. And readers respond completely to the creative work, whereas when you're writing nonfiction, especially not like memoir, but like a topic, like what I've done, they're responding to the subject matter. So if they're interested in the global flower industry, they don't care so much exactly how it was written.

No one ever asked me anything about my writing process, ever. The whole time I was out talking about those six books, they only ever asked about the subject. Right. Yeah. They would be like, tell me about the flower market in Amsterdam. So great.

I mean, I'm happy to talk about that, but it's like they're not paying attention to the writing. But that's kind of all there is in fiction in a way. historical fiction. From what I understand, it basically was, and I guess it tracks what you said earlier, which is sort of like each book revealed the nugget that would turn into the next one. So take me there. Well, so for this, I was researching Drunken Botanist. And I was writing about a gin smuggler named Henry Kaufman. And I just thought, as I would do with anything, I just thought, well, I better see what else this Henry Kaufman did. Because if it turns out that he was like a senator from the great state of New York, I might want to put that in there, right? It becomes a different kind of story if we know something else about him. So I was just doing that basic kind of due diligence.

And I turned up a story in the New York Times from 100 years ago, 1915, about some guy named Henry Kaufman, maybe not the same guy, I never figured it out, who ran his car into this horse and buggy being driven by these three sisters, which turned into an escalated crazy conflict with lots of bricks and bullets and kidnapping threats, and the whole thing got out of control. And it was like an amazing story. But you know, that happens all the time with research, right? So I'm very accustomed to turning up bizarre old newspaper articles and going, wow, the world was really weird back then, wasn't it? And then just moving on. But in this case, I read this thing and I'm like, oh, this is kind of amazing.

So then I started digging a little more. What else can I find out now? I had a few more names and I start pulling more out of just the digitized newspapers about the Cobb sisters and about this case. And pretty soon the whole day has gone by and I'm just doing this. And my husband came home. We own a bookstore and he runs the store. And he came home from the store and as he was every day at that time, he would say, well, what plant did you work on today?

And I was like, oh, no plants today, but you're not going to believe these sisters. This is incredible. This has got to be a novel. I think this is a series of novels. I think I have to do this. Look at all this stuff. And I had all this stuff spread out on my desk. And he said, well, you know, we have an Ancestry.com account at the bookstore, so we can look them up in census records.

We can find birth certificates. And it just went crazy from there. But you're still working on the prior book at that point also. Right, yeah. I had to get back to Drunken Botanist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was wrapping it up. I was very near the end.

Right, but this hooked you enough where you're like, okay, I need to really focus a lot on our genealogists. Right. So anytime I had a little spare time, I would dig a little more. I hired a genealogist out in New Jersey to start pulling things out of courthouse records. And I sort of just kept picking at it whenever I could. And what happened is over the course of a few months of that, I really started to piece together the whole lives of these three sisters.

And, you know, no one has written about them. At first I thought, well, someone's written a book about them. I'll order the book and we'll just see. Nothing. So this is all primary research. You know, these people were completely forgotten about. They're nobodies. And it's like a hundred-year-old research, which...

Right. Yeah. It's not like you can just flip open the paper or Google. It's not super easy. Yeah. There's a lot of microfilm in library basements and a lot of, anyway, I just, so I got really sucked into them and I really connected with these women as real people and they started to really matter to me. And it started to really matter that everyone had forgotten about them and that I found them again. So I actually came to feel a powerful sense of personal obligation to not let them go. And I thought, I'm going to write this book and I'm not going to let anybody talk me out of it. No one's, I'm not going to, you know, editors, agents, I'm not going to let anyone tell me no, I'm just going to do it, which is kind of a scary thing for someone who's used to having the next book contract lined up and ready to go the minute the last book is done. I said, no book contract. I'm just going

to spend a year or two. I'm going to do this. I'm going to, you know, live off my savings. Oh, really? So this was sold after it was done then? Right. Yeah. Nobody was paying me to do this. No one was telling me it was a good idea. It was just passion, like a burning question and a sense of obligation to like tell the story. A sense of obligation to them. And also this feeling of, I felt like I'm not going to get another one of these. Really? Yeah. I thought this could be the best idea I'll ever have. So I can't, I can't put it down because as a nonfiction writer particularly, I'm working off of existing things that are floating around in the culture out there. You know, the global flower industry.

Well, that's a real thing that's out there that people know about and other people have written about. And I'm going to glom onto it and make a book out of it. But this is something that belonged exclusively to me. No one else knew about the cops. And I thought, this came to me. This didn't come to anybody else. It came to me. And I just, I thought I'd be an idiot to not pursue it.

And I decided right away that it was, that there were going to be more novels. It wasn't just going to be one novel. So I really, at the age of, you know, like in my mid forties, pretty much, it was one of those almost kind of midlife crisis kind of things. I just said, I'm going to do this with my life. And if nobody wants to pay me to do it,

I'll come up with another way to pay the bills. But this is the thing I'm going to do next. So it was a big deal. I mean, it sounds like a really big deal. Because also there's an expectation. There's an expectation from your readers. There's an expectation from the industry that, like, this is the type of thing that you do and that you write and that you're known for and that people want to buy from you. Right.

And then you kind of have to step outside of that and say, well, that may be the case. Yeah. But I'm still going to do what I need to do. Oh, I know. I mean, when Drunken Botanist came out, I was already deep into the research. And I went on this huge tour. And I do a lot of speaking outside of the book tour kind of stuff. So, of course, everyone asked what your next book is.

And at the time, I couldn't really say that much. I needed to keep it a little bit under wraps. But I just said, well, I can't tell you, but it's a novel. And people would kind of go, oh, you know, like there was no gasp of excitement. But you had such a good career. Right, like you're doing a what? Yeah, yeah. So it was a risk.

Okay, so which also brings up the other question, which is this starts out as a factual research project. So at what point do you decide that actually this is going to be historical fiction rather than a nonfiction accounting? Well, I decided that on day one, literally that first day. I was like, this is a novel. And the reason is I've done enough nonfiction to know that with nonfiction, there is this so what question that has to be answered. So if I were to say, I'm going to write a book of nonfiction about the first woman to fly solo across Canada, people would go, so what? Eh, what else you got? Like Canada? Eh, you know, whatever. So there's that problem. You know,

I could tell this story and I think people go, hmm. But then also the other problem is what kind of nonfiction book is it? Because there's lots of gaps in the historical record. I don't know what they said and did every day. There's months that go by where I have no idea what happened because I don't have a newspaper article to tell me. I don't have their diaries or letters. So what am I going to put in the rest of the book? It felt to me like it would have to be a lot of filler about the time period and the location and that it would start to feel like it would be one of those books that was kind of like, you know, this would have been a really nice magazine article.

You know? So there was that reason why I didn't want to do it as nonfiction. But then the other reason was the story just felt so fun to me. It felt like a caper. I mean, as much as these sisters were in danger, and they really were, they fought back and they were, you know, with guns and they, and so I just immediately

thought, oh, three sisters, like how much fun is that? And look how plucky they are with their revolvers. And three pretty badass sisters. Right, right. So it really just felt like an adventure, and it felt like the kind of book I like to read. I just had this idea of like, this can be fun. It can be kind of weirdly light at the same time

that all these dark things are happening. There can be this wonderful sort of bubbly, frothy, giddy kind of moment in it somehow. So I just had that feeling about it. Like I want to have more fun with this than I can have as nonfiction. So, and how do you balance that with your, what you said was this sense of obligation to do these, these women's stories, right?

Yeah, that's tricky. I wonder, I think about that a lot. I often wonder like, well, what would Constance Copp think if she could read this? She'd probably roll her eyes and tell me all the things that I got wrong. So where I finally came to with that was that what I really wanted to give readers was the same sense of excitement that I felt as I was digging them up, as I was finding all of this. So I just wanted other people to have the same emotion about the Cobb sisters that I was having. And like how you manufacture that emotion in other people, there's probably a lot of different ways to do that.

So, yeah, it's odd. Like, so here are these three women who are, of course, no longer with us. And yet I do spend a lot of time wondering, what would you think if you saw the fictional version of you that's now out in the world? I'm sure it would make you feel like I turned you into paper dolls or puppets. Yeah. But you also, because you were able to track down some of their descendants, a couple of generations. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, I found a grandnephew. So the three sisters had a brother. And so the brother's grandson. So he never really knew them, but he grew up hearing a lot of stories about his three crazy aunts. So he was the first one I got in touch with, and he was great.

He was like, oh, yeah, they were like the Charlie's Angels of the 1910s. I've always thought somebody should make a movie about them. That's too funny. Yeah, so he was really into it. But his stories, you know, he was a little kid hearing those stories. So I had his memories to go on. But then the youngest sister, Florette, I was able to interview her son, who is quite elderly and living in New Jersey, and I tracked him down. So here's somebody who

knew one of the sisters intimately because he was raised by her. And then the middle sister, Norma, his Aunt Norma, lived with them for a little while when he was a kid. So he has clear, accurate, vivid memories of what kind of person Norma was in old age. And I can't even tell you what it was like to go and sit, to know, even today, like right now, even knowing that there is a person on the planet who knew my characters and he's walking around right now with his head full of memories of them is so bizarre to me because there is this sense in which there's the real people the real cop sisters but then there's my fictional version of them and sometimes i get a little lost going back and forth between the two of them you know i'll get sucked into who they were as real people for a while and then i'll have to take a deep breath and go, okay, so let's go back to my cardboard

cutouts that I made and let's see how we can work with that. Yeah. So have you given them a copy of the finished book? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they've read it. And? They have been great. They've been so great about it.

I was so nervous. You know, I kept over and over. I would imagine. Totally. Like over and over again, I kept saying to them, I can only imagine how weird it would be if a stranger got in touch with me and said, I'm writing a book about your great-grandmother. That would be very weird and uncomfortable. So I'm wanting to, I kept trying to ask and check in and manage their feelings about it and do all

that kind of stuff. But they've been great. They've read it. They've said nothing but nice things about it. Florette's son actually was pretty thoughtful about it. Like, oh, it was really interesting to see where you stuck with the true story and where you went into fiction. Like, he got it that this is not your real mother. This is a fictional version that vaguely resembles your mom. And see, I had been burned with this before. I had earlier with another nonfiction book written about a real life person and the family, I thought I did

a fine job and I thought I made him a very interesting person, but the family was really pretty hurt by how I talked about him. And I felt terrible about it. I felt like, you know, I thought I was super clear about, you know, I thought I was super clear about, you know, what I was doing. And like, I'm just going to tell about this one little part of your dad's life, not his whole life. And it's, it's a, it's a tough story and it's this and that, but I didn't do enough of that to make them feel okay. And they didn't like the version of their dad that they saw. So they felt almost like that you, they were sandbagged to a certain extent. Yeah. Which that's gotta be so tough for you as a writer.

And I'm just not that person. Like, I just won't write about something if I think it's going to hurt somebody, you know. So, yeah, I was very nervous. I mean, I knew I was going to write this anyway, but I would have felt horrible if the family had been upset about it. Yeah. Well, I mean, and I guess like you said, also, so much of it is, you know, probably just, and I'm curious too, like, how much more expectation setting did you do this time around having had that experience with the earlier book? Right. A lot more, a lot more, a lot of

emails where I would very clearly spell out like, you know, what I, I would say things to them like, this is kind of like when somebody takes a book and makes a movie out of it and they have to change it to make it into a good movie. I have no choice but to take their real life and make big changes to it. And I'll do my best to explain those changes in the back, but this is not going to look like your family. I have to let bad things happen to people. You know, I'm not going to turn your grandfather into. I have to let bad things happen to people. You know, I'm not going to turn your grandfather into a psycho serial killer, I promise. You know, I have a lot of respect for them. But at the same time, in fiction, in TV and in movies,

stuff happens. We have to let stuff happen to people. Yeah. And I also explained to them, there's more people involved in this than just me. There's an editor. There's a big publishing house. There's going to be book critics out there. This is going to start to belong to a lot of other people pretty quickly. So there's a lot of people who are going to have input, and there's going to be a lot of talking about what happens. Okay, so this is really interesting for me also because you wrote this book because it was a thing that you couldn't not write,

and largely it sounds like on spec, basically. Totally on spec. So then when you're like, okay, I'm ready. Right. You're like, here's my agent, here's my editor. Right. You hand it over. Yeah.

What's going through your mind at that point? Well, the first thing that happened is my agent, we went through many more rounds of editing once my agent got hold of it, which was great. She read it and she put it in the hands of some other readers, like other literary agents and just interns and whoever it is that agents have access to. So that was cool. I got like this whole other round of revisions to do that I really needed. I had also hired an editor. So I'd had a terrific freelance editor, really good person. So anyway, it went through some more polishing. But when it was finally time to send it out, I feel weird even telling this story because it's such a great story that it feels

kind of, it's almost like winning the lottery. It feels sort of uncomfortable to just tell it, but I guess I'll just tell it, which is that when it went out, it went out to 18 editors all at once on like a Friday afternoon. And I expected everyone to reject it. You know, I just sort of thought, okay, well, this is the first 18 and they'll all say no. And then we'll start on the next tier. That's really what I thought. I thought everyone was going to be like, oh yeah, we just don't see you as a novelist. And this kind of doesn't work. What made you think this was even a book? Like, really, that was how I felt about it that afternoon. That's where I was. I was like, well, okay, well, I'm sure that no one will ever get back to us in six weeks will go by and we'll think of plan B. And on Sunday morning, this editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sent an email saying, oh my God, I love

this. I can't believe it. I've been looking for something like this. We have to do this. I would buy it today if I could. I've just emailed it to my whole team. Everybody's going to have to have it read for our meeting tomorrow. You're going to get a call. Thank you just insane. I just thought someone wants to finance my midlife crisis. Seriously. It just felt like I had made this decision that I'm going to do this no matter what. This is enough work that I'm going to still be doing it. It's going to take me somewhere into my 50s to get this thing finished. I've committed a big chunk of my life to it. I don't know how I'm going to pay the bills when this happens. And Houghton came along and said, I'll tell you who's going to pay the bills.

We're going to pay the bills, and you're going to sit there and do this thing. We believe 100% in this crazy idea you had. We think this is the best idea in the world. That is an insane, crazy feeling. It was remarkable. I mean, it was truly this life-changing, transformative moment to have someone else, someone in a position to do something. That's not my grandma who loves me, but like, right? To come along and go, yes, you made the right decision. Yeah. I mean, how incredibly validating. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculously validating. Yeah. Yeah. So once you actually do that,

you know, and that's because then, you know, the way the book industry works, it's not tomorrow that the book comes out. Do you start to sort of, in your mind, do anything? And as this is because I'm like, I'm a writer, but I'm also I'm an entrepreneur. And I love marketing and psychology of human behavior, too. So I'm the weirdo writer that actually likes marketing the book. Yeah, yeah. Knowing that you sort of have, you know, sort of a readership that you've built over more than a decade with certain expectations. Now, you know, this is actually gonna this is real, this is legit, this is going to come out. In your mind, is there any work that you start doing to set expectations of this longstanding

readership about sort of like the nature of the book that's coming? Or are you, in your mind, are you just like, my job is just to write the best damn book I can write right now and put it out there and let the universe do what it needs to do? Oh, no. No, I have a lot of work to do. Yeah, yeah. I wish that I could just outsource this to the universe and let someone else take care of it.

No, as soon as my publisher kind of gave me the go-ahead, like, yes, you can say what the title is, you can say that this is the book. You know, there's always this moment where it's like, let's not talk about this yet. Let's finish the edits. Let's get this moment where it's like, let's not talk about this yet. Let's finish the edits. Let's get it. Let's get this officially done. But so once that came around, yeah, I really had to start talking about it to people. So I was out on the road doing

drunken botanist events. I was at botanical gardens and science museums and garden clubs. And they asked what the next book was about. And I had to pretty quickly develop my little two sentence rap about it and hope to get this level of excitement from this audience who'd been used to me answering that question with something like, my next book is about all the plants we turn into booze. And everyone would go, yay, we're going to have cocktail, you know, and it was like fun. So yeah, I really had to start right away kind of talking to people and seeing if anyone was even going to come along. Yeah. Any of my readers were going to come along.

What was your sense? How were people responding? Well, my sense so far has always been like, oh, so some people are being nice and saying that they want to read it. You know, the problem with social media is that you think a lot of people are interested in something, and it was really like 12 people. But 12 really vocal people. 12 people are very excited about this, and they said so on a blog. So I really wasn't sure. And my first official book tour event was just a few days ago in Atlanta.

And I was at the Decatur Book Festival, and I asked the audience to raise their hand if they'd read any of my other books, and half the people had and I was like wow they're willing to you know they'll do this the thing is that of course a lot of people are interested in gardening are reading fiction of course they are so you know I think some of those folks will come along yeah yeah um and based on just what I've seen you know from the early receptions sounds like a lot of them are. I think so. I want to switch gears a little bit, but not so much because it feels like a pretty organic thing just with sort of a small amount of time we have left. You mentioned that you and your husband have a bookstore. Yes. Yes. I'm kind of fascinated by

what's happening in the industry these days. And I've never actually had the opportunity to sit down with somebody who owns their own indie bookstore. What's it like? Because there's all these movies and the TV pictures of someone who just loves books and they curate this astonishingly cool collection and everyone comes and you talk about books and you smell the pages when they come out. What's the truth on the ground of owning a bookstore these days? Well, so I should say that our bookstore is a mix of new, used, and rare. Okay.

And my husband's really a rare book dealer. So he's dealing with a lot of kind of really high-end collectible stuff. At the same time, we've got all the new hot fiction and whatever. So we're doing a little bit of everything um in the new book world i think um first of all the thing about owning a bookstore is that you do all the just dirt jobs that no one wants to do you know i i remember right when we bought the store i was walking through the store with like those yellow rubber cleaning gloves and a bucket and a mop and a toilet plunger. And somebody stopped and said, excuse me, are you the owner? And I'm like, of course I'm the owner. Who else, who else would

be doing this right now? So, you know, owning- And by the way, I'm also a New York Times bestselling author. Yeah, that did not come out. So, you know, a lot of owning a bookstore is bookkeeping and personnel stuff and just garbage that no one wants to deal with. I noticed you've got Elizabeth Gilbert's book on your shelf over here, Big Magic. And I just about jumped up and down and screamed out loud when I read her chapter on shit sandwiches. Like whatever passion you have in your life, there's going to be a shit sandwich. You have to eat along with it. And it's just,

do you like that particular flavor of shit sandwich? So the shit sandwich with owning a bookstore is bookkeeping, accounting, um, personnel stuff, homeless people hanging out in your store. You know, like there's all this stuff that has nothing to do with the books.

Uh, the light fixture goes out and it takes forever to get an electrician in. It's that stuff. It's the small business owner's stuff. Right. But is there a magic to it also? Is there the layer of the projection that most people would think where there is this magical texture to the community around it also? Yeah, no.

I mean, right. The day is full of fantastic moments if you're lucky enough to be the one up at the counter when it happens. I mean, we just had a wedding in our bookstore. You know, kids come in and so we have like wonderful interactions with like, you know, little kids who are finding their favorite book for the first time and can't stop talking about it. You know, you give them a little piece of paper and let them write a shelf talker so you can have

the eight-year-old shelf talker, that kind of stuff. So yeah, it is wonderful being able to put the right book in people's hands. And one thing I wasn't prepared for, and this happened on literally one of the first days we owned the store, I was behind the counter and a guy came in and he said, hi, I would like to bring my son to the Lord. And I'm looking for a book that will help me do that. And I just thought, wow, if I'm standing behind this counter, people are going to come at me with everything, right? Like every human experience. And they are going to come at me with everything, right? Like every human experience. And they are going to expect me to be prepared to help them with that.

I, of course, had absolutely no idea what book to... I was frantically looking around for someone else to help. I'm like, oh, I only work here. This is my first day. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Well, the owner will be back in a couple of hours. Let's ask the boss.

That's too funny. You know, somebody comes in wanting a do-it-yourself divorce book, and they want a paper bag because they don't want anyone to see them walking out with it because it's a small town and they haven't told anyone they're getting divorced yet. You know, it's that. And that's every day. And it's just like, wow. It's almost like a bartender to a certain extent. But instead of you dishing out the advice, it's like you have to provide the book that's going to dish out the advice.

Yes, and you have to be the super confidential. You've got to keep everyone's. You know, people come in asking for erotica. They come in asking for sex manuals. And, you know, you're like, okay, they're right over here. Right. Yeah. In the whisper part of the store. Yes. Yeah. I'm fascinated by the book industry because five years ago, everyone was saying, well, indie bookstores are going to be gone. And in fact, the big box stores are going to be gone and everything's going digital. And

it looks like the latest information that I've seen is actually that digital has actually flattened out in the last year. And it seems like great indie bookstores, great curated bookstores are actually doing fine from what I've seen. Yeah, we're doing great. Yeah. We're up every year over the year before. People love to spend time in bookstores. And I think they're starting to get the message that you can't just spend time here. You need to buy something. That's how we stay open. Yeah. You have to support them. I'm

a huge fan of that. And I'm also, I mean, when I travel, because I read a ton of books simultaneously, I don't know about you. So, you know, I take it something electronic because it's a whole lot easier to travel with a Kindle than with five books in my bag. But given the choice, you know, it's, it's, it's funny.'s funny, I'm in a position now where I'm sure you are to a certain extent with what you do. I'm offered a lot of advanced copies. Yes. And, you know, along with that is always, you know, like, do you want it in paper? Or can we just send you the digital galley? I'm like, can I get it in paper? Because there's something about

the feeling of a book in my hands, you know laying back in an old chair and the smell of the pages as you turn them, that adds to the experience for me. Yeah. Well, I think the challenge going forward, and this is more to the publishing industry, is to figure out how to enter the 21st century with the way books are just ordered and handled and shipped and sold. You know, you get any group of booksellers together in a room and you get them talking about shipping procedures, invoices, returns. There are so many things that are very boring accounting issues that eat up, you wouldn't believe how much time. And it's only because publishers have not figured out a 21st century way to handle stuff that is so easy in every other part of our lives. And then suddenly when you're a bookstore ordering and receiving and shipping books, you're back to a Byzantine bureaucratic nightmare that takes up time that we could be spending out with customers

selling books. So there's some important changes that need to come along with papers doing well. Then let's improve how we do everything else with these paper books so that it's seamless and efficient and everyone can go back to selling books. Yeah. Yeah. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that phrase out to you, to live a good life, what does it mean to you? Now what it means to me to live a good life is to actually be a good person to other people.

I've actually been feeling lately that I've been spending too much time making my own life better. And that I've gotten a little bit too self-focused. You know, I've gotten very focused on, oh, I need to exercise a little more and I need to get a little more sleep and I need to work a little smarter. And I've realized that I've kind of stopped thinking about other people. You know, whether that means I've stopped being that person that you call when you need help moving, you know, I'm just like not that person who shows up at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning to help you move or whatever. So I think kind of my latest thing I've been thinking about is like, how can I lead a good life in terms of doing more good

for the people around me and maybe not being so caught up in doing good for myself? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining in this week's conversation. You know, if you've actually stayed till this point in the conversation, I'm guessing there's a pretty good bet that you've gotten something out of this episode, some nugget, some idea.

If that is right and you feel like sharing, then by all means, go ahead. We love when you share these conversations and get the word out. And if you wouldn't mind, I would so appreciate if you would just take a few seconds, jump onto iTunes or use your app, and just give us a quick rating or review. When you do that, it helps get the word out, helps let more people know about the conversations we're hosting here, and it gives us all the ability to spread the word and make a bigger difference in more people's lives. As always, thank you so much for your kindness, your wisdom, and your attention. Wishing you a fantastic rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Field, signing off for Good Life Project. If you're looking for flexible workouts,

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