A Talk with Julia Fine: Author of The Upstairs House

Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the Editor of the New Books Network and you are listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Artists and Authors podcast. I'm very pleased to say that we actually have Fine on the show today. She graduated from Grinnell in 2010 and we'll be talking about her life and her work as a novelist and particularly her terrific new book, The Upstairs House, which came out from Harper Collins in 2021. Julia, welcome to the show.

Julia Fine:

Thank you for having me.

Marshall Poe:

Absolutely. The traditional question on the New Books Network or first question on the New Books Network is tell us a little bit about yourself.

Julia Fine:

Well, I am, I guess at this point, can firmly call myself a novelist. I have two books out and one on the way, which just feels very, feels like you wait a very long time to maybe be able to say that that's your job. Usually, I just say, "I'm a writer and I teach," but I am a writer. I write primarily novels, occasional essays, and I teach writing.

I'm on the core faculty at StoryStudio in Chicago, which is a sort of adult, well they have kid programs too, but I mostly teach adults who are either interested in learning more about creative writing, thinking about going back to get MFAs, just sort of want to have a project they've been wanting to work on. StoryStudio offers sort of the equivalent of what you might get if you went back to graduate school in terms of different types of writing classes, interactions, networking with different writers.

It is not a graduate program. It's a nonprofit. That's been a really fun career move in the past two years to be affiliated with them. I've been teaching for them for a while, but only I think in the time for everyone, I'm sure time just sort of has meddled together now that we're all since [inaudible 00:01:55], but I think in 2021, I joined the core faculty, but it may have been sooner. Either way, I'm there now and I specialize in genre fiction but really do sort of all sorts of different things for them.

Then, I also teach for Catapult, which is another sort of online, it's the educational arm of the Catapult Publishing Company and then one offs here and there, but yeah, mostly novels. My first book came out in 2018 and my second came out in 2021 and hopefully the third will come 2023-ish. That's still in the works.

Marshall Poe:

That's great. Congratulations on all that. You're also a mother.

Julia Fine:

Yeah. Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

We're going to be talking about that. Yes.

Julia Fine:

Two young children. I have a four and a half-year-old and a one and a half year old.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, we'll be talking about that because it's relevant to The Upstairs House. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about Grinnell since this is a Grinnell College podcast, why did you decide to go to Grinnell?

Julia Fine:

Oh gosh. I grew up outside of Washington DC and literally everyone, when I said I was going to school in Iowa said, "We don't know where that is and why." It's funny because my grandfather, this is a roundabout way of telling the story, but it is why I decided to go to Grinnell, my grandfather sort of came back from World War II and on the GI Bill®* had gone to the University of Iowa.

He is New York, born and raised, and he was very, very east coast, but he had gone out to Iowa for a few years and he had these wonderful memories and said, "You should go look at schools in Iowa." I knew that I wanted to go to a small liberal arts college and I'd applied to a ton of schools along the east coast that of everybody else in my community was looking at.

Then, I got into Grinnell and they had the visit, you could go out and do a visit and I went and visited and I thought, this is just the perfect fit. It has everything that I'm looking for from these east coast liberal arts schools, but it's so much more my style and the people are so much weirder and better than who I seem to be meeting at all these other school tours. It was a whim. Well, my grandpa likes Iowa, so I'll try it. Then, it ended up being, I met my husband there, my best friends. Clearly, the best decision I made of my life. Well, one of the best decisions of my life, but a very formative one.

Marshall Poe:

I agree with all that. I think going to Grinnell was one of the best decisions I ever made. My search for college was not as systematic as yours, but I did end up at the right place and I'm very grateful to the people at Grinnell for everything they did for me. Let's talk a little bit about what it is to be a novelist. How did you decide to become a novelist? This is a fascinating question for me because it's not as if you open up the job ads and it says novelist.

Julia Fine:

Yeah, no. There certainly are no job ads, but I had been interested in creative writing and had been writing since I was very young. In high school, I did a lot of creative writing and submitted to contests and won a few awards. Then, I actually, I felt sort of like you said, there's no job ads for novelists. You need to support yourself. You need a career. What will you do?

I did not take, I took one creative writing class in college. My senior year, I finally had room because I double majored in English and psychology and I went abroad. I had no room for anything that wasn't sort of on this very particular track, which I loved, but also it just was like every class was English, psychology or something required. I finally, senior year, took a creative writing class, really liked it, but still it was like, "Well, okay. Now, you're graduating, you need to make money.

I graduated in 2010, which I think was slightly better perhaps than the few years before me, but not that much better in terms of job opportunities with the recession. I started working, my first job out of college was selling yellow page ads over the phone, which lasted about eight months, I think. Then, I switched and worked in PR and that was definitely a more long-term sort of opportunity as the yellow pages were clearly on their way out in 2010, but I really didn't like it and I wanted something that would be sort of creatively fulfilling.

I started writing again in the evenings and reading a lot and thinking about what my ideal working life would look like. Everybody said, "This is not really viable. Probably you should go to law school. How will you make money doing this?" I was very cocky and I think mostly have ended up being very lucky because I just quit that job that I really hated. It was a very intense sort of small family-owned business where you had no life outside of work.

I nannied full-time to pay the bills for a year and a half. Then, I kept nannying. I applied for MFA programs and I got into one in Chicago that funded me and I continued to nanny and then added, slowly added teaching in to sort of balance that out. I've been very, very lucky in that I have a husband, then partner, still partner, but then boyfriend now husband who said, "Go for it. Do this. I support this idea," even while everyone, my parents were saying, "Mm."

Then, I also just have been, I think I was fortunate to have written something that resonated and found the right people at the right time. The first book led to the second book, which led to the third book. I just hope, it's luck. It's a lot of work. I mean, it's a lot. Writing novels is literally just spending a really long time by yourself thinking and writing and not interacting with people. It definitely, I think you have to have the self-discipline and the drive and the self-confidence in a way that you can get through this and do it.

I will say it's gotten easier with every book I've written and it's the best job. I say job in air quotes because I'm not getting a weekly paycheck. It's almost like you're working on commission, but when you can make money, doing it's amazing and being able to do it is amazing and it basically has amounted to me just saying, "What am I really interested in and how can I glam it together and try to write a book about it that maybe someone else will want to read."

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, yeah. No, I get that. I really liked what you said about the work aspect and the necessity of a certain amount of work discipline because one of the things I've discovered in my own career or careers is that you kind of have to embrace the grind. That's what I call it. You have to embrace the grind. You have to be willing to put in the hours. If you don't feel like you can, it's probably not the right thing for you.

Julia Fine:

Absolutely.

Marshall Poe:

You really have to, it's a little bit athletics where you get to the point where you can't do it anymore and then you do it some more.

Julia Fine:

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think, it's difficult because it was one thing to write a book when I didn't have children and it's just such a different game when you have kids because it's not only the physical demands of like, I need to feed my kids right now, but just mentally you need to be present with your kids in a way. I mean, my husband probably is like, I'd appreciate if you're present for me, but as an adult he can fend for himself for long periods of time if I'm just sort of daydreaming.

With kids, it has had to be a much more deliberate sort of like this is the writing time, I'm turning everything else off. I'm going to not watch TV for six months because I'm reading a book.

Marshall Poe:

This is a, I don't know whether to ask this question or not, would you have any advice for aspiring novelists? Is there anything you might say, any nugget of wisdom that you like have aimed?

Julia Fine:

Absolutely. I mean, I think this idea that you need connections or an MFA program or sort of something that isn't just you and an idea and all the reading that you've ever done in your life is, it's useful to have that. It's nice to have dedicated time but you don't need, all you really need and the thing that it will come down to again, is like you sitting down and putting in the time and just working through it and being willing to throw away large chunks of the book in service of making it better.

If you've gone to school for it or if you know people who you think might boost you up, that can be nice, but until you get your butt in the chair and you actually write it and none of that is really going to matter. If that's something that you feel like is stopping you, it shouldn't because I know so many people who have gone to school and gotten master's degrees or who have the network, but it ultimately is not the thing that's going to help you get through it.

I also would say don't quit your day job. It's not going to be like, there are the occasional person really hits it big, but even that is sort of fraught because just you did really well with one book doesn't mean the next one will and expectation is high. It's not really, if you are lucky enough to have come into a massive inheritance, maybe you can decide this is all I'm going to do, but otherwise, having something else which also having something else in your life gives you something to write about. I don't really know how people cannot have of a life outside of writing books. Obviously, we all need to make money.

Marshall Poe:

Right. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad you mentioned this because you do have to pay the bills and you have to love what you're doing, but you also have to recognize that there are also practical necessities and you need to take care of those because other people are probably relying on you for those. You have to balance these two things. Your book is kind of about balancing these two things...

Julia Fine:

Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Marshall Poe:

... because we're not balancing them as it happens. I don't really know quite how to approach this because I don't want to give too much away because I guess, if I were classifying your book and I don't really like classifying books, it's kind of a horror story but it's also kind of a mystery, a psychological thriller. How would you classify it?

Julia Fine:

Gosh, I think that, my literary agent has described what I do throughout as literary feminist horror, I think is her but this one is particularly, when I pitched it, when I first had the idea, I said I want to write a postpartum Poltergeist story where a new mom who's in that terrible first, well, maybe for some people it's not terrible, but very, very stressful and very lonely and isolating those first few weeks of new parenthood things or is being haunted by a literal ghost.

In this case, she thinks or is being haunted by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny and a whole series of other children's books. This new mother, Megan, the book opens with her coming home from the hospital with her first baby and her dissent into what might be madness but what might just be a ghost story, sort of a [inaudible 00:13:43] style where she is being haunted in some way or another by Margaret Wise Brown and then the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown's real life female lover whose name was Michael Strange, who was a poet and an actress and sort of a socialite in the, I guess, first half of the 20th century.

Marshall Poe:

One of the interesting things about the book is that Megan, who's the protagonist, has this kind of before in life, before and after life. She's writing a PhD, which happens to be about Margaret Wise Brown and children's literature. Then, this kid shows up and she doesn't know how to negotiate these two things because she wants to do the dissertation. That's where her passion is, but then she has this kid.

Julia Fine:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

This is tough and it kind of drives her crazy. I want to talk a little bit why you chose Margaret Wise Brown to be a kind of principal character. The reason I do this is I have personally read Goodnight Moon about 10,000 times. I have three kids and I got to tell you, it's a creepy book. It is a totally creepy book. I mean, you're talking to inanimate objects and it's sort of surreal and weird. I don't know how else to put it. It's like a piece of surrealist art. Why Margaret Wise Brown?

Julia Fine:

That is because of that book. Also, when my son was born and he came out as the world's worst sleeper, he's still. He's four and a half now and still is up at 4:30 being like, "What are we doing today mom?" One of the pieces of advice that I got of how to get your kid to go to sleep more easily was read them the same thing over and over. I was like, "Okay, we'll read Goodnight Moon," over and over just of, someone gave it to me or I'd picked it up and that page goodnight nobody where you say goodnight to all the things and then all of a sudden there's just a blank white page, the goodnight nobody and then the next one is goodnight mush. I was just so interested in it and I thought who wrote this?

There's a biography of Margaret Wise Brown called Awakened by the Moon and I feel terrible. The name of the author is Leonard. It's not Leonard Wise Guard because he's an illustrator, but it's Leonard something else and if you buy, if you get The Upstairs House, I have him credited, but anyway, it's a really good biography of Margaret Wise Brown. I started reading it and I realized she was so different from who I had pictured as the author of these books and yet it made perfect sense that she had written them.

She was bisexual. She had this 10-year sort on and off again relationship with a domineering older woman. She died at 42, which just felt like a surprise because I felt it was the books you think with children's books like, "They're so grandmotherly and writing for children must be something that this old woman who's raised a family did," but she never had kids. She was a rabbit hunter, like a beagle. She was an avid rabbit hunter and [inaudible 00:16:56] club on Long Island.

She has a very quirky personality, the type of person who would forget to pay the electric bills. She had this cabin in Maine where she didn't have a refrigerator and just kept bottles of wine in the stream and had all of these would swim naked in the freezing cold water in Maine. I was just fascinated by her.

The more I read about her and the more I read particularly about this formative relationship in her life with this older woman, the more I felt like, "I really need to write a book about her. What can I do?" At the same time I was in my own life clearly, figuring out how to be a mother and how my new life was going to fit into my old.

It sort of fit the two pieces fit together pretty perfectly because here was a children's book author and I wanted to write about children and I wanted to write about the way that, again, this woman, Michael Strange, was a very domineering figure and maybe a toxic figure, but also someone Margaret really, really loved. They seemed to have really loved each other really complicated relationship.

I thought, "Well, having a newborn is also a really complicated relationship and something that of turns the course of your life in ways that are mostly good but sometimes not so good. It just of feels like, invasive is the wrong word because... but it just is pervasive I think is a better word. I felt like how can I connect these two stories and how can I put these two things that I'm interested in exploring together? The Upstairs House is what grew out of it.

Marshall Poe:

I saw the relationship between the parallel and the relationship between Margaret Wise Brown and Michael and Megan and Megan's daughter, Clara because it's not entirely sure who has whose interests in mind and the relationship isn't, it's one of love, but there's also certain amount of antagonism there. Again, having kids myself, I love them, but there were sometimes when, let me say, I didn't.

Julia Fine:

Absolutely. I think especially with a newborn, because they're so needy and they really can't give you much back. I guess, they're cute sometimes, but it takes a few months before they start really being able to provide much emotional, I don't know, before they give anything back. I was also really interested and I think that even since I started writing, even since my first child was born and I started writing The Upstairs House, I feel like culturally, there have been more stories about how maybe those first few months are not sort of all roses, but at the time, I, as a new mother, felt like I was surrounded by stories of how wonderful. We're so cozy and great now. Everything is so perfect to be the mother of a newborn.

I felt like this is not realistically what it's like. I wish that I had been a little bit more prepared to know what it actually means to take care of a several week old baby. That was also part of the inspiration, wanting to write something that felt more true to my experience and also that made other new parents who maybe were having some of these same feelings feel validated in those feelings, because I think it's fine to not be obsessed with your newborn and normal, but I think there are times where we, there's sort of a stigma around saying, "I really don't like having this newborn."

Marshall Poe:

Well, it is diapers and vomit and crap and sleeplessness...

Julia Fine:

Just crying all the time.

Marshall Poe:

... and it's a lot. This is one of the things that comes up in the book is all of this advice that's floating around not only from your friends and family but their books and there are all these other things that people are foisting on you telling you this is how you should do it and that's how you should do it. I don't know. I didn't find most of those terribly useful.

Julia Fine:

No, no, I agree. Although, now it's funny now that I have kids because I mean, I didn't have kids at a young age sort of overall. I was 29 when my son was born, but I was on a faster track than a lot of my friends. Now, they're having babies and I hear myself saying these things and I'm like, "Oh my gosh." Just in terms of giving advice of, "Just let the baby cry it out," or just do this or do whatever it is.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, right. I know that. That is [inaudible 00:21:37]. Whenever a friend of mine has a child, I only say one thing that is when they cry, they're probably but not necessarily hungry. That's all I have.

Julia Fine:

That is very true.

Marshall Poe:

I have nothing else. Work with that.

Julia Fine:

Yeah, no, it's just new parents are given, I don't know, especially to be a new parent right now, I feel like, and it's funny because this book came out February 2021, so mid pandemic, even though I wrote it beforehand. I feel like new parents are even more sort abandoned and accosted by contradictory advice and left without childcare than ever.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, no, I think that is very consistent with my own experience having had newborns and now having some teenagers, there's no real manual for it. I find myself surprised all the time at the things that I am saying and asking them to do and that I'm doing. I always said, "Well, I would never do this," and here I am doing it and it's a very frustrating thing. Let me ask this, what drew you to, well, let's call it horror, why horror? Again, horror's not quite right, psychological [inaudible 00:22:54], why there and not something else?

Julia Fine:

I think that I was never a consumer of traditional horror. I love the gothic and I love psychological horror, but I was never a kid who would watch slasher films or don't, I'm not very widely read within the more traditional horror genre either, but I am very interested in using something concrete to talk about an idea and writing a book that effectively is a metaphor. I think that-

Marshall Poe:

It is. The book is a metaphor.

Julia Fine:

Yeah. I think that horror is a really good way to talk about if something, it just feels to me if you want to write something that's haunting you emotionally, why not add an actual haunting? As a writer too, plot is, I think, there are some people who go about writing and are very plot driven and know exactly what's going to happen and how the dominoes are going to fall. I really admire, and I'm jealous of people who can write books that way, but for me of plot springs out of things like this of, well what if there's a literal ghost of your past self and your past work while you're trying to care for a baby? What would happen then?

My first book, What Should Be Wild is what if this idea that women, it all hinge on the idea that women, specifically teenage girls are seen as both sort of seductresses and also little angels. What if there's a girl who literally has the power to touch something and turn it from life to death and back again.

Then, my third one, which is I'm working on now, is a little bit less sort of one to one, but still this idea of when you're writing about feeling or some sort of emotional turmoil, to me, the best way to get a plot moving so that you can explore those things is to literally take it out of psychology and put it as a thing on the page. I think horror is the way, that's how horror has always functioned.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I get just what you mean. It does work very well on the metaphorical level in the sense that the metaphor becomes real in a way that it can't, if you're just doing kind of straightforward internal monologues in which there's no magical element at all or no supernatural element, they come to life on the page and they're real stakes because they're ghosts or monsters and these things are malevolent and they can hurt you just in real life how actual people can hurt you.

I do like that because it front loads the metaphor and it makes it apparent to the reader. This is just editorialized for a second, people will talk about genre fiction and kind of disparaging tones. I don't like this at all. Sorry, that just doesn't fly with me because it is true, there is a thing genre fiction and some of it is great, but it's just fiction. That's what it is.

Julia Fine:

No, it all is. It's funny too because people talk about literary fiction and I love literary fiction. I read a lot of literary fiction, but that's also a genre.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. I think it's for that drama.

Julia Fine:

Literary fiction [inaudible 00:26:05].

Marshall Poe:

The word for that is drama. If you think something is literal, it's probably just a drama where humans interact and they conflict and they're at each other's throats or whatever it is.

Julia Fine:

Whatever it is. Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

It's drama. There are no ghosts. Then, you have to look a little bit harder for the metaphors. In your book, which I really liked, the metaphors are just, they're more apparent and real because Margaret Wise Brown appears or maybe not. We don't know if she does or not. Michael appears.

Now, the kid is real and Ben, her husband is real, but I think it's Ben, right? Is it Ben? Yeah, Ben is real and these other characters, because that's what they are in the book. THEY appear too and they actually go about the real world, well maybe the real world and they actually do things. I found that it easy to follow because of that literary technique, but you're not a fan of horror yourself. You don't read it.

Julia Fine:

I mean, I like it. I definitely, I'm a big, I love, I really a slow burn, psychological gothic horror. I love Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter type things. I read, I wouldn't call myself, I said, I'm the sort of in the genre fiction niche at work and I feel like I need to caveat that with, I'm in no ways an expert on some of these genres that I've dipped into. I'll read what I need to.

I mean, I read a ton of fantasy growing up and I've read pretty widely, but I wasn't, I know I have friends who are writers now who really are diving into traditions that I think I'm just not quite as, I pick my lane and I try to dig deep in there, but I don't have such a broad understanding. When I knew I wanted to write of a psychological ghost story, it's like, "Well, what are the things Turn of the Screw," or what else did I look?

I read a lot of Victorian ghost stories in working on The Upstairs House, but I wasn't ever, I don't know. I don't feel like that then sort of turns me into suddenly an expert in even the Victorian ghost stories. I think I always just want to caveat that because there are people out there who have such a firm understanding and are so well researched and have read.

I guess you can never have read everything, but I think the book is horror, but I also understand if people who are writing more firmly in the traditions of horror would say, "I don't know if I would classify this as horror," which I would say, I think that it is genre bending and it's definitely speculative, but it's difficult to, just with my first book people put it as magical realism and then they're like, "Well, it could go to the traditions of magical realism." I don't know that [inaudible 00:29:12].

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that's for literary scholars. I don't get too involve myself not to disparage literary scholars, but I don't involve myself much in that kind of thing.

Julia Fine:

It just depends on what, and I think a lot of it is about, I have come to learn that genre is also a lot about reader expectation. I feel people are more open to both of my published books. If I say, "Yeah, I don't know where I would put it." Then, if I say, "This is a fantasy novel. This is a horror novel." Just because I do, I'm interested in playing with expectation and there are people who are really here for that. Then, there are people who want, they want the beats to hit where they want them to hit and they're reading the book to take comfort in that. That's not something that I really do in my work.

Marshall Poe:

I don't. I appreciate those kinds of, I'm a big fan of police procedurals. I read a lot of them and I watch a lot of them and they are isomorphic, let's use a big word, they're really all kind of the same, but I do take great comfort in that. I like them.

Julia Fine:

Yeah, Mm-hmm. I don't know. It's like what are you picking up a book for? I think that people turn two books for vastly different reasons at different times. There are some things that I want to read because I just want to totally escape and some things that are really going to emotionally move me and some that are going to make me think.

I think it all is a matter of what you're looking for, but I have noticed when you do work that doesn't fit into necessarily one of the sort marketing niches, people's responses are vastly different based on what they think that they're picking up.

Marshall Poe:

Right. I can think of a couple of books that I have picked up thinking they were one thing and finding out that they were another. It was shocking and not particularly pleasant, but once I got into it was okay. Before I let you go, we've taken up some of your time and thank you very much for it, I want to ask two more questions and this is out of my complete ignorance of the way that novelist work, was this book hopped? There's a thing you guys do called workshopping, right? What is that?

Julia Fine:

Yes. My first book, in an MFA program, effectively what you are doing, you have sort of more traditional literature classes that feel like lit theory and English classes that you might take, but a lot of the time it is just people bringing short stories or excerpts of novels to the table and a group of maybe 10 people reads them and then they all talk about it in whatever form your workshop leader wants to take. Sometimes you have to just sit there and say nothing. Sometimes you can respond to people's comments on your work.

My first book I wrote during graduate school. That one went through of a ton of different iterations. This one, I wrote the first, I think 70 pages. I sent it to my agent. She came back with comments and then I wrote the rest. Then, I had two or three writer friends who I trust and who I felt knew what I was going for. I had them read it and then we went out and got it to a publishing house. There's always an editor who's involved at the publishers, but this one was a lot more streamlined of a process for me.

Marshall Poe:

Then, it's not quite my final question, but have you had responses from readers and have they been pleasurable or is it?

Julia Fine:

Yeah. Honestly, no. They've been mixed. I think that there are some people who, both people who have kids and don't have kids, who really don't want to read about the difficulties of having kids and find it boring or disturbing. I mean, I think that a lot of the thoughts that Megan has in The Upstairs House are disturbing. They're supposed to be disturbing.

My goal there was to take some normal feelings and then sort try to push them. When you're writing a book, again, nobody wants to read about, "It's so annoying that my kid is crying," but if you can explode that feeling and push it a little bit, that's what makes good fiction, in my opinion. I think there are people who think this is child abuse. This is terrible. Then, there are other people who are structurally, it is a confusing book because you jump back and forth between real life "Megan" and excerpts of her thesis about Margaret Wise Brown and with footnotes and then Margaret Wise Brown sort of historical sections.

Then, there's also sort of weird dream psychological breaks where it all mixes together. There are people who are like, I'm just not here for the amount of work it takes to read this book, but I also have gotten responses. The majority of responses I think are people who say, "This feels really true emotionally to my experience of trying to have either a career or be an artist or just balance a life and also have really small kids."

People who have read are Margaret Wise Brown aficionados have been pretty, that to me, I take a lot of pride in the fact that the people who know are interested in her life and have researched her. I see you did your research there because everything she does, both she and Michael in this book, clearly the conversations I've invented and there are motivations for things that I came up with because they are characters in the novel, not the real them, but it's really based in a lot of research.

The places that they go, the people they see, the things they wear, the food they eat, I really, Margaret Wise Brown left a lot of journal. She was a journaler and it's hard to get into her psychologically, but you can trace where she was. While she wasn't in a Chicago apartment, I've tried to make her as realistic and as sort of true to who I imagine her to be as possible. Getting responses where people are like, "Yeah, this is cool. It feels really good."

Marshall Poe:

I'll tell you what I do when I read a novel that I really like by a new novelist is I write them an email and I tell them I like their novel.

Julia Fine:

I mean, that is...

Marshall Poe:

Oftentimes, I get a response.

Julia Fine:

... the best thing you can do. Yeah, no. It feels at a certain point you're doing, you sit there and you write the book and it takes years usually to write the book and edit the book and go through production and then maybe have a little team working on the book with you, but then it's out and then, usually, you'll get a few weeks of reviews and people will respond to it maybe, but hearing someone taking the time to write a person on note, I'll always respond.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I like it a lot.

Julia Fine:

It always [inaudible 00:35:39] beautiful.

Marshall Poe:

I had a lengthy correspondence with this Israeli author who wrote a book called The Hilltop, which I very highly recommend. Go read the Hilltop. It was great. I was just so happy to be in contact with him. It was a terrific book. Thank you very much for your time today, Julia. Our traditional final question on the New Book's Network generally is this, what are you working on now? Can you give us a little preview?

Julia Fine:

Yeah, I am right now working on, I'm pivoting sort of, but not really thematically, I am working on a book about two female musicians in Venice in the 18th century who study at the Ospedale della Pieta under Antonio Vivaldi. It is also sort of a horror story. It's like a Faustian story of what will you sacrifice to get better at your music, but I also have sort of pitched it. It's almost like, not necessarily mean girls, but sort of teenage girls cat fighting and broke Venice.

It's been a lot of fun to write and research and I was actually, I was supposed to be in Venice this week and then omicron canceled my plans, but hopefully I'll get there soon to keep researching, but yeah, that's-

Marshall Poe:

Well, good luck with that project. That sounds absolutely fascinating. I'm a historian. I'm always into, and actually I read historical fiction, speaking of genre fiction. I like historical fiction.

Julia Fine:

Perfect. This one is like historical fiction horror. It's [inaudible 00:37:04].

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, right. I like it very much. Well, let me tell everybody, we've been talking to Julia Fine, who graduated from Grinnell College in 2010. We're very proud of her and we've been talking about her book, The Upstairs House. It's out from Harper Collins. It was published in 2021. Julia, thanks so much for being on the show.

Julia Fine:

Thank you so much me. This has been so fun.

Marshall Poe:

Absolutely. My pleasure.

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