Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 3:09
You Are Here | One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2023, let's talk with author Karin Lin-Greenberg
But then I took this class, and it was taught by a graduate student at the time, and I loved how she talked about writing, and I loved how the writing in that class made me feel. She was one of the first people outside of one of my teachers in high school that suggested I maybe keep going with this writing thing and I will never forgive her. I'm just kidding, Karen. This is all to say, it's been a really incredible experience. All these years later
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:35
When did you first Know that you wanted to write to the point that you Committed to it as a real practice consistently in your life, and Especially with your debut novel coming out? After having two short story collections previously, did you ever see yourself at this point at having the Most Anticipated Book Of The Year? That's a novel. As someone who's written so many short stories
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:35
I love talking with other writers and creatives about failure, since it's often such a big part of the process and there's so much that we can learn from it. I'm curious for this book and your other books. Really, too. Has failure played any kind of role in their evolution? And how did you confront or work with or play with that failure so you could keep moving forward and the books could exist and be in our hands today?
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:51
We have a really awesome writing community here on Swell that is often talking about what they're working on, challenges they're facing, all that good stuff. And I think we would all love to hear On The Verge of your third book being published in just a couple of months. What's some writing advice that you either received from someone else at some point in your writing life that has really stuck with you
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:16
Or I've read interviews with writers where they talk about how they read obsessively that everything they're reading is informing what they're working on and is in conversation with it. For you are here. Were there any books or art or just any other kind of storytelling pieces of work or anything, really? It could be food, it could be the newspaper, anything that you were consuming a lot or felt sort of obsessed with while you were working on it or writing
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:41
You can pre order go to Karen's website. I will link it here. You will not be disappointed. Karen is an incredible writer, and you can read a lot of her work online, too. So get to it
Karin Lin-Greenberg
@karinlg · 3:35
It was just something I really enjoyed doing when I was an undergraduate, I was an English major and then had a creative writing concentration. And then I just always loved writing stories and it was one of the things that I would do where I would be engaged in it and then time would just kind of pass and I'd have no idea. I was sitting there for 3 hours writing. So just something I kept doing and was lucky enough to be able to keep doing after I graduated from college
Karin Lin-Greenberg
@karinlg · 3:06
So yes, absolutely. Failure, I think, has played a role in everything I've ever written. I think you and I have talked about this before. I believe you've shared with me your extensive spreadsheet with logging, you know, all the journal submissions. I'm not sure if when I had you as a student, I shared with your class all my rejection letters
Karin Lin-Greenberg
@karinlg · 2:07
And that's why you're publishing now. There are a lot of people out there who went to school for writing, whether undergraduate or graduate, and they never wrote again after they graduated, after they finished their last class. And I think even if those people were the most talented, if they were the ones who are winning all the awards at school, if they don't write anymore, then they're not going to succeed
Karin Lin-Greenberg
@karinlg · 3:10
And was working on those myself too, as a separate project from the novel. And I know you have also worked on some text and image combinations. And I think the big thing that came out of that was this huge appreciation for just writing just text, because when you add these other elements in, there's just so much more to keep track of, so much more to deal with. And I'd been writing for decades by then, but had given up art for a long time
Karin Lin-Greenberg
@karinlg · 2:22
So, Bowie, I just want to say thank you for talking to me today and for your great questions. And I also hope listeners seek out your stories and essays that can be found online. I have to say, it just delights me that you've published and you've continued to write and I know you're working on longer projects too. And I just think back to when you were a student in my class and I can picture you
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 4:23
I definitely was one of those young writers that felt really like I need to be sending things out, and it's mostly just because I wanted to be out there playing with the other writers. And now that I am about ten years oh gosh, more like 15 years, I guess, at this point into regularly submitting