Author and Forest Avenue Press founder and publisher Laura Stanfill, Part 1
Wherein I write long-ass questions and Laura writes long-ass answers... all thoughtful and dreamy, mind you!
I’m beyond excited to share the first half of my conversation with Laura Stanfill, a powerhouse and goddess in Portland, Oregon’s forever thriving and loving literary community. Laura is humble and might never call herself a powerhouse or goddess, but I do and many who know her do too.
I’ll ask Laura to send me a photo of her doing roller derby for Part 2, but for now… (and remember, Substack IS ALL ABOUT long-form pieces, eh-hem)… here we go, here we are.
And as I said in a lil’ sneaky-peaky hint that this bebé was coming, I hope you feel as hugged here as I do with Laura’s generous time, braininess, warmth, and energy. 🤗
Dear Laura,
I was in the shower today when it hit me: You know how we met, of course—I submitted my novel to Forest Avenue Press in 2015. I didn’t know you, but I knew Liz Prato from the Portland writing community and trusted whatever wordsy-world she was involved in.
After receiving a few hopeful rejections from Big Apple agents on my novel Outta Here!, I had gotten actionable editing suggestions and serious encouragement from my workshop leader and peers at Sharon Oard Warner’s fabulous and now-defunct Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. A few excerpts had been accepted by established literary journals and one excerpt won the 2014 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Fiction Prize. I was flown to New Orleans and put up in a fancy haunted hotel. I read my work and spoke on a panel. I thought this was it, my time, my manuscript’s time! My beloved characters and I only had to find the right fit and a budding small press out of my beloved city of Portland could definitely be it.
Okay, don’t feel bad! I know you don’t feel bad. I know you could feel the weight of all the “I want to be an author” pennies I’d tossed into fountains because you’ve tossed those pennies too. I knew rejection long before you sent your kind rejection letter. You know rejection, the toe or leg in the door, the door slamming, the fact of more doors there to test our faith and persistence.
I was digging around in my email today because I wanted to read that thoughtful rejection letter, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found this gem you sent me on July 21, 2016:
“Dear Christine,
… I’m so jazzed about your journey that I wrote you into my publishing book draft!
It’s for authors with a focus on fiction and moving from manuscript to author (and author’s representation/agents), publisher, and reader. I would love to quote you on what it feels like to break open your book, for the editing chapter. But I’d also love to quote you on why you decided to take the leap and undo what was so polished at this point.
Here’s the setup I drafted:
Author Christine Fadden has had close calls with agents and editors on her girls’ softball novel, Outta Here!, a powerful and polished story about two girls who move in with their grandparents during the summer of their parents’ divorce. She’s always felt it belonged in the adult fiction category... that is, until an encouraging agent explained that Outta Here! straddled the adult and young adult worlds. While she had received similar feedback before, this particular agent offered a really clear explanation of why. Christine’s novel featured an adult looking back to age eleven, which typically would skew it toward the adult fiction label, because it’s not in the moment with the child, but that adult voice didn’t offer guidance or analysis, which skewed it more toward the YA side. Christine made the difficult decision to break Outta Here! open and turn it into a YA manuscript.”
Laura, your publishing book draft—it’s a book, now! IMAGINE A DOOR: a writer’s guide to unlocking your story, choosing a publishing path, and honoring the creative journey! You did it.
Okay, my writer and publisher friend, I promise I’m getting to the point and want to hear your voice, not mine—but yeah, back to more of what hit me today in the shower while thinking over everything I loved about IMAGINE A DOOR, realizing I have a new angle to add to Outta Here!, and then opening your Summer 2016 email:
Just last week, I committed myself to giving Outta Here! one more shot… one more round of revisions, revisions I have only gotten halfway through since hiring author and literary consultant Lynn Stegner to do a manuscript evaluation in 2020. Nine summers after you and I were talking about Outta Here! … do you see what I see?
9 is my protagonist’s (softball uniform) number so this MUST mean it is finally time for this story to find its perfect match in an agent or small press, right? Like finally, finally.
Or not.
Either way, DEAR LAURA, HI and thank you for taking time out of your wild and wonderful schedule to chat with me. Now to a few questions inspired by your beautiful gift to the writers, IMAGINE A DOOR:
You spoke of the stories you wrote in your youth, wondering what kind of twelve-year-old wrote phrases like “clad in his nightshirt”? You did, you wrote that phrase, and I love it! I totally see this pre-pubescent Laura in every head shot and photo of you captured at book events. I sat next to this Laura because she invited me to her lunch table at the Willamette Writers Conference in 2016. In IMAGINE A DOOR, you define “voice” as “the manuscript’s music” and “how your youness rubs up against the story you’re telling.” You state that a writer will know they are leaning into their youness when “nobody else could write the fifty-first page [of their story] and note how a writer who is struggling to summon their voice might try tapping into their childhood landscapes to conjure who they were and how they sounded “before the world tried to change [their] voice.” My friend, one of the many stylish hats you wear is that of teacher. Is there a specific writing exercise or prompt—wrapped around this concept of our voice being tied to who we were and where we were at age eight or ten or twelve—that you offer writers who are having a hard time either finding their voice, or putting it on the page?
Anyone else identify as shy? I grew up wanting to conceal everything, desperate to show my peers a perfect surface self, because I knew I was different. Other kids knew things I didn’t know about how the world worked. If I could pretend to be like them, I’d fit in. Of course, in trying so hard to pretend, I excelled and that made me different in another way.
Figuring out how to loosen up our voices is a matter of acknowledging what we’re trying to hide, what we don’t want others to notice about ourselves. We are all prone to this kind of pretending when we are figuring out how to express ourselves as writers, to find and use our usness in our work. Trying to use sentences and verbs to appear a certain way on the page, because we are nervous about people seeing the real us, gets in the way of finding and using our authentic voices.
Here are some generative questions that will help you figure out what kind of walls and boundaries you are putting in your own way:
What should I sound like? (What do people expect of me?)
What do I want to sound like? What do I want people to imagine of me, based on how I use words?
Are there voice expectations within the genre I’ve chosen, and should I adhere to them? Or break them?
What do I want strangers to know about me? (What am I afraid of?)
What kind of storytelling will earn me a book deal?
It's okay to ask those questions, to wonder and ponder and worry, but to really go deep and find your voice, you need to stop worrying about them.
Here’s your assignment: jot down any of these questions that resonate for you. Add two more that aren’t on this list. Then put the piece of paper in a jar. Screw the lid on. If you don’t have a jar, stick the paper under a rock. Or under your mattress. Put your worries someplace you don’t have to look at them.
Back to my example of being a shy kid, the idea of strangers reading my fiction and knowing something about how I think makes me want to crawl under a weighted blanket and not come out. And yet. It’s my voice, it’s the me-ness of my work, that makes it mine. So I have to let go of that fear to write, well, anything that sounds like me.
Once you’ve secured the big scary questions out of sight, in a place where you can acknowledge their existence but not deal with them right now, let yourself play. For me, childhood memories are a go-to springboard, but you can use any kind of prompt or material that resonates.
Write about a moment you experienced wonder. Who was your childhood best friend and what adventures did you have together? Write about a time you got lost. What weird games did you invent with your friends (or was that just me)? Write about your first crush. If you’re feeling stuck, go outside. Be in the weather. Look for bugs or frogs. Let yourself be in the world, feel in the world. Or try another art form. Pick up a cheap set of watercolors and brushes and paint something that doesn’t have a narrative arc to it. Just paint for fun! Anything to loosen the constricts of feeling like you have to perform.
The more moments like that, where you can let go, the more permission you’re giving yourself to practice your authentic you-ness on the page.
In the chapter “Progress is Personal,” you speak to the value of working at your own pace and taking the time the work demands be taken. You made progress in an early draft of your debut novel Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary by writing and revising a single chapter from it for about a year in the writers’ workshop you were part of. That chapter evolved into a whopping 100 pages, but you say that narrowing the scope helped you be more inventive. Does this mean that your start and ending for that chapter were 98% clear, set, and non-negotiable, so you just kept adding to and fleshing out the characters and events that seemed to belong in-between this framework, or what? Please talk a bit more on narrowing scope, especially in light of how it helps when the complexities of writing a full-length manuscript overwhelm us.
Actually, the framework of chapter two was more open-ended, like a canvas that kept growing to fit my needs as I added more plot points. What happened within those pages was helpful for development of the story, but even more so for my understanding of the kind of novel I wanted to write.
In the finished book, set in a magical nineteenth-century French village, chapter two is about my protagonist’s father being born and growing up. Since the father is a cisgender white male, destined to run his family business, the sun comes out the moment he stops crying. Ha! It’s great until the sun wrecks crops and everyone blames him. The novel is about his son, Henri, who would rather make lace than join the family barrel organ workshop, so I wanted to set up the context of the expectations people had of him before he tries to break them.
When I first started chapter two, though, I was writing about Henri as the strange child, a boy the other kids wanted to take down a peg because of his father’s position in the community. The chapter kept growing in pages and months of content, exploring his childhood and leading up to a major turning point in his life’s arc. Throughout that year in the writing process, there was something terrifying about ending that chapter and beginning the next one—I’m not sure why, exactly. But it felt like I was on a roll and I’d spoil that by starting a new chapter.
In my sprawling labyrinth of Singing Lessons files, I found a 40-page version of chapter two and a 54-page document of chapter two cuts—all things that used to be part of chapter two. I’m sure there are older versions of the whole hundred-page sprawl hidden in other folders! What’s clear, though, is that those hundred pages were less about plot—the story unfolding—than about figuring out how to tell the story. I found this snippet of information about my process in yet another folder:
Working and reworking the same stretch of material helped me figure out the mechanics of writing historical fiction set in France that sounded fairy-tale like without a distant, wooden tone. I also needed to figure out how much French vocab I could use, from my high school classes, to get an authentic sound on the page.
I also chose what many writing coaches say not to pick: an omniscient point of view. I didn’t want to narrate my protagonist’s life so much as give voice to the community that encircled him and helped him follow his heart. My earliest plan, which held true through fifteen years of revisions, was to explore how toxic masculinity can be broken down through generations by strong women quietly resisting their husbands in heteronormative relationships.
I think working within a chunk of story, so obsessively, without putting a shape to it, allowed me to play with the sound of the novel, and also to be generative about Henri’s childhood, to add more moments and scenes and relationships. A lot of that ended up not being usable, but I don’t know if I could have written the book without the permission that an enormous chapter two gave me. It’s kind of like that exercise about setting all your questions (expectations) in a jar. I let that chapter be a place where I could marinate in the ideas and language of the novel, and I didn’t move on (or out of that jar) until I felt ready.
Ira Rosenstein of Starlight Press wrote to you in 1992, when you were forming a poetry journal, “Do whatever you do with energy… in choosing poems, choose for yourself and not for unknowable others… and don’t expect to make a dime.” First, yes to the energy factor and managing expectations around entering into the writing, editing, and/or publishing life, because the dream of what that life is, is rarely the reality. Writing a manuscript and revising it isn’t just a marathon, it’s an ultra-marathon, and the agent search and publishing process is another ultra or two on top. You have to respect and prepare for it, sourcing your energy and sustaining it, turning to community when your defeated ego and sore-ass writing muscles need a massage. So how, Laura, how do you manage your energy and bring it to the many professional projects you juggle—your own writing, the writing of others, and running your own business—Forest Avenue Press? Second, how do we balance the core necessity of choosing for ourselves—in this case sticking to writing what is true to our bones—against the shrill and constant voices screaming at us about the necessity of naming and writing for our “target audience”? Finally, I appreciate how transparent you are throughout IMAGINE A DOOR about money, finances, budgets—for writers, agents and editors, and the various publishing house models. Again, this helps your readers manage expectations. I do this with my clients, explaining that majority of my author friends, even ones with multiple successful books, cannot afford to quit their day jobs. Many never stop teaching, because teaching is freaking holy work. Anyway, I have no question here for you about how many dimes we can expect to make as writers because you lay it out, gently repeating it: Let go of the notion of writerly fame and fortune, and write because you love imagining, playing, creating.
I definitely struggle in prioritizing my creative work over deadlines and publishing projects. I belong to a writing group now and haven’t brought pages in months because of being on tour with Imagine a Door, acquiring several new manuscripts, working on our fall title, Who Killed One the Gun? by Gigi Little, and selling my second novel, The Neighborhood Dames, to Ooligan Press. It’s all great work and I love doing it, but my novel-in-progress isn’t, well, progressing. The plot has percolated during this down time, but when I open my laptop, my emails are there and the responsibilities I have to everyone.
The one commitment I have kept to myself lately, in terms of energy, is to get plenty of sleep. I struggle with brain fog due to autoimmune issues, and when it sets in, I take breaks and naps. I used to overpower my body using my sheer focus of will, and that was a poor choice for my health.
As far as target audience versus choosing for ourselves, I’ve come to find peace in my heart about this disconnect. I write what I love, and in that way, I write for myself. Trying to write for a market in an industry that is so slow is too much of a risk. Even as a publisher, working in the trenches of submissions and learning what new books are forthcoming from other presses, I don’t know what the next trends will be. If I try to write for a trend I see now, by the time I finish the manuscript, let alone find a publisher, the momentum will be long gone.
We’re calling Gigi’s Who Killed One the Gun? a cozy noir, because cozy is huge right now, and hers is a mystery that reads like old-time radio with a brilliantly funny literary spin. Will cozy noir catch on? Who knows? She wrote the book she wanted to write; I’m trying to put marketable keywords to it. Gigi had the guts and the smarts to put this charming and subversively feminist work on the page, and I am doing my best to bring booksellers and reviewers to the work, so they decide to share it with their customers and readers.
Recently I met with a publishing person who mentioned that a small press publisher had put $10,000 into her press. The woman was appalled by that sum! She was like, Stop! Don’t do that anymore. I didn’t tell her: gosh, that’s nothing compared to how much I’ve invested in other people’s work. Even a small print run can cost $10,000. I do have backlist titles that sell pretty well, and that helps our budget, but every frontlist title costs so much money, and there’s no guarantee we will earn those dollars back in the first six months or the first year. I mean, ideally, yes! With investing in a book, it’s a long game, and even with profit and loss projections, a lot depends on luck. When I pay for extra marketing opportunities, either they’re going to help build a fanbase and long-term sales record for this book, or I’m tossing more money down the same hole.
Something I used to believe about conferences and workshops and editorial support was that eventually, when I sell my book, I’ll earn all this back. It just doesn’t work like that, at least most of the time. Publishers are in a similar boat, investing their money and time up front, because they believe in your work and they hope they’ll earn back what they spend, but it’s not guaranteed. I think the big houses can afford books that don’t sell because they have robust backlists and celebrities on their frontlists. It’s harder to take chances in the small press world, but without a crystal ball, to some extent, it’s all taking chances and hoping for the best.
You offer your IMAGINE A DOOR readers a list of questions author Lidia Yuknavitch offered to you, about success, and the image of it. I suppose you offered her answers then, or journaled your answers then, so, now, Laura (and Lidia), allow me to pose again two of those questions: Laura, when are you your best self and how do you keep conjuring and growing story space for yourself?
I love this! I am my best self when I’m not leaning forward trying to do everything for everyone. Right in this moment is pretty great. One of my kids is awake, keeping the dog company inside, and the other is still asleep. I’m at my rainbow picnic table, having this delightful conversation with you. Later I’ll pack a picnic and take my youngest and her friend to the river.
Your questions are inviting me to slow down and take stock. To think about where I am in this moment—and to embrace and acknowledge that it’s hard, and I’m often overloaded. Just putting that down on the page helps me prepare story space. To bring myself back to myself and call myself back to the novel I’m working on.
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Stay tuned for Part 2 of this delicious chat with Laura Stanfill, where we talk about reading and readers, plus reasons (for writing) and resistance.
We’ll touch, too, on elements of craft such as story starts, dialogue, the balance between scene and narrative, and creating characters that breathe on the page.
In the meantime, if you are so inclined, please consider sharing Creative Passages with your friends, becoming a paid subscriber, or offering a one-time toast to this intimate and illuminating conversation.
Thank you!
Loved this interview. Can’t wait for the 2nd part of it!