Laura van den Berg: By now we’ve all published, or will soon publish, the paperbacks of our most recent books, which means we’re all around a year out from hardcover publication. If you could go back in time, what would you tell the 2024 version of yourself? 

Katya Apekina: I love this question because it invokes these versions of ourselves talking to one another. The idea of a coherent self is an illusion. I’m always surprised when I stumble on a note or something from my past self. I think I am still too close to Mother Doll coming out to have really useful advice for my previous self, but I will tell her that some stuff will be exciting, and some stuff will be disappointing, and that I’ll get to meet a lot of interesting people–which, when I was writing the book during the isolation of COVID would have been the dream.

Gabriella Burnham: With Wait, I was very nervous about how to talk about Gilda, the mother character who is deported early on in the novel. I worried that most readers wouldn’t want to pick up a book about such a politicized topic, even though I knew it was a topic that needed the emotional nuance that fiction offers. I even suggested we remove mention of the deportation from the copy on the back of the book so as not to dissuade readers (my agent convinced me this was the wrong move). 

In the year since Wait has been published, the situation around ICE in the United States has become increasingly dangerous. There have been several ICE raids on Nantucket, where Wait is set. Conversations around abolishing ICE have resurfaced in the mainstream. I wish I could remind my 2024 self that it’s our job as writers to push the boundaries of what’s considered palatable social discourse. 

Emma Copley Eisenberg: I love all these answers and retweet them and will only add that if I could go back in time to talk to the version of myself before my debut novel Housemates was published, I would tell her to keep it weird, or maybe make it even weirder. Some readers have been delighted and some confused that the first person narrator of the novel is not the main character; she’s talking from the side about two young queer people that she maybe stalks, maybe imagines, maybe…who knows? My only regret, if I have one, is that I could have made this narrator EVEN WEIRDER. Also, I’d tell myself not to schedule more than two book events back to back – you think it will work and it could, but only if you don’t have a body that has needs and might get sick!!

Julia Phillips: Oof, yes to all of this, and an especially emphatic yes to the mention of a body with needs that might get sick. The early-in-2024 version of myself expected this year to be ruled by book and publishing concerns, but it actually ended up being defined by body and medical concerns, so I’d tell my past self that in the midst of all this exciting book stuff, it’s always worth it to care for one’s physical being—to make sure to eat well and sleep well and go to doctors’ appointments and take medicine. It was easier than I realized for me to lose track of those things in the midst of professional fun, stress, and travel.

LVDB: I published the book before State of Paradise, a story collection, in 2020, so of course everything was virtual. I was really excited to be able to travel irl for SOP, but when the moment arrived I found that I was a little uneasy doing front-facing stuff (events, interviews) in a way I hadn’t been before. I’m not sure if there was a little pandemic life hangover or if it was because this particular book contains so much personal material, but there was an internal tension I hadn’t felt before.  I really wanted all my events to be group events, because I love a good party and collaborating with writers I admire, for sure, but also I think I was trying to hide a bit. So don’t hide! would be one thing I’d tell my 2024 self. Also, I had forgotten how much a few weeks on the road can take it out of you. If I could go back in time I would have blocked off more rest in my schedule. 

Priyanka Mattoo: I actually got the exact piece of advice that 2024 me needed from my husband. He told me, just before the publication of my memoir Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, that I was going to get a wave of love for the book, but it probably wouldn’t be in the shape I imagined it would be. That was incredible insight. I think in this wildly unstable publishing climate it can be easy to get caught up in where attention for the book is coming from–for whatever reason it feels so make or break with a debut, like am I going to get this immense avalanche of love and sales, or is my career over before it started–and it reminded me to pay attention to the shape the love was actually taking–the reviews and press were lovely, but notes from readers, notes from awkward far-removed acquaintances who picked up the book and read it, and were touched, in some way, were the crest. The more I paid close attention to the one-on-one human connections I was making, the less I fixated on specific press hits or looking at numbers. 

KA: Based on when our books came out, we were probably all writing them during COVID, right? How do you think the pandemic influenced the books and the writing?

GB: My debut novel, It Is Wood, It Is Stone, published in July 2020, and I think that experience shaped Wait more than writing the book during the pandemic itself (in some ways quarantine was the ideal condition for writing a novel, which is a long, solitary process). 2020 was a period of deep political unrest in this country; many authors were questioning the slow pace of book writing as an effective tool for change, even as readers were turning to books to learn, to make sense of our moment, to fill the time. It was also a very strange year to be marketing a book–most of us felt too ashamed to ask people to pre-order our books when so many were dying from or struggling with COVID. From the book business perspective, I know there was a big push for publishing houses to buy Black and POC authors, but then by the time their books came out years after, the initial enthusiasm flagged. Basically, it was a very contentious and unusual time to navigate the publishing world, especially as a first-time author, and it taught me that ultimately, we cannot predict what will happen when our books enter the world. That period made me appreciate the process of conceiving, writing, and editing a book even more. 

ECE: Yup yup, when I wasn’t watching Love is Blind or collaging during lockdown, I was writing Housemates, and the writing continued into seasons 2 and 3 of the pandemic (2021, 2022). I had started writing the novel in 2018 but writing fiction in my little room while people were out there in the streets dying of COVID or working to save peoples lives put the whole enterprise of what I was trying to do in stark context and not in a good way. What is the point of doing this? I wondered many, many times. So I put that question into the novel; Housemates is maybe most about the question of why make art at all, and if art can save your life. I was writing the novel to actively figure out my answer to that question, and so I gave that question to the narrator and made it her quest to solve over the course of the novel. For a while I couldn’t figure out why the most common response to reading Housemates was people telling me it made them revive some art or craft practice of their own, but when I think about it now I do know – it’s because the book is a twisty argument for the kind of aliveness and the kind of presence making art requires of us. I felt about 50% less dead when I finished writing the novel than I had felt before writing it.

LVDB: I don’t think State of Paradise would exist had the pandemic not happened. The novel takes place in the aftermath of an unnamed sickness that is distinct from Covid (this sickness has a speculative edge) but / also SOP is very much about what I did during the pandemic: return to Florida, where I grew up, and live there, surrounded by my family, for several years. This was a massively difficult time and also ended up being one of the most beautiful, transformative, surprising, and healing periods in my entire life. There was no way to not write about it. But at the start of 2020 I had plans to work on an entirely different book. The pandemic changed the course of my life in a day-to-day sense–as it did for all of us–and also altered the path of my work. I actually found this pretty humbling, as a person who has a lot of plans; all of a sudden I was in the thrall of this unexpected and paradigm-shifting moment in time, as opposed to following the design I’d envisioned for myself. 

JP: So much of what you all are saying here matches up with my experience of this book: the blown-up plans, the scrambled path, the transformed work, the shocking more-alive feeling that came with writing it. Because of the pandemic, I came into this project with so much more desperation and came out of it with so much more joy that I ever imagined was possible before.

KA: I remember writing Mother Doll while I was hiding in the attic from my child who was not in school. I was taking these mediumship classes over zoom, as research for my novel. It was these guided meditations that I was doing in the cramped attic room, and it was an escape. At one point in the pandemic we drove across the country and I took care of my grandfather. I’d visit him in the hospital and he would dictate his memoirs to me into a recorder. He just wanted to talk about his early childhood. He would talk at me for hours, and this feeling of receiving another person’s story was also a big plot point in my book that I was writing at the time. The heaviness of being this type of receptacle. He died and I arranged his funeral, and then we went back to LA and I finished the book. I think there were a lot of books that were written during COVID because people were at home, and writing can be an escape or a coping mechanism.

PM: Like Laura, I don’t know if I’d even have this book if not for the pandemic. I was screenwriting just before, and then the TV/film sales machine abruptly stopped (and then we had the WGA strike). I was home with the kids, and had very little time to write, but still felt the urge to get stuff out, so I wrote a few essays that became op-eds for the NYT, and then a piece that landed in The New Yorker. They were all about my itinerant childhood and my displaced Kashmiri community, and there was a tipping point when I had published about ten in quick succession–they were pouring out of me–that I knew I had a book. I sold it on proposal, via zoom meetings. And man, was I grateful to have a reason to squirrel myself away during the zoom-school years. I’ve blocked most of it out, but not the energy that writing gave me. 

GB: I want to ask about money! Most people, I think, know that when an author publishes a book, they receive a sum of cash for that book (“an advance”). But many people may not know that the amount of money you receive for your advance directly correlates to the marketing budget for your book. If you receive a huge advance, the publishing house will pour more money into making sure your book is a hit. The books that get the most money are positioned to make the most money. On the other hand, if you receive a huge advance, the risk of failing to meet sales goals might be higher. How do you square this with the personal work we do as writers, typing away in a word processor day after day? 

ECE: So much to say!! Basically yes, publishing is capitalism so the more they pay for a book the more they are incentivized to try to make back their investment by pushing that book. I’ve written before about how this system impoverishes readers, as readers are then only going to hear about maybe 20 books a year and these will be the ones that publishers want you to hear about not because they think these books are the “best” but because they think these books will do well as objects under capitalism. This stuff matters, materially and culturally, as I want to live in a world where I hear about and read more books than just the ones deemed profitable. 

But also I know enough to know now that I really can’t control how much my books sell for, how much my ideas or my humanity is valued in the marketplace. I can control how I interact with and talk to readers of my books though – we are living in a moment where authors can talk directly to their audiences in ways that were previously unimaginable. Ideally this kind of direct communication goes hand in hand with in-house marketing efforts that amplify the book on a bigger scale, but I think some of the successes I’m most proud of for this novel came directly from connections I forged with readers independent of my publishing house. I can influence the narrative of what people think my book is about – I’ve done that with Housemates via making original video content about the book, investing effort in a Substack that tells my audience what I want them to know about the book, and the ways I talk about the book at events.

LVDB: I agree that the only solution is to write the things we must write–our obsessions, our terrors, our loves. I worry when students talk about writing to the market, because it’s not a fixed target; it’s always shifting. It also seems like such a narrow lens to be looking at the world through. We have little control over the value the market places on our work, or the moment a book will be published into. But of course knowing this stuff and then living it out in the context of a capitalist system are two very different things. 

I published my first book with a small indie press, for very little money, and I loved a lot about the community at that moment in time–there was little expectation of being profitable. If you sold a thousand copies you were, like, amazing. I did a lot of events at friends’ apartments. I crashed on a lot of couches. I was happy for friends who sold their first books for huge amounts of money, but that level of visibility and the attendant stresses seemed to belong to a different universe. My press didn’t have a marketing department or a publicity team. The additude was very DIY and let’s-try-shit-and-see-what-happens. 

I’m grateful for the support I have now, especially editorially–I am lucky to have worked with two outstanding editors who always pushed my work towards its best self. But I also kind of miss that indie energy. Traditional publishing is at a moment where they recognize a lot of the usual models aren’t working in the way they once did and yet there can be a real reluctance to experiment. There’s a lot of entrenchment. I think it’s useful for writers to understand where we simply have very little control, which can be a helpful form of release, and also to understand where we do have agency. I appreciate the way you’re speaking to the latter in your response, Emma: how we can shape the way our work is described to readers, how we can connect with readers directly. 

KA: I think after you see how things work a little bit from the inside it doesn’t get any less baffling. Why are some books pushed over others? It’s very rarely for artistic reasons. Most journalists don’t even read the books they put on the lists they compile. The books that get hyped, that take off, it seems like a confluence of factors that one can’t control, but also, most of the time, it’s not an accident. That’s why it’s maddening when you’re the writer, because on one hand it feels like it’s outside of your control, but then it also isn’t entirely, and that loop can make you nuts. Of course it’s somewhere in the middle–there are things you can do, but hard to know what, if any impact they will have, but I guess ideally you just do everything you can or want to do and then move on. It is helpful to think in terms of a career rather than about individual books.

PM: As a former Hollywood agent, I need to point out that I find the sales/PR/marketing aspect of publishing excessively confusing–at least Hollywood is super open about how things are marketed and sold. Because I also know a lot of authors who got nice advances and then felt their books were completely ignored? I think we have a system that makes a lot of good product, and is then at an utter loss as to how to sell the crap out of it. From what I can see, marketing spend (for non household-name authors) seems actually to be allocated after the book catches on fire via pure luck. Basically I don’t talk to a lot of authors who are happy with how their books were taken to market, and the joke I make is that yeah Hollywood makes its messes, but book people are supposed to be the smart ones, surely we can figure this out?

GB: I hear that too, Priyanka– even authors with sizable advances end up feeling disappointed in how their books are marketed (and yet, it is still true that an author who gets a six or seven figure advance will receive way more attention than an author who gets a five figure advance). I think this speaks to the consolidation of the market. There are so few places to publicize and market books, and the places that seem to “work” are celebrity book clubs (impossibly thin odds) or going viral on BookTok (also impossibly thin odds, and highly unpredictable). Basically, even a Big Book can hit a limit in terms of publicity channels, and in the end we’re all relying on a big heap of luck. 

JP: This is my favorite subject, Gabi. But, yeah, I don’t know if there is any squaring the two: the arbitrary and capricious capitalist machine on one hand and the art-making we do on our own on the other hand. In this moment of my career, it feels like the only way to exist with these irreconcilable things is to talk as plainly as possible about how they do (and don’t) work, treasure the luck we get, not blame ourselves for the luck we don’t, and keep typing.

LVDB: On that note, I have a follow-up question! It feels like we’re in a moment, in publishing, where the landscape is really shifting. There is a lot less space in terms of review coverage, which has been true for a while, and also the things that would normally supercharge a new book (a glowing NYTBR review, an NPR interview) don’t seem to be impactful as they once were. On the flipside, new doors are opening (as you noted, Emma, writers have more pathways for speaking directly to our audiences). I’m wondering what discoveries you made about connecting with readers: approaches that turned out to be more impactful than you’d anticipated (or vice versa)? Things your publishers were a little reluctant to do that turned out to be really successful? 

KA: I’m so curious what other people will say about this. I am not savvy about this stuff. When strangers write to me about my book I write them back, but it’s always sort of strange–since it’s a one-sided intimacy. But I find it moving to know that what I wrote helped someone or made them feel seen. When I think of the book more as an act of service than some extension of my ego, it makes it easier to do things for the book.

I don’t have an impulse to write a newsletter, to share my thoughts or ideas in that way, though I think it’s such a nice and direct medium, and maybe that could change. For my first book, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, for the book event, we had a drive-in reading–it was very LA–people drove up to this beautiful park on a hill, and we put a radio transmitter in my friend’s jeep, and I did an interview and reading from my car, and people listened in their cars, or from radios, sitting in the park. It was actually pre-covid, but it would have been the perfect social distanced event. 

ECE: Damn, I love the sound of that book event Katya! Oh to be in a park on a hill listening to you read! It’s so true – reviews, even an NYTBR review, do not move the needle anymore because so few people read them, a bummer indeed. I am not trying to say “look on the bright side” because there IS no bright side – I want more carefully considered criticism and more places for people to talk about books rather than less – but I do think that the places that do move the needle now are more democratic and unexpected and that this state of affairs is remaking the industry in some generative and genuinely interesting ways that have the power to disrupt the old model of initial publisher investment (advance) as the sole determinant of a book’s sales. TikTok, Substack, and literary podcasts are the places that can make a difference where I’m seeing the most interesting and serious literary criticism – long posts about a single book, direct to consumer cultural criticism magazines like The Metropolitan Review, and long TikTok or Instagram videos analyzing the structure of a novel. Two things that were unexpectedly impactful were a single video from a wonderful, taste-maker BookTok account (which did not come out of nowhere, but came out of about a year I spent learning and engaging organically with interesting literary booktokers) and being featured on Virginia Sole Smith’s Substack and podcast, Burnt Toast which happened because my book interrogates body size and diet culture and so was a topical fit for that pod. When people come up to me at events and say they learned about my book, it’s almost always from one of those two places. 

JP: Emma, I’m so impressed with your long engagement with BookTok and the different ways you directly engage with your readers! Your description of that one tastemaker video and your appearance on Burnt Toast as “unexpectedly impactful” rings true to me—that some aspect of this landscape is determined by long-term work on the author’s part, which can then wind up in surprising connections and unanticipated results. I was amazed this past year to see how some of the relationships I formed with readers around my debut, five years ago, grew to be newly meaningful with this publication. People I met then, sometimes only once, showed up patient, generous, and invested in my continuing career. It meant the absolute world to me. I didn’t anticipate that connecting with folks in a bookstore five years ago would forge a relationship that would last to the next book (and hopefully beyond!)

PM: If anyone ever figures out the answer to this, let’s clone them and put them in charge of publicity for every book. I truly have no idea what was effective or not! I thought I could figure it all out, but I did not, and trying to make sense of it was making me anxious. So I took a deep breath and thought about how I wanted to celebrate my book, had some lovely DIY-type events in cities where I had a lot of friends, and did a bunch of book clubs and readings, and a couple of festivals. Then I got back to writing–both the next book and my newsletter, which is small by design. Maybe this is a boring answer but it’s the one that keeps me sane. 

GB: Like literally everything, the book media landscape has been remade in large part by algorithms that drive engagement (Substack, Tiktoks, podcasts, Instagram reels etc…) While I do agree it has evened the playing field in some ways and opened up new possibilities, every author now has to decide how much to share about their personal lives for the purpose of selling books. I was kind of stunned when in a review of Wait in NPR, the critic parsed out which aspects of my novel were fiction and which parts were taken from my actual life, all based on an interview I did with my publisher. Even memoirists feel this push–I have several memoirist friends who say, “I wrote everything in the book– why do I have to keep finding new ways to say it to a front-facing camera?” The answer seems to be that your personal life feeds the algorithm (way more than a book cover does), and if the audience connects with you as a person, then they are more likely to buy your book. It’s a mixture of social media voyeurism, a dearth in rigorous book criticism, and perhaps an unintended consequence of the OWNVoices movement (i.e., prove to me you are qualified to write this novel about X group of people by revealing your own personal history and background). That doesn’t totally answer your question Laura, I’m realizing; this is more to piggyback on everyone else’s answers, which are spot-on and I co-sign each one! 

LVDB: Emma, I’m so interested in what you’re saying about how the industry is getting reshaped in some “generative and genuinely interesting ways that have the power to disrupt the old model of initial publisher investment.” It does feel like we’re in the midst of a real shift in terms of how readers find their way to books. It’s exciting to see new spaces and pathways opening up. 

ECE: Totally, and I also hear what Gabi is saying. It’s such a tough double bind. I recently taught a class about “diving into the wreck” of fiction, aka how to embark on a new project when everything in the world screams “who cares?” and how we as writers carve out a space of belief and of possibility. How are you diving back in, into your next project, or into something else creative? Or are you not/what are you doing instead??

LVDB: Truly a question for the ages! At this point in my life there are few things I believe in more than the power of story. And I don’t mean this in a hokey “literature-will-save-us” kind of way (I do not think it will!). Because story is so fundamental to how we understand ourselves and our environment. If our own internal story is fucked, we’re going to be operating at a big deficit. Something will always be a little misaligned. If a nation’s self-narrative is fundamentally dishonest it’s going to be hard for that society to move toward real justice and equity. Stories can reveal the world to us in powerful and important ways, and they can also be dangerous–so many people are out there weaving stories that warp reality for their own profit. I think it’s the artist’s job to do the opposite, to say something true. That is a kind of foundational thing I come back to. I am nearly always working on a story of some kind. It’s how I process being alive. 

KA: It seems like a question of faith. For me writing has required a lot of faith and what at times felt like magical thinking. Will this all cohere in the end into something? And then, after that, will I be able to shepherd it out into the world? If you start thinking about it too much, it can feel hopeless and discouraging. Better not to look down, to keep moving forward. When everything DOES cohere, and the novel clicks into place, it’s like a very satisfying sensation I feel physically. I don’t think too much about “who cares” as long as I care. I’m usually writing to understand something, a behavior or way of seeing the world that is different from my own. It’s driven by a curiosity, and requires a presence or empathy that feels like some sort of religious fervor? I don’t know actually, since I have never had a religious fervor, it’s just what I imagine it would be like–because it does feel like I am given access to something divine, and it’s hard to find that space, that portal or whatever you want to call it, but when you are in it, and it is carrying you along somewhere, it feels amazing and suddenly things feel alive and pulsing with meaning. All of this is great, but sometimes it is too great, and it takes me too far afield of my life, and I find it hard to toggle back and forth, to be present in the actual world. I don’t know, I’m making it all sound very woo. I started another book, but I am not working on it currently, because I am ghostwriting something else to make money.

JP: It is very woo! Art making is magic! Creating something that wasn’t there before—connecting to something greater than, outside of, beyond ourselves! I agree wholeheartedly, Katya, that it’s not necessarily meaningful to me whether someone else thinks this activity is a sensible or meaningful or worthwhile way to spend my time, whether someone else cares. I care. I’m deep in another manuscript and it’s thrilling to me. Creative work makes me feel human and alive.

PM: Maybe it’s because I came to writing late, and was so eager to get here, but I start a new project the second I hand one in. I just handed in my next book, am wrapping up a screenwriting thing, and then I have a proposal for a third book I need to pull together. But also, the process of diving into another project is wildly different for me as a nonfiction writer, because I’m not world-building and harnessing my imagination to craft people out of thin air. A new project starts with observing, thinking, reporting in detail on the things I see/read around me, and a book-shaped narrative comes from patterns and connections I make while I’m engaging in daily life. I didn’t exactly set out to write about myself, I like to write about the human experience, and I’m the closest human I can investigate without being rude. I used to worry that focusing on memoir and personal essay would reveal me to be indulgent and ridiculous, but then I saw that the more specific I could get about my life and feelings, the more it opened up conversations with people who were feeling the same. I was a profoundly lonely child, and this has been the remedy. 

And I, too, fall into the pit of “what is the point,” but if the goal of art is human connection, and that’s what we most need in this moment, then… the work is the point. When I’m flailing around about the state of things, I give myself the time off I need to tend to my family and myself. But I find, more weeks than not, that I am itchy to come back to writing, even just as a way to process everything that’s going on. And then of course, there’s the spite. Maybe it was because I didn’t get to be a writer for so long (I was agenting and producing until my late 30s), but I have a backlog of things I’m dying to write, and I’m not letting the end of the world stop me. 

GB: If we as a people have learned anything in the last, I don’t know, 100 years, it’s that, to change, we need a movement built across disciplines and styles, and art is a central part of that constellation. My “who cares?” comes more from the story itself and less from the act of writing, which I gave up apologizing for a long time ago! I’m getting better and better at sharpening my instinct around which are stories worth telling and which aren’t. I totally agree with what you said, Laura, about how stories are used to mystify and obscure reality (let’s look at the American Dream mythology, for example), and so it’s especially important to tell stories that are specific and true, as Priyanka said. It may be that novels are not always the right form for the moment, and I’m trying to get back into journalism for that reason. But, novels are what I love to read and write most, they make me happy, and that’s important too. 

ECE: I recently went to a talk where a very smart older woman writer listening carefully to the excellent answer of her conversation partner and then when the attention turned to her, she said “Yes, it’s that.” I have nothing to add. Yes. It’s all that you have said!

JP: Let’s try to project ourselves forward: as we leave the hullabaloo of this particular publication period behind, anything you want to tell the 2026 version of yourself? What would you like to say to the person you might become a year from now?

LVDB: I’m working on a novel called Ring of Night that’s tentatively scheduled for 2027, so by next year I’ll be sliding back into the pre-publication gear (lol what). I’d like to encourage my 2026 self to boldly try new things, with the understanding that deciding something is not for me doesn’t mean I failed. It was just an experiment! Also: I normally have a sequence of books I’d like to write in my mind, but I don’t know what my next project is beyond Ring. I’d like for my 2026 self to see this open space as a beautiful quiet field to roam around in, trusting that the next project will emerge in its own time. 

KA: I love that, Laura. A beautiful quiet field. I hope to be wandering in it soon too. I guess that’s what I would tell my 2026 self–to remind her to roam around and think and be less reactive.

ECE: (Un)fortunately I am already back in pre-publication gear as you say, Laura, since my next book of fiction, Fat Swim, will pub in April 2026. I feel (at this moment! Ask me in six months!) strangely calm this time. I never thought I’d get to write one book, let alone three. All the systems that once gave us feedback on if our book is good, if it “succeeded”, have crumbled (see above) so I feel this time that I am publishing a book into a kind of open clearing. The clearing has weird blue-ish grass and trees you don’t recognize and is filled with fog and no one can see anything. So what I would tell my 2026 self is to do a little dance in that clearing. Dance dance dance, because no one can see you anyway. 

PM: I would like to remind myself to slow down. I always think I’m going to learn to do this without reminders, and then I get overwhelmed or frazzled, short with the family, puzzled about my work, wondering why things aren’t working or why the world is frustrating me so much, and I wish there were a more complicated solution than just take a breath and slow my brain and body down, times infinity. I hope you’re slowing down, future me! Faster is never the answer! 

And also that cliche of—- what is it? The teen version of me would freak out, seeing what dreams I’ve achieved? I try to have some perspective when I’m disappointed in my work life. Teen me was pre-med, and pretty miserable about it. We’ve come a long way, and we have to remember to enjoy it. 

GB: Yes to slowing down, Priyanka. At the end of 2024, I was churning out a new novel at the speed of light. Some of that energy was genuine enthusiasm for the new project, but I think most was pent up drive from the book publication year. I didn’t want to be talking about my books anymore; I wanted to be making them. When 2025 hit, my energy came to a grinding halt. I had thought I’d have a new draft by the summer! Lol! Not even close. And guess what? That’s not only OK, it’s totally necessary. The book will be better if I take my time, let it develop. Remember that, 2026 self. It is OK if the book isn’t where you thought it would be. You’ll be busy reading Laura and Emma’s new books anyway!

Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next two novels, State of Paradise and Ring of Night, are forthcoming from FSG in 2024 and 2026.

Katya Apekina

Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, LitHub and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She has published stories in various literary magazines and translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film “New Orleans, Mon Amour,” which premiered at SXSW in 2008. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Boston, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and dog.

Gabriella Burnham

Gabriella Burnham is the author of the novels Wait, which was longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and was named a Vulture best book of the year, and It Is Wood, It Is Stone, which was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Publishers Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. Burnham holds an MFA in creative writing from St. Joseph’s College and has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, where she was named a Harris Center Fellow. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and the Verge. She and her partner live in Brooklyn, NY with two rescue cats, Galleta and Franz.

Julia Phillips

Julia Phillips is the bestselling author of the novel Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Priyanka Mattoo

Priyanka was formerly a talent agent at UTA and WME, as well as Jack Black’s partner at their production company, Electric Dynamite. Priyanka co-founded EARIOS, the women-led podcast network, and co-hosted its critically-acclaimed beauty/wellness podcast, Foxy Browns.

Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture, and The Hairpin, and her film work in festivals from Sundance to Cannes. She was raised in India, England, and Saudi Arabia before moving to the U.S. in high school, and holds degrees in Italian and Law from the University of Michigan.

Priyanka is the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, and her piece How to Extract a Mother’s Rogan Josh Recipe Over Zoom was noted in Best American Food Writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.