An Interview With Baltimore Review Editor Lynn Stansbury
by Christa Davis
I sat down with Baltimore Review’s own Lynn Stansbury, who was among the ten debut novelists in this year’s Poets & Writers’ 2023 “Get the Word Out” cohort. The program introduces fiction authors to the nitty-gritty of being published: publicity and marketing.
Lynn’s forthcoming book, Not All Dead Together, depicts a lifetime of Guatemalan history, a meditation on family, heroism, and unlikely friendships in the midst of hostile surroundings.
In this three-part blog series, writers of all levels will learn about the Poets & Writers’ 2023 “Get the Word Out” program. Through Lynn’s candid lens, she offers her own unique perspective about the program, how it works, and why publicity is essential to book publishing.
Not All Dead Together is scheduled for release by Chin Music Press in Fall 2024.
Where are you in your writing journey? Does it matter?
What matters is knowing where we want to go with our writing. A lot of us hope to publish our work, and whether you’re a new writer or an experienced novelist, it’s never too early or too late to learn about the publishing world.
Without revealing too much, what would you say your upcoming book is about?
About taking responsibility. About building family across what are conventionally viewed as unbridgeable gaps of time, culture, history, and experience. Told across the sixty post-World War II years that have seen the US overthrow of Guatemala’s legitimately elected reformist president (reminds you of what?), then the Guatemalan Thirty Years War and the second Mayan genocide, Not All Dead Together chronicles a friendship that grows between two young women and their families, one Guatemalan, one gringa, a bond that survives and matures through thirty years of genocidal civil war and fifteen more of kleptocratic narco-terrorism.
Tell us about any influences or inspirations you had when writing your book.
The way I craft stories—how they start, grow, and birth themselves in my head—are fairly consistent in both my long and short form fiction writing: a scene, a landscape, something happening in that landscape.
But this particular book, more than any of my other novels, grew from a conviction that in my Peace Corps years in Guatemala, I had been privileged to witness genuine heroism, again and again, among some amazing people. A story that kept growing over the years that followed. And that I needed to find a way to tell that story in a way that would honor them but not further endanger them.
What drew you to P&W, and how did you hear about their program?
P&W has posted and curated some of the most useful websites for searching for literary agents, for possible contests, and appropriate journals for short story submissions.
That said, notice of the “Get the Word Out” fellowship turned up in my gmail account at just the right moment and I jumped on it!
Describe your reaction to the news that you were selected for the 2023 fiction cohort.
Mind you, the contract offer on Not All Dead Together had blown me out of the water. So “gobsmacked,” yes, but, being now among the “select” of being a “real” author, I guess I also thought, well, anything’s possible.
Describe the program so far. Are you optimistic about the process and how it aligns with your expectations?
May-Zhee Lim, a top publicist with Penguin Riverside, leads each session. The sessions take alternating forms.
The core program is a series of “workshops” in which May-Zhee leads a discussion—usually framed around but not limited to questions she posts about where we are and how we are thinking about and dealing with our publicity and marketing issues. Through this process, May-Zhee has done a wonderful job of building us into a mutually supportive working group.
The workshops then alternate with seminars featuring a guest presenter. We have had three so far: Nora Alice Demick, a marketing specialist with Penguin Riverside, Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, and Spencer Ruchti, author events manager for Thirds Space Books, the largest independent bookseller in Seattle. The fourth presenter, January 17, will be Miwa Messer, the host of the Barnes & Noble “Poured Over” book review podcast series. The information that we’re getting certainly meets my expectations; the access to the top tiers of the current publishing scene has been awe-inspiring.
Are there any misconceptions about publishing that aspiring writers should know about?
I was surprised by the array of tasks and odd bits of expertise that the writer (like the patient and their family in health care) thought were going to be handled by the professional team but which in fact one must do or at least coordinate oneself. For many of us, the writerly headspace is a solo voyage across a wide and lonely sea. Whereas the experience of actually being published—especially by smaller indie presses, particularly those that will still look at un-agented work—is like herding cats.
Finish this sentence: The future of fiction writing is _______.
As rich and full of possibility as ever. Not least because we humans keep having to discover and relearn the same stuff over and over again. And storytelling is so often how we do that.
Lynn Stansbury is a fiction editor for Baltimore Review and lives in the Seattle, Washington area with her husband. Not All Dead Together, her fifth novel but her first to make it beyond iUniverse, is due in October 2024 by Chin Music Press.
Christa Davis is a graduate student of Professional Writing at Towson University, a Marine Corps veteran, and reads fiction and CNF submissions for Baltimore Review. She enjoys time with family, genealogy, history, and writing nonfiction.