Transcript

Jared McCormack

Welcome to MFA Writers, the podcast where we talk to creative writing MFA students about their program, their process, and a piece they're working on. I'm your host, Jared McCormack. Today, I’m super excited to be joined by Meghan Perry for a special debut authors episode. Meghan graduated with an MFA from Emerson College in 2009 and currently directs the Writing Center at St. John's Preparatory School in the Boston area. She’s published stories in Cold Mountain Review, Sycamore Review, The Fourth River, and other publications. Her debut novel, Water Finds a Way, was just published this November by Delphinium Books with an audiobook by Penguin Random House. The novel has received a Kirkus star and been featured in Newsday and Condé Nast as one of the top books of this fall. Thanks for being here.

Meghan Perry

Thank you so much, Jared. I'm so excited to join you today.

Jared McCormack

Yeah, I'm so excited to talk to you. So you've described yourself as a writer who is drawn to the ragged edges of people, places, and dreams. And that is definitely the case in Water Finds a Way, a book that follows several characters who are trying to outrun their past and create some kind of future for themselves under difficult circumstances, as we just heard in that reading. So why do you think you're drawn to those ragged edges and characters? Where does that interest come from?

Meghan Perry

You know, I think it comes from a lot of traveling and specifically just kind of road tripping around the US to places that are a little off the beaten path. Those types of places have always called to me. I mean, give me a ghost town, an abandoned factory, a rugged little Northeastern fishing community that really appeals to my imagination and those are the places I've always loved. Not so much like the huge tourist hotspots that have a million people around them, but the places that feel very lonely and isolated.

Jared McCormack

Have you ever read Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon?

Meghan Perry

I have not.

Jared McCormack

Okay, it's one of our claims to fame. I'm from Columbia, Missouri, and he started his trip from Columbia, Missouri, and you traveled through all of those small towns around the US. I love that book and that reminded me of it. Something about getting off the big highways and getting off the interstates in particular and going through these small towns of America, you start to get a sense of the diverse culture of America and the diverse experiences of the people and the struggles that people go through and how they're different but also connected. I don't know. I feel a sense of that when I read your book.

Meghan Perry

Yes. I think that people think of America sometimes and Americans think they have to go abroad to find a lot of diversity and culture or whatever. And right here in the U S there are so many different pockets, you know, those overlooked places and you can learn so much from that. So that was a big part of my upbringing. My parents tried to show me that. And that's certainly something I try to do with my own children now that they are of traveling age.

Jared McCormack

Yeah. I mean, I was one of those people, I grew up in a tiny town in the middle of Missouri. I didn't really travel much as a kid. And then after I graduated from college, I got a passport for the first time. and I moved to Taiwan. I spent almost a decade traveling around the world. But it was interesting, in traveling abroad, I became more interested in my home country. And now that I'm back, it's like, all I want to do is, you know, go on road trips and travel around the US and see some of these places that I haven't seen here. So it's interesting, sometimes you have to go really far away to realize how interesting it is in your backyard I think.

Meghan Perry

Yeah that's awesome.

Jared McCormack

So what made you particularly interested in the characters in Water Finds a Way? I want to hear you talk about where those characters came from and what it is about them specifically that inspired you.

Meghan Perry

So these characters I was writing about had been around in my head for quite some time. Some of them started off in a series of short stories. I began actually writing back all the way back in MFA. And I came up with them really from the geography itself. I always start with setting as an author. And I think you can't really know a character until you know the geography they're from and everything that is involved and tied to that geography. And so I was interested in a story that explored the experiences of these people who aren't necessarily given a lot of attention in day-to-day American news or politics or what have you. And the idea of someone who just recently came out of prison and is rejoining the world of everyday citizenship really fascinated me. And I think also I really am interested in the idea of being an outsider. In some ways I've always felt a little bit like an outsider myself. I think because I'm an introvert and so a lot of times I feel like an outsider looking in on a lot of different experiences I've had. So that's kind of the approach I took with all of these characters and what it felt to be kind of on the outsides of things, whether that be because one of the characters had been in prison for 20 years and really had been on the outside of society, or whether it's because you one of the characters has a chronic illness, which prevents her from being involved in society in certain ways, or even the people in the novel who just come from very much struggling economic circumstances

Jared McCormack

Yeah, I mean, I come from a town that's very different from the one in this book. You know, I'm like in the middle of a cornfield in Missouri, not on the coast of Maine, but very similar in the sense that, you know, it's like a very working class community. And I'm always struck by just like the feeling that people had in that town, whether it was spoken or unspoken of just feeling a little bit left behind a little bit like, somehow on the outside looking in on... I don't know where the country is going, I guess. And I got a sense of that when I was reading the book, you know, like this, these like working class people who are trying to figure out, well, what comes next? Like, where do we fit in, in this new America, if you will? So that was an interesting thing. You know, you talked about how important setting is to this book and having listened to some of your other interviews, I can tell that like setting is in general, like very important to your writing process. I mean, like I said, this book Water Finds a Way is set in a remote fishing community in down east Maine. It's very beautifully rendered on the page. And you can tell as you're reading it that it's very important to telling the story. It's a huge part of the story. It really feels like the characters and the plot, all of it is very connected to this place. So I'm curious to hear you talk about that a little bit more, like how important the setting was to telling the story and how important it is to your writing process in general.

Meghan Perry

Sure. I think, well, Maine itself, first of all, as a state, is a fascinating place. And there are many Mains. Anyone familiar with Maine knows there's not just one Maine. There's Southern Maine with northern Massachusetts, as it's called, in jest. There's mid-coast, which is becoming much more gentrified. There's down east, which is more remote. The coastline is just so ragged. It's like thousands of miles if you stretched it all out, if you just took all of that and stretched it all out. And then there's northern Maine, central Maine. So there are a lot of different pockets and different cultures, and it's changing pretty rapidly, particularly post pandemic. A lot of people moved out of these metropolitan areas and wanted, you know, the extra elbow room, so to speak. And so that's coming in. But down east appealed to me because, I mean, obviously it's got such beautiful geography. It's got these iconic rocky shorelines. And so people flock up there to experience the warm summer months when it's very pleasant. And then, you know, obviously behind all of that, there's different realities for people who live there. Maine is a very old state. It's got a very aging population is what I mean. And a lot of young people find there aren't a lot of opportunities. So they have to move out of the state or at least move to the cities. And so down east has this loneliness to it. I felt this isolation for people who live there year round and certainly fishing communities face their own number of challenges and lobster fishing itself has changed a little bit with some of the new technologies, but the basic process has kind of remained the same over the years. So it's kind of, it's iconic to many people who think of Maine. They think of lobster fishing, of these solo guys or a couple of guys going out on a boat into the sunrise and catching lobster. But, you know, as with any rural community, Down East struggles with a number of things. One of them is the opioid epidemic. And I talk about that a lot in the sense that Maine is one of the hardest hit states with the opioid crisis. And it's interesting to see how that's affected fishing communities in particular because they're so remote, access to treatment, it's very minimal. And so there's also that rugged culture of I don't want to admit I have a problem. I don't want to seek help. And so that has a ripple effect for everybody in the community. So that was definitely something that was central to writing this novel.

Jared McCormack

Oh yeah, that's to me a big theme in this book, kind of running through it. People with pasts, demons that they're struggling with and trying to come to terms with, and also figuring out how to ask for help and how to reach out to other people and find some way forward through other people. I think the characters in this book are really beautifully written and the relationships are really beautifully written. And they ring really true for me from a small town. I haven't been to Maine, but I still see in these characters people I grew up with, people I know from back home. So that's a testament to your ability to write characters. And you mentioned that a lot of times when you write a story, the characters actually kind of spring up from the setting. Like you start with the setting and then the characters come from that setting. I'm curious to hear you talk about how that looks in practice when you sit down to write something. How do you work through the setting and at what point do the characters start to show up?

Meghan Perry

A lot of the stories and the novels I write are based on places I have visited many times that I have. a I try to get a great deal of familiarity with these places on the ground because I feel that's important to the authenticity. I can certainly do a lot of research and read and all of that, and that's important too. But when I'm in a place, I like to watch people, perhaps to a creepy degree, and I like to listen to people. I like to listen to how they talk, what's playing in the local restaurant, what music are people listening to, that sort of thing. And so as I sit down to write these characters in these settings, I try to channel that atmosphere from these observations I've made. A lot of it, you know, I have to hear the conversations, the dialogues in my head. And I just have to completely immerse myself in that world. And then I begin building and always at the forefront of my mind is how would someone who, let's take Raker Harbor, a fictional town in Down East. If you don't have access to, let's say super great healthcare you're someone like Nora Hayes who has MS, how does that affect your world? How does that affect your day to day existence? Who do you have to rely upon for help? How do you have to be kind of self-sufficient even as you're kind of losing that ability to be self-sufficient? It's really an intense immersion. And it's been so wonderful to hear from people like yourself, but also people, New Englanders say, you know, this sounds like the people from my town. This sounds like what we're going through. This is absolutely something I've witnessed myself. And that's the best compliment you can get really as a writer.

Jared McCormack

Alright, well going off of that idea of starting with setting and from the setting, finding the characters, I was really interested in the way you wrote and talked about the ocean in this story, because to me it almost feels like a character in this story. Obviously it's part of the setting, but it feels like this character is simultaneously providing for and threatening the people in this village who are interacting with it on a daily basis. So how did you think about the role of the ocean when you were writing this story?

Meghan Perry

Well, first of all, I grew up in Maine and Massachusetts. The ocean terrifies me. There is nothing more powerful on this earth than the ocean and its destructive abilities. But also there is when you stand and you look out on the ocean, there is that sense in your soul right that there's something beyond so you get this greater sense of what might be out there and so it's really the ocean giveth and the ocean taketh away in real life and in this novel, Blake the protagonist returning to it, it is really not a human, she's returning to not even really a concrete solid land place so much as that idea of the open water, that open horizon, that possibility. So for Blake, the ocean is possibility. But for some of the characters who've had to make a living on it or who've had to have spouses who make a living on it and then lost their spouse, as in the case of Nora, that ocean is kind of this oppressive being that they've just kind of had to learn to to to live with and be aware of its power that is greater than them and have even fallen victim to it. So I was really interested in the way that the ocean can play so many different roles for different people.

Jared McCormack

You mentioned earlier that this story originally started as a series of short stories before it came to novel. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit. You wrote three stories that took place in this setting, Raker Harbor, and follow some of these same characters. One was titled Another Ocean, and it's published in the Fourth River. Another Changing Water is in Passages North, and the third Offseason is in Sycamore Review. So I really want to hear you talk about those stories and how they became this novel. Did you know when you wrote them that you would eventually turn them into a novel?

Meghan Perry

I knew after I wrote the second one that I wanted to turn it into a novel. The setting itself just kind of wouldn't let me go. And what I found when I was shopping short stories out to literary journals was that the editors were really interested in this setting. and They were kind of asking me, hey, do you have anything else in the setting? I said, oh my gosh, you know, I'm a full time high school English teacher at the time. I don't have anything else. I can't write it fast enough. So I knew, you know, kind of put a pin in that that I wanted to return to this and write a bigger story. I think the way that my brain works and has always worked, um I think in much more novel scale than short story scale and the short story form was something I had to learn both as an undergraduate and then in the MFA. And so this had lived inside me for quite a bit. But those short stories actually focused more around the character who became Leland Savard in the novel. And he, as you know, he's a main character in the novel, but he's not, he's not what I would call the protagonist. And so I made some big shifts away from some of the plot lines from those short stories in creating this novel, but they were certainly the beginnings of it. And they, they really helped to anchor me in that imaginary place in Maine.

Jared McCormack

Tell us a bit about that process though, starting with those short stories. You have these three short stories, editors have said we want more, and you're like, okay, where do I go from here? How do I take what I've got here in these short stories and turn them into a longer narrative? What did that process look like?

Meghan Perry

That process was really quite challenging. Obviously I graduated from MFA in 2009. And to be fair, I, you know, I dabbled in some short stories. I was beginning my career as a high school English teacher. I moved a couple times, we had children, like a lot of life stuff happened and got in the way of really focusing on, on making it into a novel. But for many years, I struggled to write a novel set in Raker Harbor that really had, again, that male protagonist, Leland Savard. And the plot was different. There were different characters, but it just wasn't coming together. And the pacing was a problem. There were a lot of problems with it. And I ended up just having to scrap that. In early 2021, I had to walk away from it. After drafting, probably thousands of pages of material that just wasn't working. And that was devastating. It was really, really hard to do, but I'd gotten to a point where I just knew that if I wanted to move forward and try again, that I had to start fresh. Luckily, I had spent years crafting that setting, crafting some of these characters who I could kind of retool. for a new plot, and um it was a valuable experience. um It's tempting sometimes for me to think of that as kind of, you know, seven or eight wasted years of my life, but it was actually, it was practicing the whole time. I was learning a lot from that, and then when I was ready to go on this one, it came out really, really fast.

Jared McCormack

Well, that's a testament to you. I think, just like persevering through that, because I think that's, you know, it's not an uncommon thing that writers go through. They start working on a book, especially their first book, you know, you don't necessarily know what the ups and downs of the novel writing process are going to be like. I think it's probably really common to get you know, a whole draft out and be like, I know this isn't working, but like, I want so badly to just afford to work. I can't start over, but to be able to listen to that voice and then do it and entrust that the next draft is going to be better. I imagine that was difficult, but did you know when you started that second draft, like, okay, like this, I feel like I'm on the right track now.

Meghan Perry

I absolutely felt like something new and very special was happening. It took bringing in an entirely new character, a new protagonist, and she was the force that drove the entire novel. It was amazing to me how changing the protagonist, just completely transformed the work and suddenly made it workable. So, you know, some of the characters I killed off from prior attempted novels, other ones, I changed their gender, I flipped things around, and it just suddenly, like, I felt liberated to do that. in a way that I felt really constrained for years trying to make this thing work that just wasn't working. And, you know, it's funny, I call that process when you have to scrap it. I tell my students at St. John's, I said, sometimes you just have to go scorched earth. You just have to lay waste so that's something you can grow. and that's what I had to do. And so I experienced that pain firsthand, and I can really, I can relate to students who come in, you know, with an essay or whatever, and they're really reluctant to just stop and start over, but it's so valuable.

Jared McCormack

So much of writing is rewriting and revising but it can be such a hard process. It's interesting to hear that like once you gave yourself permission to just try something new, the whole thing kind of opened up. Um, that's really, it's really exciting to hear and good for, I think listeners to hear that if they're in that same situation, although it might seem like, like you've wasted time writing that first draft, you know, the good stuff will still rise to the top when you work on that next draft. It'll always come back if it's supposed to be in the story.

Meghan Perry

Absolutely.

Jared McCormack

You mentioned that you really prefer writing novels to short stories, but I'm curious to hear you talk about how important it was to kind of master the short story form, if you will, in order to successfully write the novel. Did you find some of those skills were carrying over to the novel writing process?

Meghan Perry

Definitely. I mean, obviously when you're writing short stories, word economy is so important. And I think the first thing, the very first lesson I received in MFA was, you know, good writing starts at the sentence level, like slow down, hold your horses, look at every single sentence you're writing and make sure that every single one deserves to be in there and make sure that everyone is crafted to the best of your ability. I had never paid such attention to language before that. So certainly in the short story, that's very important, but it's equally important in a novel. I mean, readers shouldn't be reading sentences that don't need to be there, in my opinion. And so you learn how to kind of let go of some of your highfalutin ideas of what descriptions need to be like. And that was the most valuable thing I learned from having to write short stories. And then, you know, it also gives you a sense of pacing and that there needs to be a problem and you need to move along the plot. And, you know, every short story needs a problem, every novel needs a problem. And then how you pace the action around that is really, that for me is where the hard work takes place. And, you know, I really struggled sometimes in MFA to finish these short stories on schedule for the next class because my worlds in my head were so much bigger and I had to condense them. And so sometimes what I came up with wasn't always the greatest in class, but I'm really glad I had that experience.

Jared McCormack

All right, so we've talked a little bit about this journey that you've been on since the MFA to this moment when you're putting out your first book. You graduated from Emerson 15 years ago in 2009. And since then, you've been working as an educator, you've published some stories and you've been working on this novel, which just came out to really good reviews. So I want to talk a bit more about that journey and where it all started. So let's go back to that MFA program. What do you remember from your time in the MFA and how did it prepare you to write this book?

Meghan Perry

I did my MFA. I went right from undergraduate into a master's to a degree in education because I knew I always wanted to teach. That was something I definitely wanted to do. Then right out of that program into an MFA because I'd gotten an assistantship at Emerson College so I was really on the fence about doing the MFA but kind of financial things lined up and then that opportunity to continue exploring writing in a serious way I decided okay I'm going to take the plunge and do it. My initial year in MFA, I remember being difficult for me because, well, my very first workshop was with Margo Livesey and there were some very talented students in that class. And there I was, you I felt like I was just like the rookie among these people. And I didn't even think I had the language to talk about writing in the way that they were talking about writing yet. As funny as that may sound. And so I remember feeling really intimidated and shy. And it was really kind of a crash course and learning how to give and take critique. And man, at the time it was tough, but I'm so glad it happened because it really equipped me for not only becoming a better writer, but certainly becoming a better teacher and becoming a better writing coach. So I did the MFA in two years. You could do it in three. I did it in two, mainly because I was anxious to get out and have a real job." um so In retrospect, I wish I'd taken a little more time and slowed down and really appreciated just the opportunity to sit in a room and talk about the craft of writing and explore that. I don't know. I have much more appreciation for it now, 15 years out, than I did when I was there and even a couple years out of the MFA. But I will say, I started to see that bare fruit, I think it was only a month or two after I graduated, where I published my first short story, which I had written while I was in MFA. And that was like a nice little confidence booster. It's like, okay, now I can call myself a published author. I got the short story published. And was not a main story. It was something completely different. But that was a really, I think everybody needs that little, you know, encouragement that someone in the outside world is interested in reading what you're producing.

Jared McCormack

Another thing you mentioned was that while you were in the MFA, you were working and you were actually working in a writing center while you were in the MFA. And now you direct a writing center at the St. John's Preparatory School in the Boston area. So tell us about the experience working in the MFA and how it led to this current position.

Meghan Perry

So I worked at the Emerson College Writing Center, which was a really well-organized and pretty big writing center, I think for the time. um know that writing centers have proliferated, they've been proliferating ever since. One Emerson, at least who I ended up working with a lot, were international students who were using the center. And that really forced me to look at writing through a different lens and the English language through a different lens. And it was really helpful because some of the things you start to take for granted when you've been writing a lot and for a long time are the structure of sentences, the structure of paragraphs. Why do we do the things that we do? And then having to figure out how to explain that to someone not familiar with those things took some time and took a lot of compassion too. I absolutely loved it. I think that you learn a lot about people through their writing and through working one on one with them through their writing and that was something that you know from the MFA and that one on one coaching with students. I went into teaching you know huge classrooms of students in public school and you know you didn't have the luxury of having those kind of more intimate conversations about the writing process and you write whether it's you know even just for an essay for class or whether you're writing a memoir or what have you it's it's making yourself very vulnerable. And I think those conversations are better had one on one. And so when I started at St. John's 10 years ago now, and they mentioned, we really would like you to create this writing center and start this writing center. I was over the moon and I thought, oh my gosh, I had such a great experience at Emerson, I would love to do that. And so I jumped right into that and and even got a postgraduate certificate and in administrating writing centers. One of those exists, believe it or not. It was wonderful to get back into the graduate school space for a little bit and do that. And it has been so rewarding. And I continue to believe even in this day and age of AI where, you know, there's so many other tools emerging now, that one-to-one personal conversation about what it means to write and how difficult and challenging that process can be is just invaluable. And I think it should be available to all students out there.

Jared McCormack

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Okay, so my background is in high school English education. My undergraduate degree was in school English education. I've worked as an English teacher abroad and here in the States. I don't have to tell you, Megan, it's a lot of work. It is a lot of work. So I'm curious to hear you talk about whether it was difficult to manage your time as both an educator and a writer over those 15 years when you were writing short stories and you were trying to write the novel and then struggling to write the novel and then rewriting the novel. How did you manage to do all of that while also teaching English classes?

Meghan Perry

You know it's a struggle. You have to have patience and you have to have faith. By the way, I had neither when I first started out. I'm fully acknowledging that. You know, when I first started teaching English, my gosh, in New Jersey, and it was the title one school and most of the kids actually were first gen or they didn't speak English, that was a full-time occupation. And so carving out time to write short stories on the side that I had to just say, I'm going to have to do it in the summer when I have a break. Like I just had to acknowledge that was a season in my life for being an educator and just kind of picking away at some time for writing. And then, you know, as I became more and more compelled to write a novel, I had to carve out more time for that. But then I had little kids. You're never going to feel like you've got enough time to do it. I think that's something as a writer you just have to accept. You're never going to feel like you've got enough time. Make due with the time that you're given and you have to be okay with they're going to be diversions from projects and maybe embrace those diversions because sometimes they're the renewal that your brain needs when you step away yeah and they can actually be valuable even though you don't think they're going to be valuable to begin with. So I certainly would have loved to have published a book 10 years ago. It didn't happen because I did other things with my life, but I was always practicing.

Jared McCormack

Yeah, well, let's talk about that a little bit more because I think a lot of people go to the MFA with this dream that they will publish their debut book right out of the program and just be like a rocket ship into the publishing industry and to the writer's life. And some people do that, but it's just as common for people to spend years working on getting their first book out like you did. You've described the publishing experience as a long game. So what do you think listeners should know about this process?

Meghan Perry

I think that number one, you have to remember why you're doing it. And hopefully it's the passion for just immersing yourself in the creative process, regardless of what the ultimate outcome is. You have to love it that much. Because if you're just doing it for the end goal, if I want to have a published book in my hand, it may not happen, number one. But number two, I think it's going to feel like an empty victory. you're going to be sacrificing too many things because it takes sacrifice. You do have to give up other things. For me, it was a lot of social life at times to get the book Done and to get the writing done the publishing industry, you know, I didn't to be honest with you I've been out of MFA for at least 10 years when I finished the draft of this book and I had completely forgotten Oh, you don't just you know get an agent right away you got to send out all the queries and you got to find the the right agents and then and Once you get the agent, great, but now you got to go through the submission process to publishers, and then you got to wait for the publishers to get back to you. And my experience was a little unique in the sense that I'd written the book during the pandemic. We started shopping the book out in 2021, so still kind of pandemic-y times, a lot of people not working in the office. And so getting responses from agents and publishers took a long time, probably more, longer than most. And also it felt like everybody and their mother tried to write a novel during the pandemic. So they were all trying to do the same thing. So there was, I was up against this kind of wave, which made it even more difficult and more important to have patience. But you certainly need a thick skin. I think that's another benefit of MFA. You get some of that skin thickening just through critiquing class. Not everything's going to be positive, but that is absolutely what you're going to encounter later on when you're dealing with agents and publishers and editors. And so keep the faith, keep the love of what you do. And if you stop loving it, then it's time to get out whether you've reached the goal or not.

Jared McCormack

All right, well, here we are. 15 years later, your book's out in the world. It's getting really positive reviews. How does it feel?

Meghan Perry

Really surreal. It's surreal. When I was writing this at my little corner desk in a bedroom at my other house, I did not ever truly believe that it was going to be published and out in the world. And I think one of the coolest things to me isn't, you know, oh, it's on Amazon. Oh, it's getting reviews and Goodreads, whatever. My aunt is a librarian. And so she looked up the book on WorldCat or whatever. She's like, Oh, it's in all these libraries, like all over the country and like even in other countries. And that is something I never stopped to think about when I was writing this that, you know, people would be reading this book, you know, in all these different states, even in these little like small town libraries. It's popping up and people are checking it out. And I think that's the coolest thing of all. That's really neat to me.

Jared McCormack

I imagine being an educator makes that even feel a little bit more special.

Meghan Perry

Yeah, I know. It's nerdy, right? It's like, oh, cool. Like someone in Farmington, New Mexico is reading my book right now. No, that's the best. And I think, you know, obviously when it comes to reviews and critics and all of that, that's a slippery slope. You can get addicted to looking at that and it can derail you just from keeping your love of the creative process. So I try not to look at that too much, but the Kirkus star was incredible. I actually had to look up what it was when I got it. Everyone's like, that's so great. That's how long I'd really been out of that space of publishing and serious writing. And so I had to get back in it and reacquaint myself with all this, but certainly very grateful for that. It's very affirming. Again, it's surreal though, you being 15 years out from MFA and having this happen, you have to keep pinching yourself. Yeah, this is what all of this work led up to, and it wasn't immediate.

Jared McCormack

Well, I'm super happy for you and super happy that you took the time to come talk with me today. Okay. So before we go, the last question I'm going to ask. On this podcast, I usually interview MFA students. And the last question I asked them is what is one way in which the MFA experience has been different for better or for worse from their expectations when applying. So for the debut author episodes, I ask a slightly different version of this. What is one way in which the publishing experience has been different, for better or for worse, from your expectations when you first started submitting?

Meghan Perry

I think I always kind of knew this before publishing, but it really hit home when I was actually in the thick of it. Once it gets picked up by a publisher, yes, it's your book, but it's also a bunch of other people's book, and learning to be okay with that and to let go, because once it's out there, once someone else is offering edits and they're designing the book cover and everything else, that's kind of out of your control and you have to let your baby fly. And that's hard. It's hard to let go of something, particularly if you spent years kind of writing in virtual isolation and it's only been yours and you've had control over every little bit of it.

Jared McCormack

Well, we can all only hope to be so lucky to send our baby flying out into the world. I'm so happy that you got to do that. I'm so happy that this book is out there and people are going to get to read it, including high school students and people in their local libraries. It's a great thing to imagine. Thank you so much for taking some time to talk with me. It's been really great getting to know you and hearing about your process writing this book.

Meghan Perry

Thanks so much, Jared, and I wish everybody out there in MFA or beyond MFA the best of luck and to continue pursuing your craft in this crazy world of AI and everything else. Stay strong and keep at it.

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