Flashback: Being Genre Flexible with Catherine Newman

#AmWriting

Hi! Jess here. I just finished Catherine Newman’s new novel Sandwich, and I’m feeling a lot of feelings. I expected Sandwich to be great because I love everything Catherine Newman writes, but it was a balm for a wound I did not realize I was nursing.
That’s what I love about books. Our feelings about them are highly personal and subjective. Some of my favorite books possess little literary merit but have found a place on my list of essential re-reads based on their emotional, temporal, or geographical entanglements.
Sandwich is a town on Cape Cod, where the bicep would be if the Cape were to let up on tricep day. A big part of my childhood was spent in a lovely house on Corn Hill in Truro, the second to last town on the very tip of the arm, where the Cape would wear her watch if she cared about the time.
When I was very small, my parents rented with friends, but when their best friend, Richard, bought our favorite of the hilltop houses, it became our second home, the place where my most visceral, cherished, rose-tinged memories were formed. The pine floors were soft under my feet, the sound of the bayside waves constant and gentle, and the light of the morning sun in the front bedroom remains my favorite filter.
When the house burned in the eighties, we all wept as if a family member had died. My father oversaw its reconstruction down to the perfect placement of the toilet. In a house bursting with actors, musicians and other sorts of wonderfully loud and dramatic guests, it was the only place one could be alone to lean on the windowsill looking out at Provincetown, down at the rock that emerged at low tide, and the cute boy from the cottage two doors over.
Richard died in 1992 and he took the magic of that house with him. We tried, we really did. We agreed to think of it as a new place, a future place, but our last gasp visit ended in an explosive family fight that served as final punctuation on that chapter of our lives.
Cape Cod has changed since the seventies and eighties for everyone, of course. It’s fancier, more curated. Less wild and dangerous, more pruned and planned. Everyone knows where the hidden freshwater pond is, and they are all there, all the time.
I mourn the loss of what Cape Cod was to me, but Catherine Newman brought it back for me while I was immersed in her words, and for that, I am grateful. Her novel bears little resemblance to my lived experiences, and yet it evoked moments and images that resonated deep in my body.
That’s what great books do for us. They help us feel things we thought we’d lost. They describe the things we lived and how they felt.
Read Sandwich. It will likely be something completely different for you than it was for me, but it will be something beautiful, nevertheless.
And with that, here’s our episode with Catherine Newman about genre-hopping and writing all the things.
“We’ll be tending our wounds. And we’ll be as young and as whole as we’re ever going to be.” - Catherine Newman, Sandwich

#AmReading

KJ: Henna Artist by Alka Joshi
Recipes for a Beautiful Life by Rebecca Barry
Jess: Sure Shot by Sarina Bowen
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Missing You by Harlan Coben
Catherine: Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Sea Wife by Amity Gaige
The Chicken Sisters by KJ Dell’Antonia
Original shownotes:

Why stick to any one genre? Our guest this week is Catherine Newman: memoirist, middle grade novelist, etiquette columnist and now the author of How to Be a Person: 65 Highly Useful, Super-Important Things to Learn Before You’re Grown-Up. While she’s at it, she writes a cooking blog, co-authored a book on crafts for kids and edits ChopChop, a kids cooking magazine. And she pens frequent funny essays for everything from O to the New York Times to the Cup of Jo website. In other words, she’s putting a pastiche of writing together and making it work with an insouciant disregard for any and all advice about self-branding or owning an niche or sticking to one topic or identity.
In fact, I’d argue that “insouciant disregard” might just BE her brand.
This episode also includes the immortal words “I’ve never had to kill anything during the podcast before,” uttered by Jess—so that’s a reason to listen right there. But there are plenty of others—this is a real nitty gritty episode on building a career and getting things done.
Are you a “sticker”?
Regular listeners know that whenever we meet our writing goals around here, we text each other one word: STICKER. (and then we add a cute sticker to our calendar, because we’re fun like that).
We call supporters of the #AmWriting podcast “stickers” too—and while our regular podcasts and shownotes go out to all of our listeners, we have created a few things just for stickers. First, there’s the Summer Blueprint for a Book Sprint—10 weeks dedicated to working with coaches and a community to figure out how to turn your next idea—or your struggling draft—into the book you want to write. You can join it anytime (the how-to is below).
Stickers can also submit the first page of their WIP to the Booklab First Pages podcast, where we might choose it to discuss, review and offer ideas for persuading agents, editors and readers that they want to turn that page and see what happens next. (Find the link to submit a first page HERE.)
I’m a sticker! Give it all to me now.
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