 Hello everyone. I am James Milan. Welcome to this episode of Talk of the Town. I am joined today by an author who lives right here in Arlington, Sandra A. Miller, because I've been told there are many, many Sandra Miller writers, has joined us. And we want to talk today about her first novel, which she is in the final stages of the process of publishing. And also her past, you know, her work as a writer over the years. And I'm just delighted to welcome you to our studio here at ACMI. Thank you, James. Great to be here. Thanks for being here. You know, I have to say that our friend, our good friend Tom Formicola, the head of the ACA of Arlington Center for the Arts, pointed you in our direction. And so you reached out and said, hey, I have a book and, you know, maybe you might be interested. And I jumped all over that, as you probably remember. And I'm grateful to Tom because I love to talk about books and I don't get enough chances to do so. So thanks for that as well. Having said that, I actually, I'm not going to start with the book. I'm going to start more by just asking you a little bit about yourself. Your history as a writer, your time in Arlington. Just tell us a little bit about you. All right. So I am a 25 year resident of Arlington. I moved here when I was pregnant with my son, my first child. And I've lived in East Arlington and a little house next to Magnolia playground for those years. And great part of town. It's a great part of town close to the tee. You can hop into Boston. So that's been my writer's haven for those decades that I've raised my children in that house. And while I was, while I was raising my kids, I did all kinds of writing. I, I had a dream of being a novelist. I, as I was pregnant with my son, my first novel that I'd written in an MFA in writing program had just gotten an agent in New York. So I thought, fantastic, right? So I'm going to have the baby and I'm going to have the book. And what's going to happen is my husband's going to stand in the back of the room of bookstores, holding our sleeping baby while I present to the crowd. That is wonderful. That was the dream, right? And guess what? 25 years later, I am publishing my first book, a different book. So, so life takes different. And you no longer can hold that baby in the same way. But I think you should go ahead and prop them up there at your son and your husband and see what you can do with that. That's funny. So what happened? What happened to derail that? Well, as I think most novelists will tell you, the path of publication is never straightforward. And that novel, it got some interest from New York editors, but ultimately, it never landed a home. So I soon had another child, a daughter, and now I've got two children. And I didn't have the space to write fiction as I was raising my kids. I only realized that recently. When I was in it, I thought, I'm not disciplined enough. I'm not good enough. I don't have the story to tell. Why can't I find that? Why can't I do this? And so, of course, I beat myself up when, in fact, I think the issue was there just wasn't room in my head. So I turned to nonfiction and I ended up working for the Globe for years as a correspondent and writing essays for all kinds of publications. A lot of women's publications. I had one of my essays won a contest in Glamour magazine, and it was turned into a short film starring Kerry Washington, Esmeralda, and Sting's wife, was the director. Trudy Styler. Trudy Styler was the director. And so I got to go to this premiere in New York and be on the Today Show. So I had some really great successes in those years, but I didn't have the novel. I also began teaching writing at UMass Lowell, which I still do. So it took the pandemic, summer of 2020. Remember, nobody could go anywhere. You couldn't do anything. No barbecues, no parties. We're all stuck in our homes. And this novel that had seated itself into my consciousness years earlier came to be fully formed like a download. And every morning of that summer of 2020, I wrote a thousand words. And by the end of the summer, I had completed Wednesdays at one. And it felt like a really complete, fully formed novel. I was really pleased with it. And so it really took the space, the quiet of the pandemic and my children were both in college, grownups to really find the space. And three years later, I'm about to publish it. Yeah, that I mean, I want to talk about what happens over those three years, you know, especially when all of this flows out. But actually, I want to just before, and again, yes, it is Wednesdays at one, folks. Okay, we are going to be talking about this at some length. But I do want to actually go back a little bit. And you were saying that for years and years, you worked for the globe and different, right, you know, doing different kinds of articles. I know from what you mentioned to me before we went on air, I know that some of that brought you some of that work for the globe brought you right into the studio. Tell us a little bit about that. Your previous connection with ACMI. Yeah, no, I found a connection to Steve Katzos, who of course did the Steve Katzos show here. I think 250 episodes more than 250 episodes in community media, folks. That is crazy. Yeah, yeah. And he was a great guy. And so I did a nice article for globe West section, I believe it was about Steve, his show, his background, what landed him here. And I got to see a couple of his shows, brought my kids to those shows. Oh, that's great. We had a blast. So that was, yeah, that was several years back and that was my first experience. Right now, we are shooting in our studio and we're tucked into the corner where the house band used to be, I believe, for Steve, the Steve Katzos show. Anyway, we got to turn the studio into a late night variety show kind of space with a live audience and, you know, the couch for Steve to talk to his guests and the bands and all that stuff. It was really a fun time and I know that you got to experience some of that energy that came as well from having a crew of 20 people who were, many of whom were professionals, volunteering their time, et cetera. So it's really one of our great accomplishments here at ACMI, so I couldn't resist. No, of course not. I was got smacked when I came in and my kids loved it and I think I brought them in a couple other times afterwards just to see the show because he had of course the live audience that I guess dad was always there, like came to every show and yeah, it was a spectacle. It was fantastic. Well, to get back to what you were saying about when you first, you know, when the idea of being a novelist, the sense that maybe you could and would be a novelist goes back to right when you started motherhood as well. How about college, et cetera? Did you come out of college and you were intending to write and that's what you started doing right away? Yeah, I went to college as a psychology major because sometimes we come from dysfunctional families and we think, oh, if I become a psychology major, I can fix this all. So that's what I did. And I had, I took my first letter. How'd that go? No, it didn't go well, but it would have been fine except my husband is a psychologist who's inspired this book, which is about a psychologist. And so there's only, we only really need one in the family. So he, me, I had a professor who handed back my first paper in a literary analysis class and she said, you're a good writer. You should be an English major. And I thought, that's all it takes. Okay, one really smart professor seeing you. And that was the course I took. And I left college and I began to work in trade paperback publishing for NAL Penguin, Viking Penguin. And I was an editorial assistant. I was later a literary agent out in Los Angeles. And but really, after I left college, I wasn't as desperate to create a career as I was to escape. I lived what I felt was a somewhat sheltered life. And so after I'd worked in New York and LA, I landed a job in Tokyo. And so I ended up teaching at a sister school of Oberlin University in Tokyo for two years, I think I was 23, 24. And, and that led me to another adventure in Luxembourg. So I spent seven years of my 20s living out of the country. But in that time, that's really when I became a writer, because in the quiet of a culture where you can't necessarily understand the language and you feel separate and other, it can drive you inside. It made me very internally focused. And it really made me allowed me to hear my own thoughts and be very self reflective and thoughtful about things. And I just I filled journals in those years. And soon, those journals turned into short stories and the essays or and that was when I really started to write when I was living out of the country. And everything was an adventure. Everything was worthy of exploring right in my journals, right? And especially you're in your 20s. There's a whole lot of a certain kind of growth that happens once you start in the world. And you're no longer choosing who you can be around. You know, you're going to be, you're going to have to figure out how to get along with the other people and in your workplace or whatever it is that you're doing. I just find that the way that we do things here in the United States, at least is, you know, more or less all the way up through the age of 22. You got it pretty good in terms of, you know, who's paying the bills, probably mom and dad, who's you know, you fall out with this friend. Well, there's five other interesting people over there. And that becomes very different. Once you start making your own way in the world in your 20s. And when you add to that, what you've already said, which is taking yourself off, unmooring yourself, escaping, I think you said. Yeah, no, to go into the complete unknown at 23, a country where I didn't know anybody. I had studied the language, you know, maybe taking a course in New York City. I think that's what I did to prepare. But I was really very ill prepared for what was ahead. I had never taught before. And I was, I was there for three days before I had to teach my first class to 40 Japanese students, a college level class to 40 Japanese students. So it was trial by fire. I made a whole lot of mistakes. But I learned and I grew so much. It was just like, yeah. Yeah, that and and I also do understand and it makes a ton of sense that you would develop even more of a writer's sensibility through that experience. Because as you said, you are isolated in a sense from this culture in which you are at the same time trying to immerse yourself, or it's certainly observing a whole lot of things that are different from anything you've seen before. And you have to figure that out and process it. And if you're naturally a writer, what a great way to do that. Yeah, and think about those times. So those were the late 80s. And we had, we had no internet. We phone calls cost a dollar a minute from Tokyo, right? So 10 minutes to your friends in the States was, you know, $10 you made your investment, right? Major investment. And there were no distractions. It was a really powerful experience to be that isolated. It was very, in many ways, very lonely. I did have friends there and my colleagues, my fellow teachers. But there was a lot of time spent in my Tokyo apartment with my books or my writing. And it was really fruitful to have no distractions at that time. Or you wrote a letter to somebody, those airgrams that took two weeks to get to the person and two weeks back. So so that experience of being not only immersed in the, you know, immersed in the culture, but immersed in my own focus, solitude, silence was a gift that I don't honestly know if I'd become a writer today. I don't know if I'd have the ability to overcome the distractions that really good point. Yeah, really good point. And, and again, you, you, well, let me let me just ask you as an aside and then we will, I promise, talk about your current book. But as an aside, did you write at that time longhand? Did you write with a keyboard of some sort? How did how did that happen? Well, I still have boxes of journals that I wrote in. But at that time, I remember got I got money like professional development funds, and I bought a laptop. And I can't believe this. This is 1989. And I got this NEC, this Japanese laptop company. And it was a laptop and all of the keys were in Japanese. Like, like, I don't even know how I learned to type on it. I honestly don't it was amazing. But it was my first own computer, my first laptop. And I think it even had like a printer in it that it used a special vellum paper. And so I did, I do like to dive from the, you know, the what had been the case forever up until that point, you know, writing writers wrote right, literally in longhand type writers, type writers, right. And then finally, to get to this kind of computer laptop keyboard phase, but then add in the complication of Japanese, you know, keyboard and the Japanese language already is completely unconnectable to English. So yeah, congratulations, man, you went through the fire there for a while, but clearly it paid off. I know and we won't talk much about it because I do want to focus on your current book. But I know this is not the first book as your first novel. But you did also write a memoir several years ago. That process compared to this one, how you just described how this one kind of flowed when it once it happened. Was that the case with your memoir as well? No, not at all. No, it was a very painful process. In fact, right after my mom died. It was a very difficult time for me. And I was trying to sort some things out, including the fact that I had been very disconnected from her. And but it really that time allowed me to focus and focus my writing on the experience of looking back over my life and really considering who I was in my family, my relationship to my mother, my dad died when I was in college and what that meant. And soon the material just started to coalesce into into a narrative. At the same time that my mom was sick, I was actually on a treasure hunt in New York City. I was looking for $10,000 in gold coins that were buried in New York City. It was It's not an urban myth. It's not an urban myth, but it's it's called an armchair treasure hunt. Somebody buries a treasure and then they set it up with clues and you have to figure these very complex clues. And once you figure out where they are, you actually go and you dig up the treasure. So the search for actual gold and the search for my connection to my parents, the metaphorical search came together as two story lines in a memoir that I call Trove, a woman's search for truth and very treasure. And after I finished it, I found a wonderful press out in Long Beach, California, Brown Paper Press, and they loved the book. And they did a wonderful job of publishing. It was a great first experience. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah, good for you. I mean, but again, I was asking in part because I don't want anybody to get the impression that, oh, you just sit down and that everything just flows, right? I mean, there's so many different right, there's so many different experiences that a writer, the same writer will have in writing different books. Yeah. And with memoir, the difference is you, well, not for everybody, but from personal experience with memoir, you're taking a lot of the pain and some of the most emotionally challenging situations in your life. And as you try to put them on the page, you have to remember them with the specificity of detail that you retraumatize yourself. So I've talked to a lot of memoir writers and I teach memoir writing. And I always warn them like you have to be kind to yourself because when you're writing memoir, for example, there's a scene in my memoir about the day my dad died. And how many times did I have to recount that to get the details correct on the page? And it would leave me in tears every time I actually had to go through that scene again over and over hundreds of times if you're writing a book. So the problem with memoir, the challenge with memoir, not the problem is that you're dealing with some very emotional sort of, it can make you very volatile, sensitive and with a novel it's very, every and as you say, it's the specificity that means that you need to return to it in order to get it right. And then each time you do your it's another kind of thing. But the gift of memoir too is that you can you've taken something that might have been not a great experience in your life. And you turn it into art. It becomes something beautiful or meaningful. You've you've made art out of the mess. And that is that is really will certainly agree and many, many other writers. Absolutely. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, you're you're absolutely right about that. I could continue on in that vein for a long time. I'm going to stop so that we can focus on Wednesdays at one. So tell us what kind of novel this is. And how it is that you that this came to be. You said it was seeded a long time ago. But just tell us a little bit genre. Okay. You can describe the novel to whatever degree you'd like. Okay, sure. So it's a literary suspense. And it's the story of a clinical psychologist, Gregory Weber, who's burdened by the guilt of this horrific thing he did as a teenager, a mistake he made that no one else knows about. And no one else who's alive knows about. And so he lives this very enviable life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And he outwardly enviable, but inside he's tormented. And then one Wednesday at one, this woman appears in his therapy office and unscheduled client. And she seems to know things about his past and has this very uncanny knowledge of what happened to Gregory when he was 17 and the situation. And so he becomes really obsessed with figuring out who this woman named Mira is and why she knows these things. And soon the roles reverse and he falls into the client role and she becomes the therapist. Interesting. And so so the central question, the novel is who is Mira and how is she connected to Gregory? Wow. And obviously we will find out by the time we get to the last page, but not until then, or approximately. That sound I mean, it sounds, it sounds, it's got me hooked. I will say that. And I do I was telling you before we started taping that I this is a genre that I just I just love. And so I'm so very glad to know that there's another piece of delight waiting for me in the future. But tell me again. Well, I guess one thing I would like to know is you said that it was it kind of gestated for a long time, right? Was that really around about the fact that as you said before, as a as a as a as a parent raising children in your house and you know, doing all of the it's a very labor intensive enterprise to raise children. Was that what what what meant that it couldn't move forward from wherever it was seated? Or did something else have to happen besides the pandemic actually opening the opportunity in the way that you said, did more did more have to happen for you, perhaps? I think I think more had to happen. I think that the story came to me. The idea came to me when my husband and I were first together before we were married and he's a psychologist and a woman started stalking him listening to our conversations outside our window and then bringing them into therapy and I wasn't interested in telling that story that was too close to home and it became our personal nightmare. But the story that seated in as I said was this idea of what if a therapist who's in control in the therapy role and usually the client is vulnerable. What if one day a client comes in and knows things about the therapist that she shouldn't know something about his past. I didn't even know what she knew in my in my head 28 years ago and I got this idea but I just liked the role reversal that interested me. So I kind of had that idea. I tried to work with it in various ways and I tried to put it into a script. I tried kind of briefly with another novel that just didn't work. It was told from the client's point of view the woman's point of view and in this case during the quiet of the pandemic when I had that space 28 years of just stating Gregory's voice came to me and then I had my entrance into this novel as I was telling it from the therapist's point of view and then the novel made sense to me and it opened to me in a way that it had never before. So is Gregory indeed in fact the narrator. He's yeah he's it's third person point of view but it's through but it is through through his consciousness. Yeah exactly. So it's yeah. That's very cool. So you describe a process which I'm sure any writers out there like oh please you know I want what she had right kind of thing which is it it can't you sat down thousand words each day next day there they were next day there they were. I mean that must have been a wonder in and of itself for you. But you also mentioned three years later you are now you know on the on the cusp of having this published. Well if you had the novel and you felt good about it and you felt like it was complete. Tell us about what happens after that that means that your weight you know that you're three years later and you're just about to get the payoff. Yeah sure I think I'm actually probably on the shorter timeline for traditional publishing. I I took I finished the novel summer 2020 I showed it to my beta readers some friends that we always exchange our work with and then I did a rewrite on it I tightened it I got it ready to send to agents and then I saw that a woman named Zibi Owens of Zibi books. She's a New York publisher. She was she had done a podcast called Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books and Trove she had my memoir on her podcast and she featured it and she really loved the memoir. So I she started a publishing house in the fall of 2021 and I thought I want to be with her she was trying to do it differently really create a community of writers and a really supportive publishing community and traditional publishing. So with traditional royalties and advances. So that's a good it was a fantastic situation and I sent the book to her the manuscript to her and she took it instantly she loved it and so she put it on her she put it into you know her calendar her publishing calendar and that was probably two years later and so now so now about a year and a half. So from that point forward things have gone relatively smoothly very smoothly. Yeah very very quickly. So it's just I mean again for aspiring writers out there or for people who are trying to calibrate their expectations appropriately or something like that. From the point at which you feel and again you've had readers who you trust also give you their feedback etc at the point that you feel like you have a finished work. Yeah. You know what should people like what what what what advice what lessons what what what should people be kind of aware of prepared for etc at that. So if you want to take it through the traditional publishing route you just be prepared for some bumps and I now have an agent but it's very challenging to get an agent. A lot of people are writing a lot of good writers out there. There's a lot of access to writing information and to writing classes of course on the Internet. So I would say to people keep your expectations in line and work your butt off. And if you want a traditionally published novel and you want to hold that book in your hands or pull it off the shelves of any of our bookstores then you are really going to have to commit to that project and if you commit to the project and hold on to the idea that you want this and those two work in tandem the hard work and the belief you can make it happen you can make it happen but call in all your sources work hard get feedback get beta readers don't get discouraged by the rejections you might get a hundred rejections from an agent that is not unusual for people and from agents and then who knows 101 could be your agent I've heard this story so many times so you just have to be strapped in and ready to just kind of keep swimming against that time. Be tenacious if you want it there are a lot of artists out there there are a lot of people with books but what's going to make you set you apart is that you're going to you're not going to quit until you're holding your book in your hands. I was a little like that 25 years later I haven't given up. That's that yeah that's a good testament right there. Okay you know Times Floam always does let me ask you one last question which is okay accomplishment major accomplishment right here. Enjoy it etc. Is there going to be another one? There is. Of course yeah I'm working on it. I'm not quite having the thousand word a day success as I did with this one but I'm also distracted because I have a big launch to prepare for and a lot a book tour and so it's not raising kids to go. I'm not raising kids but I'm going to book tours. So so it's finally kind of my career time full blast so so but I'm still working on another another project. That's great well we will have you in with that one when the time comes. Thank you I hope so. We hope it's not another three years but who knows. I have been speaking with a our local author Sandra A. Miller about I said Sandra and I meant Sandra about her novel Wednesdays at one and it has been a delight. It's been such a pleasure coming in. I really appreciate it. I thank Sandra for her time and you as well for yours. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm James Milan. This is Talk of the Town. We'll see you next time.