Issue V: On Supportive Writing Friendships & Communities with New York Times bestselling author KJ Dell’Antonia
On small towns, big dreams, and how to be a rising tide that lifts all boats
Welcome to The Village! I’m Kate – an essayist and mother fascinated by the ways we create community in our lives, inspired by those who do it well, and convinced that thriving communities are what makes for a joyful world.
I first met KJ Dell’Antonia when she led the Motherlode, the New York Times’ predecessor to Well Family, where she took great pride in bringing the joys and struggles of families going through unique circumstances to a wider audience. She brought stories of adoption, education, and more to her New York Times audience, and we connected when I brought several stories from our wider military community her way.
Since the Times, KJ has had the kind of career authors dream of – her debut novel, The Chicken Sisters, was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick (!!!!), she followed it up with the delightful In Her Boots, and her third novel, Playing The Witch Card, is available now for pre-order and comes out this fall. She also runs the successful #AmWriting podcast with her friends and fellow bestselling authors Jessica Lahey and Sarina Bowen, helping authors at all stages of their careers demystify the publishing industry.
She’s still passionate about sharing stories and making the small, personal struggles of families visible to a wider audience – community is a theme that runs through all her work. We spoke here about the ways community shows up in her writing and in her life, and KJ generously shared her thoughts on the one key thing that makes a writing career truly successful. Thanks for being here, KJ!
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
1. All your books have a strong focus on strengthening family across generations, vibrant small-town communities (and the power of bonding through food). I wondered if you could share a bit about the power of community in your own life and family?
I have always been fascinated by how hard it is for people to figure out what's going to make them happy. That goes back to my parenting writing as well. One of the random snippets of information that stuck with me forever is Daniel Kahneman - he did this research [on] if you ask people what they think will make them happy about where they're going to live, they're going to say ‘the view, the location is close to my office, the schools, you know, the house itself.’
But what really makes people happy is the people they live near.
The one choice that you could make around moving, is to move closer to people that you love, but people don't do that. That doesn't seem practical to us Americans. So I'm always sort of fascinated by that resistance to community as the thing that gives us the biggest gift, and I think we often overcome that resistance when we start cooking and eating together. That's a thing we do associate with happiness.
A consistent story in my books is people finding their community through various forms of cooking and that's going to show up in Playing The Witch Card too.
2. How do those experiences influence & shape your characters and your stories?
My folks grew up in a small town, much bigger than the one in The Chicken Sisters, but they're based on each other. Those chicken restaurants exist in a small town in Kansas, only with different names. And [my parents] left because in their generation, that's what you did. They left and then I grew up in medium-sized small cities as opposed to big cities, and then I left for New York.
But even in New York, New Yorkers form communities. There's the community around where you live, there's the people that you see every day whose names you might not know, if you're in a big building, there's your building neighbors. Again, you might not know their names, but they matter to you. You know, the idea of being a regular in a coffee shop is so important to people. And then you also realize that there's almost this loose spiderweb community of people that you know, who go to the same places, even though they don't live near each other. That is probably classist, but it exists. You run into people you know in places you wouldn't expect them to be because of that web of community. And that really interested me.
In the case, of Playing The Witch Card, [main character Flair Hardwicke] wants a limited community. She wants to pick how she's a part of it. You don't always get to pick that!
That actually happens in The Chicken Sisters too, to May, one of the two point-of-view characters. People want to control every aspect of our lives, and realizing that the thing that makes you happiest might not be something that you can turn off and on really fascinates me. In Playing The Witch Card, to fully become a part of both her community and her family, Flair really has to let go of controlling every aspect of that.
If you're lucky, you live in a community where everyone values the community – where it’s shared values of humanity and togetherness and taking care of one another, but not necessarily shared ways of believing [how that should be expressed.] That's, I think, really healthy for us as much as we might not always enjoy it – and that is an undercurrent in my books.
3. You run the successful #AmWriting podcast with author Jessica Lahey, which has now also become a #AmWriting community on craft, productivity, and creativity. What made you want to start the group together?
I wanted to start a podcast because I love podcasts and that is what I do - I love magazines, therefore, I will write for magazines. I love The New York Times, therefore I will write for The New York Times. I love books, therefore I will write books. It’s a magical gift for turning things you love into jobs, which sometimes works out well and sometimes doesn't. I wanted to do a podcast; Jess was game. We sat down and the obvious thing at that time would have been a parenting [podcast] because I was writing the Motherlode and she was working on The Gift of Failure – [well,] she wasn't even working on The Gift of Failure yet, but we were clearly aiming in that direction. We consulted people and they were like, well, this is the obvious thing to do.
And I sat down and I was just like, ‘I don't know that in five years I'm going to want to be talking about parenting every week. What will I want to be talking about every week?’ And the answer was writing.
So it was kind of serendipitous, as was the fact that #AmWriting is alphabetically first in everything. I didn't know that. That's how those little symbols work. So that was lucky. And of course, it's an A on top of that. We started in 2017, I was with the Times, she had not had her viral thing. We had not had book deals. We were really in the trenches of the freelance pitching and the agents quest and all of that sort of thing. If you listen to it, you really grow up with us. It's definitely fun and we try to be really aware of that, as a community, that we span all [stages]. There are people that listen to us that I look up to as places I would like to be in my career, and I also know we have a lot of listeners who are starting in their career, so we try to hit all of it.
4. How have you nurtured its growth? How do you keep it supportive?
We really wanted to give people a place to talk to each other, a place to ask questions that we hadn't answered. It's hard for me to tell someone how to pitch something for the first time anymore, because I can't do that anymore. I am invariably me when I pitch and I come with the baggage of that which is mostly good, but it has some negatives as well. So we wanted people to be able to do that.
We have a very positive, supportive friendship. It's Jess and I, and later we added Sarina Bowen, who's also local to us, and she's an indie romance writer of enormous success. And the three of us have been very successful in different areas. We've done podcasts about being jealous. Would I love to have Jess’ stellar New York Times bestseller sales and records and speaking desirability? Yeah, that's fantastic! Would Sarina trade a couple of her USA Today bestseller things for one New York Times one? Possibly. I always say a rising tide lifts all boats; we have seen that as we grow in the industry. We take people with us and if other people grow, they take us with them, and that's the thing we wanted to translate into community.
The wonderful thing about books is nobody ever said, ‘Oh, I read one romance. I'm done now.’ No, it's not like ‘oh, I read one book about wizards, I don't ever want to read another.’ That's not how it works, right? So if you write a fun witchy book that's going to come out around Halloween, the people that buy those, they want a stack; they don't just want one. I can be super excited to support and share the books of other authors in my genre. And I love that about this business. It's a little harder in the freelancing world but again, you can't write everything. You can't, so sharing editors and being open and trying to help other people work is only going to pay off for you in the long run. And because the three of us have always felt that strongly, I think you probably don't come into our community if you are approaching it in a different way.
5. And lastly, whose work in writing and community-building inspires you?
Virginia Sole-Smith's Burnt Toast. I didn't even know there was an anti-dieting community until we connected. She has this fantastic podcast on her second book, and it's a community - people are talking, people are going back and forth. It's the Substack you dream of. It's really solid.
Lyz Lenz. She makes a living from her Substack, [Men Yell At Me]. It's a really big community and yet it still feels like a community. People talk back and forth to each other. It's really interesting to me because it's very political, but also she's in the Midwest, so her politics and the politics of where she lives don't really match up. She's very constantly butting heads with that. There's a lot of other people and they're finding their ways to live and communities that don't necessarily match their identities really well. She's really great.
And then Dan Blank. He's a connector, so it's not so much that you can go to a community and see people talking back and forth. But if you start following him and you respond to his Instagrams and get his emails and you'll find yourself like, ‘oh, that person he interviewed really is interesting to me. I'm going to follow them.’ He's just a natural connector. It’s a different kind of community, but I love it.
Thank you so much, KJ! Her next book, Playing The Witch Card, is available for pre-order now! What are your favorite writing communities? I’d love to know in the comments below!