“The written word is still and always will be the comfort, pleasure, and grace of my life.” ~~Randy Susan Meyers
Use Your Passion:
How Randy Susan Meyers Makes Her Passions Work
The title, The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone, intrigued me. So did the fact that the story was fiction with a social conscience and a look at the relative innocence of the seventies.
Were there surprises and shocks? Love? Fear? Disbelief? Ramifications? Absolutely. You’ll find them as you read the book and figure out how the author discovered them as you read her answers in the interview below.
As you’ll see at the end of the interview, Randy Susan Meyers is active online. If you have questions about this interview, I’m happy to forward them. Also, a shout out to Koehler Books for publishing this attention-grabbing story.
BLG: What convinced you to become a writer, and how many books have you written at this point?
RSM: Books have always been the center of my life since I began reading, well before kindergarten.
Stories bang around my head and crowd my mind. I’m stuffed with ‘what if’ and ‘why did s/he do that?’ As a child, I made twice-weekly trips to the library. Writers were gods to me, purveyors of that which I needed for sustenance. Food. Shelter. Books. Those were my life’s priorities.
Writing was always my dream—marrying at 19, having my first daughter at 21, and then becoming a single mother at 29 made that dream a bit harder to achieve, as working two jobs and raising my girls were my top priorities. But I launched my first novel at 57, have now released six, co-authored another with M.J. Rose, and independently published a novella.
BLG: What prompted you to tell the stories of the activists and their children in The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone?
RSM: Every book I’ve written steals from my commitment to justice (should anyone commit to injustice ?), but never at the expense of plot and character.
(Is there a more propulsive novel than The Handmaid’s Tale?)
Social justice has played a role in everything I do since childhood—probably because books actually raised me. Early on, I developed a penchant for books rooted in social issues, my early favorites being Karen and The Family Nobody Wanted. Shortly after, I moved on to Jubilee and The Diary of Anne Frank.
Many in the generations of the ‘60s and ‘70s devoted themselves to bettering the world—I wanted to portray the characters behind the tropes with whom we’re familiar.
My particular slant came from being at a neighborhood reunion for those of us who raised our families in Mission Hill, the setting for much of my book. Two friends (who were best friends) talked about starting a ‘children’s commune’ for their kids—and how it didn’t work out very well.
I never interviewed them or spoke to them about that situation afterward—I just took that idea as a ‘what if’ and went from there. The initial idea evolved into a full-blown saga of five couples and their seven children, tracing their journey through communal living, civil rights, the women’s movement, the Vietnam War, and personal tragedies. Most of all, it is a story of mothers, fathers, and children—and how their passions impact all their lives.
BLG: How did you discover the conflicts facing Annabel and Ivy?
RSM: These are the ingredients of uncovering conflicts in all my books:
- Outlining repeatedly until the plot feels intense enough to carry the weight of the story. Planning is one of the most essential parts of my process.
- Dredging up my memories and then transmogrifying them into something far more intense and engaging, while performing the magic of masking my truth while also telling it.
- For Ivy & Annabel, I read as many memoirs as possible, including those about raising children in a commune, growing up in a commune, participating in Freedom Summer, and exploring histories of protest art, among others. For every novel I write, I read 50 to 70 nonfiction books.
- I use beta readers, including my writer’s group, my best friend (who is also a writer), my sister, my husband, and my women’s group, all of whom hold my feet to the fire.
BLG: You’ve built many levels of complexity into the story. Any tips for doing that so effectively?
RSM: The process begins with index cards. Before I begin the outline, I sit with a deck of index cards (in many colors!) and write an idea on each one, sitting there until my head is empty and I have a huge stack of cards.
Some of the cards end up with banalities, but some of them hold gems if I work the idea hard enough. I write out every problem I can think of that is relevant and possible to the story and to the time period I am working on.
For instance, just one moment of cogitation, brings forward multiple issues that are relevant to the decades about which I wrote (Freedom Summer through the social actions in the sixties and seventies, through to the Pandemic.) Arrests, interracial relationships and friendships, KKK, killings, monogamy, fights over house cleaning, birth control, protest marches, Kent State, natural childbirth, breastfeeding, fights over natural food vs Chef Boyardee….
It’s all there for the taking.
From there, I go on to the techniques I use for all my novels.
BLG: How different is your first draft from your final draft?
RSM:
The core of The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone existed from the first: Annabel and Ivy, who they were. The mother-daughter conflict was always the center of the story.
The way I told the story changed in the following ways: The point of view became more intimate when I switched from third person to first person for my characters. I gave the story more breadth in the end. Initially, I was going to end the story at the end of the 70s, but I became so caught up in my cast, that I followed and followed it till I (they) ended up in the Pandemic.
The decision worked for me. The lockdown turned out to be the very place where I could see a culmination of the love the characters all had for each other and a way to tie up as many loose ends of their tragedies and travails as seemed right.
BLG: How did your agent find Koehler Books, and why did they seem like the right company to publish this story?
RSM: My agent and I have always worked as a team. With this novel, I was anxious to bring it out as soon as possible as larger publishers will take as much as fifteen months—with luck—to three years to publish a novel after the contract is signed.
My initial talks with Danielle and John Koehler were fascinating. They seemed so excited about their work and eager to be as transparent as possible. Then, when I spoke to my potential editor—Becky Hilliker— after she read the book, our conversation sealed the deal. She ‘got’ the book, both the familial relationships, the span of over fifty years, from the Sixties to 2020, and the upheaval of that time.
The final decision-maker was that they are a small, nimble company that wanted to get the book out as quickly as possible.
BLG: What’s the most effective publicity and/or marketing tip you can offer writers?
RSM: My first piece of advice is to use your passion. There are so many ways one can use social media, traditional media, and paid professionals (along with the help from your publisher) it can be overwhelming.
I start by following the roads that lead to what I love to do.
Second, if possible, allocate funds to marketing and publicity—just as one does in all businesses.
Research like crazy! If you can afford a publicist and/or marketing person, find a trustworthy and experienced person to work with. I’ve worked with the same company, GetRed PR, through many books.
After AuthorBuzz became unavailable, I conducted research and interviews, eventually finding Elina Vaysben, with whom I clicked, and who had excellent experience.
BLG: You are a prolific writer. Which books are you most proud of and why?
RSM: Ah, isn’t that the which child do you like best query?
Rather than saying I love them all the same (as they are not my children ) I’ll say that each one scratched a different itch (obsession!) for me, thusly:
My first novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, begins with two sisters who witness their father kill their mother. That didn’t happen to me—but my father tried, and my sister and I were there. She opened the door; I stood silent at four years old. Invisibility, abandonment, and neglect ripple through everything I write.
In The Comfort of Lies, three women are bound by one child: the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and the wife whose husband fathered her. I never surrendered or adopted a child, but I knew infidelity—the obsession, the guilt, the uneven forgiveness.
In Accidents of Marriage, I captured the undercurrent of every relationship I knew: how you can tell by a key in the lock, by a shift in the air, whether the night will end in rage or silence.
In The Widow of Wall Street, I wove together the lies I’ve lived through, exploring why people deceive and destroy—my roman à clef on greed and betrayal.
In Waisted, I took my fraught relationship with my body and asked fiction’s question: what if?
And now The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone asks the same: what if I’d given in to all my social justice dreams and self-destructive impulses? In life, I only just stepped back from the edge.
BLG: What else would you like readers to know, and where can we learn more about you?
RSM: Most of all, I’d love people to know that I love my work because most of all, I love reading, books, libraries, and bookstores.
Truly, books (in a Brooklyn Library) saved my life. The written word is still and always will be the comfort, pleasure, and grace of my life.
Anyone wanting more information can find me here:
My website:
Brooklyn Girl Books, Etc. (The Substack where I get all ethical and political)
Pinches of Joy (where I get excited about books, TV, make-up, hair, food, skincare, hair products, etc.!)
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