Book Journey

What’s it like to become a debut author at seventy-one? Pretty exhilarating! I had a fantastic time speaking to our 2024 alum, Marianne Lonsdale, about the journey to publish her novel When the Road Curves (Sibylline Press, June 2026). Marianne’s journey started a while back—when she was a new mother at forty-one, she started writing personal essays, sharing with a small group of writers. Little b...

I have been a fan of Martha Conway’s writing for years. We first met at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference in 2014, when I read the opening pages of what would become her novel, The Underground River. She had met with me for a consultation and I ended up editing her book before her agent submitted it to publishing houses—it was acquired by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, the imprint...

When Lina Patton finished college, she did what every responsible adult (who secretly wants to be a writer) should do: she went into advertising to make money. For years, she fought the idea of being a writer—it was not the smart, organized, Type-A thing to do. But when she applied to the George Mason MFA program and got in, and then to the 2018 Northern California Writers’ Retreat and also got in...

When Cheri Radke joined us for our first ever Quail Retreat this past fall, she was already gearing up for the publication of her debut novel, An Accident of Dragons , which publishes April 28th from Erewhon Books, and imprint of Kensington. On the Book Journey podcast, Cheri and I talk about what the writing process was like for her and how she knew THIS was the novel she was going to query (unli...

Sometimes, your third novel is your debut. I met Caro Claire Burke in 2017 when she was fresh out of college, taking her writing seriously for the first time. She was dabbling in fiction, playing around with pages that would become her first novel, a book which I edited in 2018. Caro attended our retreat in 2017 and 2018, and received her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars after that. Caro’s jou...

This month, I spoke to our 2025 alum, Pamela Pan, about her writing journey--from her newly published poetry to her novel currently out on submission! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit norcalwritersretreat.substack.com

I got a chance to speak to our 2019 alum, Joanne Morgyn White, who writes at J. Morgyn White, and was so impressed by how prolific and tenacious she is! We talked about the many books she’s written (17!) and how after signing with an agent and going out on submission, she decided to self-publish. Fans of Dungeons & Dragons as well as Magic: The Gathering, will be particularly interested in Joanne’...

Sometimes novels are twenty years in the making. For our 2025 alum Elizabeth Kemp, something she witnessed on a cruise decades ago needled in her memory and after years of scribbling ideas on receipts, she sat down to write her novel during the pandemic. Writing can be like that—the writer as observer, taking in the world and seeing the anomalies, wanting to explain them, or explore them! I was lu...

The publishing world is small and in the same way that writers rely on word-of-mouth for their book recommendations to pass from one reader to the next, so does our retreat. So I’m going to tell you a little story about that. Alissa Lee attended Northern California Writers’ Retreat in 2023, the first time we were back in person after a nearly-three-year-pandemic-induced hiatus. Alissa heard about...

In 2019, we were so lucky to have Aja Gabel join us for Northern California Writers’ Retreat! Pre-pandemic, we were located in the Santa Cruz mountains, and Aja and her Literary Agent, Andrea Morrison from Writers House, were both able to join us for four nights and five days in the redwoods. Aja’s debut novel, The Ensemble, had published the previous year and I’d gotten to go to her reading at Bo...

I really like knowing my neighbors, and this particular neighbor I met in 2016. Alka and I share a fence line, and in May, I can pick the most delicious plums from her tree, which overhangs into our garden. I’ve been fortunate to watch Alka Joshi go from writer to published author—four times over! Alka’s debut novel The Henna Artist was published in a bleak moment: March 2020. But she made the mos...

Enjoy the conversation with our 2020 Author-in-Residence, Jasmine Guillory ! Jasmine is a New York Times bestselling author of nine novels including The Wedding Date , the Reese's Book Club selection The Proposal , and Flirting Lessons . Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal , Cosmopolitan , Bon Appetit , and Time , and she is a frequent book contributor on The Today Show. Northern Cali...