This Week We Talk To Amazing Author Mindy McGinnis! Asking Her About All Kinds Of Things From What It Takes To Get A Book Published To Her Thoughts On Some Of Her Books Being Banned And Why. But We Cover So Many Subjects In This One It Was Very Fun! (We Talk A lot About Her Books "Heroine" & "Be Not Far From Me" We Highly Recommend Checking Those Out And After Reading Those You Will Get The Most Out Of This Episode.) - Love, You. Enjoy, Like, Comment And Subscribe!
Unofficial Book Club Podcast - I Write The Books I Want To Read →
In this episode author Mindy McGinnis joins me again to discuss her relationship to reading and all of her favorite books!
Unofficial Book Club Podcast - As Women & Girls There's So Much We're Not Allowed To Be →
In this episode author Mindy McGinnis joins me to discuss her dark thrillers The Female of the Species, The Initial Insult and The Last Laugh along with all her other amazing books. Mindy talks all things writing and the stories she creates!
Mississippi Book Festival Young Adult Panel
In these coming-of-age stories, YA authors examine the mysteries of mental health, the importance of personal identity, and the universality of feeling out of place in a sometimes hostile world.
Sami Thomason-Fyke (moderator)
Mindy McGinnis – A Long Stretch of Bad Days
Jeffrey Dale Lofton – Red Clay Suzie
Mariama J. Lockington – Forever Is Now
Remember Reading With Veronica Roth - When Heroines, Not Heroes, Tell the Story
Fictional dystopias don’t create fear as much as they validate it. And isn’t that what we want as young people and even later as adults? To be validated, whether in our fears, our pain, or our happiness? Young Adult books let us explore, without the threat of rejection, what we most wish to understand or even accept, ourselves.
In this episode, we explore a new era of female protagonists and the dystopian world in which they exist. Authors Veronica Roth and Mindy McGinnis create stories that challenge the conventional role of young female characters in YA literature and set forth to expose how heroines see the world.
Podcast: Beyond the Shelf with Orrville Public Library
This month is a gathering of Thriller titles from across the literary world. Jenny and Dawn discuss classic thriller and mystery books and favorite shows. We are pleased to share a conversation with young adult author Mindy McGinnis who has written a number of titles in the thriller genre as well as historical fiction and fantasy.
Page Count Podcast Live: Turning Points in a Writing Career
This episode was recorded before a live audience at the 2023 Ohioana Book Festival at the Columbus Metropolitan Library on April 22, 2023. A panel of five authors discuss turning points in their writing careers—the good, the bad, the ugly, and the existentially fraught. This conversation covers everything from rejection to reader reactions, imposter syndrome, awards, inspiration, validation, and more.
Featured authors include:
Mindy McGinnis, author of the YA mystery A Long Stretch of Bad Days
Ric Sheffield, author of the memoir We Got By: A Black Family’s Journey in the Heartland
Judith Turner-Yamamoto, author of the novel Loving the Dead and Gone
Andrea Wang, author of the picture books Watercress and Luli and the Language of Tea
Felicia Zamora, author of the poetry collection I Always Carry My Bones
Mindy McGinnis Event Interview
This was one of my favorite book talks that I have been to! It was so much fun, and the Pizza was delish! And Cover to Cover. OMG, it was soo cute and unique. I will definitely be back.
Cover to Cover Children's Books Address: 2116 Arlington Ave, Columbus, OH 43221
Mindy’s new book! A long stretch of Bad Days: https://a.co/d/dx0yzp7
Follow me on Instagram @aditipyakurel!
Mindy McGinnis, Margaret Rogerson, MJ Kuhn on What's Going On Dayton NBC 24
More than 20 authors will be on the show floor at Rossford Junior/Senior High School for the Northwest Ohio Teen Book Festival.
Just before the start of the festival, we brought in a few more of the guest authors to highlight their latest work:
"Among Thieves" and "Thick as Thieves" by MJ Kuhn
"Vespertine" by Margaret Rogerson
"A Long Stretch of Bad Days" by Mindy McGinnis
Authors, experts and avid readers will gather at Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. for a day filled with story development discussions, slam poetry, board games and book giveaways.
Q&A with Mindy McGinnis – A Long Stretch of Bad Days
By Fiona Stephens
We are thrilled to welcome Mindy McGinnis to The Reading Corner to talk about her hotly anticipated new release A Long Stretch of Bad Days, out on 14th March 2023.
Lydia Chass doesn’t mind living in a small town; she just doesn’t want to die in one. A lifetime of hard work has put her on track to attend a prestigious journalism program and leave Henley behind—until a school error leaves her a credit short of graduating. Undeterred, Lydia has a plan to earn that credit: transform her listener-friendly local history podcast into a truth-telling exposé. She’ll investigate the Long Stretch of Bad Days: a week when Henley was hit by a tornado and a flash food as well as its first—and only—murder, which remains unsolved.
But Lydia needs help to bring grit to the show. Bristal Jamison has a bad reputation and a foul mouth, but she also needs a credit to graduate. The unexpected partnership brings together the Chass family—a pillar of the community—and the rough-and-tumble Jamisons, with Bristal hoping to be the first in her family to graduate. Together, they dig into the town’s worst week, determined to solve the murder.
Their investigation unearths buried secrets: a hidden town brothel, lost family treasure, and a teen girl who disappeared. But the past is never far, and some don’t want it to see the light. As threats escalate, the girls have to uncover the truth before the dark history of Henley catches up with them.
Hi Mindy- firstly, it was a pleasure to get my hands on your new book. I loved it. It was a mysterious, small-town thriller that bubbled with humour throughout. To begin with, please tell our readers a little about yourself and your work.
It might be obvious, but I am a small-town girl. I grew up – and still live in – a town in Ohio that graduates about 65 kids a year. We are tiny and tight knit, and I can’t imagine living any other way. All of my books reflect small town life, while illustrating that all problems are human problems, that cross boundaries.
The real soul of this book is centred on our two protagonists- Lydia Chass, who is the upstanding, respectable cornerstone of the community with an unblemished family legacy. She has been ruthlessly focussed on her means of escaping Henley via the Ivy League. Whilst Bristal Jamison is the girl from the other side of the tracks with a fondness for cussing and vaping, who has little to no expectation placed on her. It is a case of opposites attracting (without the romance). How would you describe Lydia and Bristal’s relationship?
They really are opposites, right down to their bloodlines. In a small town, your last name means a lot, and people attach generational meaning to it. Lydia has grown up with a certain expectation, while Bristal has grown up with virtually none. Lydia wants to escape by being admitted to an Ivy League school; Bristal wants to be the first person in her family to ever graduate high school. But they are both goal-oriented, determined females who have zero patience for their gender being identified as a weakness. It’s that common strain of grit that unites them, eventually.
I found their burgeoning friendship touching and authentic. Each has something the other lacks. The excitement, the vulnerability, the friction, the realizations. Lydia, at times, can be a very difficult character to warm to but we see her especially evolve and mature by the end of the book. What do you think they each learn from the other? Was there a character you leant to more as you were writing? Do you identify more with Lydia or Bristal?
Oh, if I had to pick, I’m Bristal, all the way. I definitely grew up with some of the expectations and outer shell that Lydia deals with, but all of my internal monologue was Bristal. An interesting thing about Lydia is that I had her pegged as a certain way in my head, but when I started writing her, she was angry. Her voice kept coming through with this aggression I hadn’t expected—she just doesn’t show it to the outside world. It made her so much more interesting as a character, having access to her internality. Whereas for Bristal, I didn’t need chapters from her POV, because she says exactly what she is thinking and has no concern whatsoever of how she is received or what people think of her.
When writing a cold case whodunit with many interweaving layers, what is your writing process? Is there a board with lots of red string tied to different characters? Do you work backwards from the reveal?
No, I’m an absolute non plotter. I knew who the guilty party was, but I had no idea how the girls were going to figure it out. I let the story evolve as I write, and I love that freedom. It maintains an organic feel, and also can take me by surprise at times as well, which is always fun, as a writer.
I must admit, I saw the word ‘tornado’ in the synopsis and was compelled to read this. There is something captivating about their iconography in film and literature. A tornado springs up in ‘A Wizard of Oz’ to transport Dorothy to a fantastical world far removed from her mundanity. Or they show up in movies like ‘Twister’ for the determined scientists to chase down answers and solutions. But that is not to trivialize the very real danger they pose. Coming from the UK, we don’t really see these absolutely devastating phenomena in our lives. The use of the tornado immediately rooted this in rural America. ‘Destruction is one thing…But this is different. This is my hometown…’. When Bailey Foxglove says the townsfolk use things like the church spire as signposts to navigate the town but they can’t do that when the church spire is no longer there. This felt very real and personal. Why did you choose Henley to set your novel in? Why did you include natural disasters as a backdrop? As catalysts?
For a very real, very simple reason. My own hometown was utterly destroyed by a tornado in 1981. Everyone in our town has a tornado story. Generationally, we can place who was alive “before” and “after” by how they describe the architecture, or the names of certain stores or landmarks—because the town changed completely as a result. It’s a narrative that comes up repeatedly, and is simply referred to as “when the tornado came through.” I was alive for the tornado, but only a toddler. I do have a recollection of fear, and feeling my parents’ fear, and suddenly realizing that something was very, very wrong if they were scared. “The tornado” is something that has just been an ever present story in my life, and is a defining one for most people around here.
This story is partly about teenage girls coming to terms with their own truths written for teenage people. It is pitched as a YA novel, how does this inform the choices you make in the book as opposed to an adult novel? What would you like parents to know about this book if choosing this for their child?
I don’t make any concessions. I write about teenagers, but I write for everyone. I write real people in real situations, so they talk about real things and they use real language. If I wrote an adult novel, I wouldn’t change my approach. Here in the US, we’re currently under a storm of censorship that a few of my titles have been drawn into. I’ve never altered who I am or what I write, and I won’t apologize for my content.
When it comes to parents, if they believe something is inappropriate for their child, then they are correct. They know that child, and it’s their job to raise them as they deem appropriate. When they say something is inappropriate for all children, they have moved out of their lane, and I deny their unilateral decisions.
”Funny thing about those cracks” Bristal says. “Most of them are teenage-shaped girls” ‘. It really does cut to the crux of the matter- Bristal is very good at doing that. When towns and individuals ‘turn the other cheek’ as they do in the case of Denise, the safety of these troubled people is threatened. Swallowed up by the dark underbelly of any town or city. Were there real-life cases that inspired this strand of the novel?
Both her name and what Denise was wearing when she disappeared is directly pulled from a real life case, detailed in both The Innocent Man by John Grisham and The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer. The chilling, random, senseless death of this young woman—Denice Haraway—had a deep impact on me when I was writing The Female of the Species, and those echoes clearly linger, years later.
Yet one of my favourite elements of the book was how both Lydia and Bristal were determined to use their voices and their online platform to discover the truth and achieve justice. The power of female unity. The need to speak up when it matters. Who are the people (real/fictional) who inspire you to find courage in adverse moments?
This is where, quite frankly, I always come off sounding like a bitch—I’m my own hero. I grew up in a conservative community, and all of the women in my life fell into very gender appropriate ways of speaking, working, and living. Even as a little girl I was like – no, fuck that. I want to do what I want to do, and I like what I like. I’m going to be me, and people are just going to have to deal with that. To this day, one of my mom’s enduring goals for me is to “be nicer.” Lol.
Podcasts are becoming a significant trope for the crime genre as seen in TV’s ‘Only murders in the building’ and literature’s ‘A good girl’s guide to murder’. What do you think podcasts add to a narrative in terms of pace, tone, and perspective? What makes them an alluring ploy for a writer?
Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t listen to podcasts, myself. I tend to find them fairly annoying. I only have so much free time, and if I come to you for your content, get to your content. I don’t care what you had for dinner or what you bought at Kohl’s or what your kid did yesterday. It doesn’t matter to me.
I DO find the egalitarian spread of news and opinion in podcasts to be liberating, which is what I find attractive about them. The current proliferation of them—literally everyone has a podcast now—and, if I’m being honest—lack of quality in many of them, is what turns me off.
“…look at the darkness and find the shades of grey”. Lydia’s dad, Brent, also mentions how bad people can do good things and good people can do bad things. There is a great deal of moral ambiguity throughout culminating in a wonderful twist at the end. Was that fun to write? To challenge readers’ assumptions? Or was it difficult to place your characters through these quandaries? What messages do you hope readers take from this book?
All of my books operate in this area, so it wasn’t difficult for me to focus on that theme. Good and bad, black and white, may be an easy way to educate children about the proper way to live, but it’s simply not how the real world works. We are all capable of horrible things; we are all capable of beautiful things. Learning and accepting that early on will help anyone move through reality.
What is currently on your bookshelves? Which books and authors do you recommend for our readers?
Unfortunately, I have very little time to read these days. A lot of avid readers that I know suffered during the pandemic—a time that should have been our golden age. For whatever reason, reading was difficult for me during the lockdown, and I’m still feeling the effects of that hangover.
Thank you so much for your time, Mindy. It’s been a pleasure and I hope you enjoy great success with this book. To sign off, where can our readers get your book on March 14th 2023?
Online, at major retailers, and of course – support your local indie!
How To Make It As A Writer, With Mindy McGinnis
With Stacy Ennis:
Many aspiring writers want to be able to make a living as a writer. But how in the world does someone go from dreaming to doing the thing?
This week, I’ve got answers for you. Along with sharing my own experience in nonfiction, I’m joined by novelist Mindy McGinnis to share her journey on the fiction side.
Mindy is an Edgar Award-winning novelist who writes across multiple genres, including post-apocalyptic, historical, thriller, contemporary, mystery, and fantasy. Her experience has not always been rosy, and, as you’ll learn in this frank and open discussion, she has experienced hardships along the way to make her dream happen. But she’s done it—she’s doing it—and she shares some of the behind-the-scenes of a novelist living the dream.
I also share insights from my world of nonfiction and offer insights for nonfiction authors who are writing books connected to a bigger purpose. We also dig into marketing and social media, and Mindy shares what she does to attract new readers and book paid speaking gigs.
Author Mindy McGinnis Visits Hickman →
Kennedy Lucas, Editor-In-Chief|October 6, 2022
On Wednesday, October fifth, Missouri Gateway Award-winning author, Mindy McGinnis visited Hickman High School. She spoke to students about her many books and sat down for an interview with the P&G.
McGinnis won the Missouri Gateway Award for her book Heroine. Heroine follows Mickey Catalan as she navigates recovering from a devastating injury. Mickey is the star catcher for the small town’s high school softball team. When a car accident injures her leg and hip, she turns to painkillers to get her through rehabilitation.
When McGinnis was asked how much of Heroine was based on the current opioid addiction in the United States, she replied, “Pretty much directly,” and went on to cite her inspiration for the book, “I was visiting a school in Southern Ohio, and it’s an area of the country that is looked at as the beginning of the opioid crisis. I was visiting a school down there, and they had read one of my books in a district-wide read, and the librarian that had set up my event was like, ‘I’m really sorry, but some students have to get up and leave during your presentation because there’s a funeral today for a student,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry. What happened?’ And she said, ‘It was an OD,’ I was like, ‘Oh, God, that’s awful,’ and she said, ‘Oh, it’s our third one this year.’ It was November. They had three kids die in three months. And I was like, ‘That’s horrible,’ and she said, ‘No, that’s the average around here. We lose them pretty fast.’ I ended up having a conversation with an upperclassman girl who was helping to plan the prom for that year. And she told me that they had settled on a black tie theme for their prom because they knew that they were going to be going to more funerals, and they needed to have nice funeral clothes and so they wanted a nice black dress that they could wear to prom and they could wear to funerals. Yeah, it was the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”
McGinnis also explained her reasoning for having a female-athlete lead in the book, saying “I always wanted to write a female athlete book. I’m a female athlete, and it’s really hard to find books written for teens with characters that are female athletes. And I don’t have a good reason for that. You can find male athlete books really easily, but female athletes, you can’t. And I’ve always been really frustrated by that, and always wanted to write a female athlete book. The truth is that a lot of young people that end up hooked on OxyContin and then move on to heroin, do so because they’re injured in their sport, and they have to use painkillers to get through their rehabilitation and recovery. They end up hooked on them, and then ‘graduate’ to street drugs. So I was able to take those two things, the fact that I’ve always wanted to write a female athlete book and pair that with the opioid crisis, to write the Gateway award winner.”
McGinnis has another book up for the Missouri Gateway Award, called Be Not Far From Me. In this nominated book, Ashley, a girl more comfortable in nature than anywhere else, goes into the woods with her friends for a night of partying. She briefly leaves the party to go to the bathroom when she finds her boyfriend with another girl in the woods. Heartbroken and furious, Ashley runs into the night, only to fall into a ravine. She must find a way back home, despite the growing infection in her leg.
McGinnis stated that Be Not Far From Me was her favorite book she’s written saying, “That one is really personal to me. There are a lot of reasons why, but some of the stories that are from my main character’s childhood are actually stories from my childhood.”
McGinnis told the P&G about her writing process, saying, “Typically, what I want to do is I write 1000 words a day, which is four to five pages, and then I stop. And the next day I write 1000 words again, and I look at what I wrote the day before, and fix it a little bit. I don’t do a lot of heavy editing or anything like that, just small changes. So then I write 1000 more. And then the next day I read the 1000 that I wrote the day before, and you just keep going until you have a book, which is anywhere from 65 to 95 thousand words, and so it takes time, but that is how I prefer to write and if you go about it with that approach, it’ll take three to four months to write a book. That’s how I prefer to do it. Sometimes I’m really bad at procrastinating and sometimes I end up in a situation where I’ve put it off and I’ve put it off and I’ve put it off and I have to write a book in three weeks. And I’ve done that twice now. And I don’t recommend it. It is not healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. But I’ve done it twice now. And when that happens, you’re just writing as much as you can, as fast as you can. You just get it done and you make sure there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. And then you go back through and you make sure that it makes sense. And then you turn it in.”
McGinnis later advised young writers, saying, “I don’t think you have to have any special training to be a writer. I actually never had a moment of instruction. I went to a really small high school, we graduated 67 kids a year, really tiny. And we didn’t have creative writing classes. And I didn’t go to college for creative writing. I’ve never had any instruction in creative writing. I learned how to write by reading. And that would be my advice for anyone: if you want to be a writer, the first thing you have to be is a reader.”
McGinnis worked as a school librarian in the small town she grew up in. She interacted with young readers every day and said that reader-based awards such as the Missouri Gateway Award meant more to her, “As a writer, it’s like, when you get good reviews, like it always feels good. And when your fellow writers are like, ‘Hey, you’re doing good work,’ or professional reviewers are like, ‘Yes, this one’s good,’ that feels good. But when my actual audience of readers are like, ‘No, this was the best book,’ and when teenagers are actually saying, ‘Yes, I read this book, and I liked it,’ that is what feels good. Yeah. So when I know that I won an award that was actually reader-based voting, that’s super cool.”
Mindy McGinnis has published twelve books of varying genres, but her trademark writing style includes many dark elements. McGinnis’ next book is called A Long Stretch Of Bad Days. It is a young adult mystery that is coming out in 2023. McGinnis’ visit sparked lots of interest in Hickman students. After she finished speaking, a large line formed to ask questions and purchase her books.
Daily Inspiration: Meet Mindy McGinnis →
Today we’d like to introduce you to Mindy McGinnis.
Hi Mindy, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
I began querying – the process of trying to get a literary agent – when I was still in college. Ten years later, and after I’d written five novels, I was able to land an agent and subsequently, a publishing deal with Harper Collins. I have been publishing a book a year consistently since 2010!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Absolutely not. Writing is never an assured thing. I’m entirely supported by freelance income. I don’t have retirement, insurance, or any type of benefits. Also, you never know how many books you will sell or if your publisher will want another one. You are mostly just crossing your fingers a lot and hoping that you can survive.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m a writer who tackles darker themes for teens. My writing covers everything from rape culture to the opioid crisis to good old-fashioned whodunit murder mysteries, as well as fantasy and historical, contemporary thrillers and fantasy.
I’m known for writing gritty, honest, no punches-pulled novels, no matter what genre I’m writing in.
What sets me apart, and what I’m also particularly proud of, is that I do jump genres. Many authors are pigeon-holed, but I’ve been fortunate in my career that my publisher has allowed me to take chances.
We love surprises, fun facts, and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
My novels are dark, but I’m really funny! I write about tough topics, but anyone who comes to any of my presentations leaves laughing. I use humor to even things out, and that can take people by surprise.
A Moment With Mindy McGinnis →
FHC Today
Emma Schultheis, Staff Reporter
Heroin: A highly addictive opioid made from the natural substance morphine, taken from the seed pod of various opium poppy plants. Everyone has an addiction. Whether that be drugs or alcohol or something as simple as caffeine, everyone has something that they crave so intensely that without it, they go through withdrawal even without realizing it. We are all flawed by design, but the struggles that come with those flaws are what make us human.
2021 Gateway nominee “Heroine” shares the story of how simple painkillers for treatment can turn into a deadly addictive habit. Although her book isn’t based on personal experience, author of “Heroine,” Mindy McGinnis, paints the perfect picture of how easy it is to spiral into a world of substance abuse.
Composition Connections: McGinnis describes the connections to English classes and composition of literature. (Isabella Totra)
On Sept. 30, the Edgar award-winning novelist shared her journey as an author with students to show how persistent hard work and dedication can lead to success. Having no degree in writing and never having taken a writing class, her journey was long but well worth it in the end.
“You don’t have to have special training or knowledge. You don’t need to have anything. You just sit down and do it. Know what you like and write what you emulate. And it’s just like playing a sport or musical instrument, you’re not going to get better at it unless you do it and no one can do it for you. No one can make you a good basketball player. You have to go to practice. Writing is the same way,” McGinnis said.
Most people’s childhoods consist of playing games or playing with toys. For McGinnis, her toys were her imagination. Growing up on a farm with little money, entertainment was something you had to create yourself. With a wild imagination, she was always making up stories. Her creative mind followed her into adulthood and led to the books she writes today. The stories she would read growing up never met her expectations due to a lack of realism and underwhelming content. It took a while before she discovered Stephen King’s novels and truly found a love for the dark, horror, and crime-filled world.
“This isn’t real life and it wasn’t interesting to me. Ever since I was a little kid I was interested in the dark stuff, the questionable stuff, the stuff that makes other people uncomfortable,” McGinnis said. “I wasn’t a little kid that laid in bed and thought about kittens and puppies and rainbows. I lay in bed and thought: ‘What is under my bed? What’s in the closet? What’s at the window?’ That’s just how my head works.”
Other authors may have a layout of their story before writing but McGinnis never plans her books. She has a general idea of the story she wants to tell but doesn’t know what’s going to happen in them until she sits down and types directly on a word document. The fear of not being able to find the right words is always a concern that races in her mind.
“Even after 11 years of publishing, when I sit down to write every day, I’m scared because I think ‘What if I can’t do it?’ Because I don’t know what the magic is. I don’t know what switch flips that makes me start writing,” McGinnis said.
Only 1 percent of published writers make a living off their writing so the pressure can be overwhelming, especially when there are always deadlines hanging over her head. When you write you are alone with your thoughts and the writing of one of her books, isolated her from her peers and made it hard to separate her work life from her personal life.
Overcoming the intrusive thoughts of failure, the author still pushes herself to the limit and continues to grow into the successful writer she is today. Every day is a new day, and every day is a new page.
“Always be working. Never give up just means you keep going and you might not think what do I need to do to improve? Just being bullheaded doesn’t get it done. You have to ask yourself, ‘What do I need to change in order to make it?’” McGinnis said.
Columbia Missourian - Young adult author and former library aide knows about banned books first-hand →
BY SARA GEORGE
Oct 4, 2022
High school student Mickey Catalan has a passion for softball. When she is injured in a car crash right before softball season, her ability to keep playing is threatened. To deal with her injuries, she is prescribed painkillers, and she becomes addicted.
Mickey is the main character in author Mindy McGinnis’ 2019 book “Heroine.” The young adult novel received this year’s Missouri Gateway Readers Award, intended “to promote literature, literacy and reading in Missouri high schools.” Students across the state vote on the winner.
The Edgar Award-winning author was in Columbia this week to speak at Douglass and Hickman high schools, as well as venues including Columbia Public Library.
“Heroine” was challenged in the Rockwood School District near St. Louis during the 2021-2022 school year. According to the Challenged Materials Committee report, the challenger was concerned the book encouraged drug use and contained material that was inappropriate for students.
“I was partially amused, because it’s probably my tamest book,” McGinnis said in an interview Monday. “I was like, ‘Oh, if you don’t like that one, wait till you read the next one, you’re gonna get really upset.’”
In the end, her book was allowed to remain in Rockwood schools without restrictions.
McGinnis, who worked as a librarian aide at a school that served grades six through 12 for 14 years, is familiar with attempts to remove titles from the shelves. Her first question to those raising concerns over a book, she said, was whether they had read it. The answer often was no.
“If they say this book is inappropriate for their child, that is their call, and that is fine,” McGinnis said. “When they say this book is inappropriate for all the children, and no one is allowed to have it, that’s censorship — and that’s when we have a problem.”
McGinnis said that although her books may be considered young adult, she doesn’t “pull any punches.”
“I write about violence, and I write about murder, and I write about rape, and I write about a drug addiction,” she said. “And if you don’t think those things are happening to teens, then you probably haven’t walked outside lately.”
According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, in 2020, there were over 100 deaths caused by non-heroin opioid overdoses for 15- to 24-year-olds. In Missouri, drug overdose is the leading cause of death for adults age 18 to 44. More than 70% of those deaths involve opioids.
“I was visiting a school where there was a funeral for a child, a student that had OD’d. And I was talking to the staff, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we get about three or five a year.’ And I was like, ‘Are you serious?’” McGinnis said. “I walked away, I was like, ‘Man, I really want to write something about the opioid epidemic.’”
Another of her books is nominated for the 2022-2023 Missouri Gateway award. “Be Not Far From Me” focuses on a girl who gets lost in the Great Smoky Mountains. McGinnis, who has written a dozen young adult books as well as short stories, finds writing isolating.
“You are by yourself. And you shut down completely while you’re working and nothing is around you, and you know nothing except the inside of your own head,” she said. “So I like to be around people as much as possible outside of my writing time. And so I do still substitute in the district that I used to work at because I miss the kids.”
Thrills & Chills for Teens & Tweens - Ohioana 2022 Panel
2022 Ohioana Book Festival Thrills & Chills for Teens & Tweens with Mindy McGinnis, Mar Romasco Moore, Margaret Peterson Haddix, and Natalie D. Richards.
Cardington author Mindy McGinnis celebrates latest release, 'The Last Laugh'
Growing up on a farm in Cardington, which she described as beautiful and idyllic, author Mindy McGinnis felt safe from life's dangers and uncertainties.
It was here in the safety of her childhood in rural Ohio that her fascination with darker themes and deeper questions began.
Now an Edgar Award-winning author who just saw her eleventh novel, "The Last Laugh," published Tuesday, the Morrow County native shared her realization that it was both this curiosity toward danger and the lack of young adult literature to meet her interest that inspired her to become an author.
She now writes young adult fiction and short stories with strong female main characters, diving into darker topics and gaining inspiration from mystery novels, horror stories and the dark poetry by Edgar Allan Poe.
"I write very dark, very gritty. I’m very honest about the human condition. When I was growing up as a kid in the 80s and the 90s, most if not all of the books that were available to us were very clean, very antiseptic, usually didactic, and those weren’t my tendencies," she said.
"Even from a young age, I was interested in darker things and darker themes."
Being so intrigued with darker themes, McGinnis was reading Stephen King novels in the 6th grade, even though they weren't conventionally age-appropriate for a 12-year-old to be exploring.
As she got older she realized she wanted to fill in the gaps in literature, and her career in writing was born.
Still, it took her 10 years of pitching her stories to agents before landing a publishing deal. In the meantime, she worked as a library aide within Cardington-Lincoln Schools, where she shared her love of reading with students for 14 years.
It turns out, she explained, that her work with teenagers in the school library at Cardington-Lincoln High School, where she herself graduated in 1997, has helped to drive her career as a young adult author, writing small-town Ohio and its unique challenges of rural poverty and assumptions made about individuals based on family ties into her work.
"I grew up in Morrow County. I’ve always lived here. I still live here, and I just always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know how that happened," she said.
"I assumed that someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, ‘You. You get to be a writer,’ Right, and it doesn’t work that way. Any type of creative industry, it’s an odd path and usually a different path for everyone."
Since selling her first book came out in 2013, McGinnis has been publishing consistently.
Beyond getting to live her dream career and experience literary success, she said her favorite part of her job is seeing the way her words and stories deeply impact her fans, many of which reach out to her after events via email.
“I always get emails after I get school visits and they’re just like, ‘This happened to me. This is a thing that I went through,’ and there’s one thing about how brave and courageous these girls are, but also sad they feel they need to speak to a complete stranger about it because maybe other people in their lives won’t listen or they’ve tried to speak up and weren’t heard,” she explained.
In her work, McGinnis focuses on highlighting female strength, whether physical strength or deeper, emotional strength like resolve, empathy and seeing girls use their voices.
"I’m all for literal female strength, absolutely, I am, but female strength can also be compassion and empathy, also like speaking up, being courageous and being brave and standing up and making your voice heard," she said.
This, she said, is the crux of why she writes: to allow girls going through tough experiences to meet themselves in her pages and see there’s hope and recovery on the other side of whatever they're facing.
An example she offered is a young woman from Missouri who attended a book signing event and asked for two copies of McGinnis' Heroine, a story about the opioid crisis.
The girl wanted to bring one of the copies to her mother, who was at the time incarcerated for drug-use. She wanted to attempt to rebuild their mother-daughter relationship with Mindy's work of fiction that so closely related to their lives.
McGinnis said she was honored to give the young woman two signed copies right away.
“I’ve had teens reach out and say, ‘You helped me understand my mom, my dad, my sister.’ If I can actually have an effect on other people’s lives with my words through the story I’ve made up in my head, that is profound,” she said.
As McGinnis celebrates the release of her latest book this past week, "The Last Laugh," the second installment following her previous release, "The Initial Insult," which is a modern retelling of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," she is preparing for a tour of events across the Midwest, including one at the Cardington-Lincoln Public Library Saturday.
Though the pandemic changed many aspects of the publishing industry, she said, she is looking forward to traveling and getting to engage with students across the Midwest in-person once again.
“I’m so grateful I get to do this for a living. It’s wonderful. Yeah, it’s just amazing to be able to do the thing that you love and achieve the thing that you’ve always wanted and to be able to succeed at it," McGinnis said.
The Many Heroines of Mindy McGinnis →
By Melissa Warner Published March 3, 2022
The Last Laugh is author Mindy McGinnis’ latest published book. A sequel to 2021’s The Initial Insult, it is her 11th published solo work. Her books are gritty, and not for the very young or faint of storyline. In college, she read a novel for class “that I just thought was terrible…[I thought to myself] I can write better than that and then I said to myself, ok, then do it.” That turned into an early version of Female of the Species, but it was not YA. When she began writing books, she was writing adult fiction, and commented “It’s not a humble brag, I was not a good writer. I had to become a good writer…I learned to write by reading.” Having spent seven years as a high school librarian, she realized, she was spending 40 hours per week with a target audience and knew the market thoroughly. She then wrote a book about water shortage in a dystopian setting which she’d wanted to do for some time, she changed her intended audience to teens, and shortly (for the publishing world) thereafter, Not a Drop to Drink was a successful, published book, and the sequel A Handful of Dust, followed the next year.
In writing YA, Ms. McGinnis doesn’t “pull any punches. [Teens] can read my books and feel like they’re not being talked down to. I’m not going to skip over anything.” She recalled that when she was a teenager, YA literature tended to be happy, clean books (“I really want a puppy but I can’t have a puppy because my mom is allergic and I found this puppy and I’m going to keep it in the basement and hope no one notices.”), but are not very interesting to most 16 to 17 year olds. As a teen, she wound up reading dark stories such as Cujo, and she enjoyed reading “dark things.” As an adult, she realized that she wanted to write books “for that teenager that wanted the hard, scary stuff…all of the things I was seeing in the real world that adults wanted to pretend didn’t exist.”
At least one (Heroine) and reportedly a second (Female of the Species) of Ms. McGinnis’ books have been challenged, and she stands by her work at least in part because they address real things that happen to real teens, and she strives to present difficult material in a respectful and safe setting. Notably she commented, “I don’t think there’s anything in [A Madness so Discreet] that you couldn’t find on any prime time tv show or video game that isn’t marked M for mature.” She also has commented that “there’s a teen out there that needs to read about a girl standing up for herself and there are more than you think that need to read [for example] that being abused by your father is not okay. I’m writing for those kids…” She does acknowledge that many of her books might not be appropriate for those under the age of 15. A Madness So Discreet is the story of an 1890 teen whose family has committed her to the insane asylum for a “problem” that is not of her doing.
“If you read my books in order, you can actually see what’s going on in my mind.” She explained that “there’s foreshadowing for what’s going to happen next because you’re literally following my thoughts.” For example, Female of the Species was written just after A Madness so Discreet. “In some ways, when I wrote [the main character killing someone], I was testing the waters to see how people were going to react to vigilante justice.” Indeed, reading the books in publication order shows this author’s development in her writing style and themes, especially teen girls and society. In Female of the Species, Ms. McGinnis tackles vigilante justice head on. She aimed “to make people uncomfortable,” but also balance justice. The book was sparked by a documentary about an individual that most in a community believed was guilty but never brought to justice due to lack of evidence. This Darkness Mine came next, and addresses the dichotomy of a person being “good or bad, period, there’s no gray.” What happens when a “good girl” does “bad things?” The main character in this book was particularly complicated, and Ms. McGinnis commented that “what’s hard is to make a complicated character likable.” It is difficult to know what to feel about many of her characters – are they good? are they bad? what does that even mean?
Ms. McGinnis next wrote a fantasy duology (Given to the Sea and Given to the Earth), and “it was definitely the most difficult one to put onto paper.” In writing this book, she discovered that world building is “really hard.” She prefers contemporary settings for her books, and Heroine is a prime example. In Heroine, the main character is a star athlete who is injured, and starts taking opioid medications. The book is a masterful building of a train wreck the reader knows is coming, and is helpless to stop. It also a much more realistic (vs presumed stereotypical) picture of an addict and the surrounding people in the addict’s life. Ms. McGinnis took great care in not writing a “how to” book for drug addiction, and pointed out that many things in the book regarding the actual drugs and drug use “couldn’t have happened that way;” she intentionally mixed in “drug terms/culture and usages from the 1980s onward.” For example, one character telling another to grind the Oxy to kill the time release to get a bigger high “may have been possible in 1998” but not now; many years ago the drug manufacturer changed the drug so that could not be done. She understands such a concern about her book, but also points out that several of the challenges appear to be from those who have not read it. Another specific challenge is that the book “glamorizes” drug use. However, Ms. McGinnis writes “very honestly about drugs – they make you feel good in the moment… They do not solve your problems.” Upon reading the book, one can see that the book’s title, Heroine, is a clever play on words.
Be Not Far From Me was originally supposed to be released prior to Heroine, but after she pitched Heroine, it was decided to publish Heroine first. Sparked by being the author herself being lost in the woods, Be Not Far From Me is a story of survival and even self discovery. Her most recent duology (The Initial Insult and The Last Laugh) is very dark, and very much in the same vein as and inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s stories. Her main human character is once again complicated, and struggles to handle situations common to being in high school. Another main character is a feline, and Ms. McGinnis has finally written a book about a cat, but definitely not as a family member had hoped for.
Ms. McGinnis has co-authored several other books with close author friends, and even co-authored a book with James Patterson. City of the Dead, published in 2021, was an exciting opportunity and a revisit to one of his prior series. Having previously written a dystopian duology, the setting for the series was quite familiar for Ms. McGinnis. “It wasn’t hard to make that leap again…and I really enjoyed it.”
Although a common misconception about being a writer, according to Ms. McGinnis, is that “we all have money,” she also noted that “I love writing, I love reading. I feel so blessed, seriously, every day, that I get to do this for a living. It’s incredible.” She does have an at least part time job, substitute teaching in the community in which she grew up and still lives. Quite oddly, she has a birthmark on her left knee in the shape of her home state, Ohio. As a teen, she wishes she had known that “it gets better, everything gets better. The things that upset you at 16 won’t upset you at 40.” Ms. McGinnis has known since she was little that she wanted to be a writer, and in high school she was “bookish but also an athlete.”
When asked how she has come up with the idea for so many books, she said “I never have trouble coming up with ideas… I don’t know where they’re going to come from or how they happen. Sometimes they really do just land on you and it doesn’t have to be necessarily tied to even what you’re doing at the moment. I will just have epiphanies. Generally those are the best ones, the ones that just seem to fall from the sky – those are my favorites.” She draws little inspiration from people in real life. Laughing, she explained: “There’s always a high body count in my books and if people think you based a character on them and you killed them, that hurts their feelings.” Ms. McGinnis stated she had no plans to write romance, and pointed out that while there is some romance in her books, “look how that turns out.” Again laughing, after discussing the darkness of her books, she said “people have said to me [after reading one of her books], Mindy you seem so normal.”
Covid had no significant impact on Ms. McGinnis’ writing, although she had to cancel approximately 60 events, and missed meeting people in real life. Interestingly though, it affected her “life long go to,” reading. She struggled to find something to keep her attention. Reading dark things was difficult due to the pandemic, and reading happy things felt “trite or silly. Reading couldn’t be what I needed it to be.”
Unfortunately for eager readers and fans, Ms. McGinnis’ next solo book will not be published until 2023 (hopefully March). It is titled The Long Stretch of Bad Days, and in it the main characters uncover the dark history of a small town while trying to earn their last history credit for graduation. What will happen next??
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