A Visit to The Top of The Eiffel Tower with Aimie K. Runyan -94

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Kristi Leonard [: 00:00:03

Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time, and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Kristi Leonard, owner and host of Writers in the Wild Retreats, nonfiction voice over artist, and president of WFWA. I'm excited to share with you a little about today's guest. Aimie K. Runyan writes historical and contemporary fiction that celebrates the spirit of strong women. She is the author of 8 historical novels, 2 contemporary novels, and 2 collaborative novels. Before transitioning to full time writing, Aimie taught French to high schoolers with occasional stints into English, public speaking, and competitive forensics.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:00:59

When she's not writing or wrangling her wayward kiddos, she enjoys hiking, baking, sewing, music, theater, movies, and all things sacred unto nerd culture. Aimie lives in Colorado with her incredible husband, 2 usually adorable children, 2 always adorable cats, and a dragon. Welcome.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:01:24

Well, thank you for having me. It's so great

Kristi Leonard [: 00:01:26

to have you here. I like to have the same question that we ask all of our guests when we start off because I find it to be a very interesting question. Tell me the most interesting thing about where you're from. It doesn't have to be where you grew up. It could be somewhere you've lived, but something interesting about where you're from.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:01:51

Well, I am in Estes Park, and it is definitely a tourist town, but it's very much a seasonal town. So if any of you have seen The Shining or watched or read the book, it was inspired by our Stanley Hotel, which is a beautiful white gleaming hotel up on the hill overlooking Estes Park. The whole plot of that show or the book was a man and his family going to take care of the hotel in the winter because the town empties out, and it really kind of is true. Oh. I mean, we do have a local population that lives here year round, and I am one of those people. We have a school. My kids go to school here, but it really does. The population after mid October until the snow stops in about May, the population shrinks other than, you know, a little for Christmas shopping because we have a charming main street.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:41

Oh, nice.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:02:42

Things like that. And it is absolutely for somebody who's a bit of an introvert and loves calm and peace, it's fabulous. I love it.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:50

I think we have a lot of writers that are introverts.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:02:55

Yeah. And, you know, I love people. I actually especially in a writing context, like going to a conference or retreat or something like that, I love getting out there and talking with real people face to face about my work, but the social battery, like, I need an immense amount of time alone to recharge. Yes. So yeah, it's just I think that's very common.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:15

Yes, I agree. So we like to get to know you a little first before we talk about your books. What is your earliest memory? Could it be about writing? Could it be about dragons? Don't think I didn't catch that in the intro.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:03:31

Yes. We have a dragon. His name is Draco, and he's a very friendly dragon. Yeah. He's my son's dragon. We got him back in 2020 right before everything the world shut down. He's our one of our pandemic pets. We ended up with 2 very beloved pandemic pets.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:03:45

We have a kitten named Zuri that we got in May, and we got Draco right before everything shut down. And so, yes, we have a house full of pets, and I love it. So earliest memory, my that's a good one. I remember my grandmother had a newspaper, the local newspaper laying out, and she was babysitting my I I spent most of my childhood at my grandmother's house, but, like, in a gap between school and when my mom came home from work. My grandmother was our caretaker. I picked up the newspaper and started reading an article, and I don't remember what the article was about, But I was all of 3 years old, and my grandmother was gobsmacked because it was just kind of that innate compulsion to read That's awesome. That my older sisters didn't have. And they got all the math skills, which I sadly do not have.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:04:33

But I got the reading skills, and I'm grateful for it. It was kind of the beginning of a love story with the written word. I got cast as scribbler mouse in the 3rd grade school play, and that stuck. Okay. You need to put that somewhere on your website. Yes.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:04:50

You need to have a hidden scribbler mouse, like and have people find it on your website.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:04:55

That is brilliant. That is brilliant. My I'm still in occasional contact with my 3rd grade teacher because I come from a small I'm a small town girl. Right. I come from a small town as well. And, like, her husband asked if I could send, like, a signed book, but he was gonna surprise her with a copy of my book for her birthday. And, yeah, we got to write my first that I remember as a that's a key memory, not my earliest, but in 3rd grade. 1 of the grandmothers in the class made these beautiful little bound books.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:05:22

And we got to write our first short story in these little bound books, and mine was leopard print. And I wrote a retelling of the legend of Adalante or the myth of Adalanta with the horse race, or it was a foot race. Wow. And I made it a horse race, and I thought it was just the coolest thing. And that again, I'm sure that book exists somewhere in the depths of my mother's house.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:42

Yeah. You were hooked by then.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:05:44

Yeah. I was hooked. I was absolutely hooked.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:46

That is so awesome. Alright. So we can't skip over competitive forensics. Tell me.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:05:53

Yes. That is speech and debate. Speech and debate. And so forensics come it's the older definition. I mean, forensics as in trying to solve a crime is a newer definition of the word. But if you think about what it is, it is the process of finding the truth, and that is what competitive debate is. I was, gosh, I was a diamond level competitor in high school.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:06:17

I competed all through college, got a lot of scholarship money. Thank you, Lynnfield College. Excellent. And I coached for a couple of years, and it was super rewarding. And I took this little ragtag bunch of kids from Fountain Fort Carson School District, which is not a wealthy school district. It's, like, half working class, half military kids, and, you know, got them told them they all had to throw on a suit or the closest approximation they could get their hands on, and we're gonna spend all Saturday talking for fun. And it's a skill set that has served me well my entire career Absolutely. Both as a French teacher, obviously, with the song and dance and being able to rope the kids in, get them excited about things.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:06:58

But also, you know, obviously, with what we're doing right now, but being able to step in front of a group of people that I don't know and being able to extemporize Yes. About my books and to field questions on the fly and be able to do so with some modicum of eloquence is so useful.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:15

Absolutely.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:07:16

So useful. So it was a great experience. I love coaching those little parts. They were great.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:20

That's so fun. So talking about your book, you've written quite a few. How many? 8 historical fiction? Yes.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:07:30

That's awesome. And I'm so, yeah, 8 historical fiction. And we have one contemporary that's done, one coming out in April called The Wandering Season. Very excited about that one as well.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:41

Heard it here first, people. Just kidding.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:07:44

Yes. Yes. You heard it here first. And I've done one collaborative novel, and the second one's coming out in November. So I have released a lot of books since, like, August of last year. Wow. It has been a lot. I had books that would clump. Like, my first two books were released 6 months apart because they were kind of part of a duology, sort of.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:03

Yeah.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:08:04

But they were already written because it was my first you know, I was my book my second book was halfway written when I went to contract. So it was very easy to get those edited and released Absolutely. Close, and it wasn't a a super pressed writing schedule. But then moving forward, it was like a book almost every other year. We tried to get out Girls on the Line pretty quickly after Daughters in the Night Sky because we wanted to hit the centennial of the armistice for world war 1.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:34

That's awesome.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:08:37

And I think we probably should have taken a little bit more time, but, like, it turned out it's one of my two favorite books of my own collection, but it was released really quickly right after each other. And you have to work cannibalizing your own audience. But then it was another, like, year and a half. It was another year and a half before across the Windy River, then another year and a half or 2 years for the school for German brides in 2022. But then since August of last year, it's been several.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:02

Right.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:09:03

And it's a breakneck pace. It's a breakneck pace.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:06

That sounds crazy. I can't even imagine that. So just to catch people up, when is the latest one? Is it out already or is it about to be? September 10th. September 10th.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:09:17

The actual I think we're live on 18th. Yep. Yeah. So it's been out a week. It's been out a week.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:22

There you go.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:09:23

It's been out a week. Yes.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:25

That's awesome. So how would you summarize? Tell us about this book that's coming out or just came out.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:09:31

Well, this is my first foray into biographical fiction, and it is a story of Clarie Fell, the oldest daughter of the famous architect Gustave Fell and her role in supporting his career after the death of her mother when Claire was only 14 when her mother died, and she took over not all the raising of her 4 younger siblings, the youngest of whom were very young, but and the managing of his household, but also she became his confidant and right hand woman in the business sphere as well. And she accompanied him to Portugal, like, 2 months after her mother died. Wow. Because she was extremely smart, extremely competent, and her father trusted her in a way that he couldn't trust his sons who were also younger, but also really not interested in the family business whatsoever. So she really took on a role that was extraordinary for women of the time who just didn't have these opportunities. And it's about that complex relationship between her abilities and the constraints of society at the time. And what's it called? Manuza Lippo.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:10:34

That's awesome. I love that. So what is it about this book that makes it different from all the other ones? So you said it's the first biographical. Yes.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:10:45

And yeah. So it's the first book that I had to base on a real human being. There are real people that make cameos throughout a lot of my other books, but I you know, I'm very careful about that. I don't wanna put a historical person where it in a place and time where they shouldn't be. Even though that is, you know, under the purview of historical fiction, if you wanna have general Pershing come in to do an inspection in November of 1917 and he wasn't there, I mean, very few people are going to harp on that. Right. But, you know, it's not I I prefer to stick to the truth. Absolutely.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:11:19

So it was a big challenge because Clarie felt is almost entirely lost to history in that I had to extrapolate her life from where her father was. So I focused the book between the death of her mother and really the building of the Eiffel Tower and the aftermath. So we've got a span of about 15 years. I have to do the math in my head, but about 15 years. And of course there are time jumps in there. Yeah. It's a 100000 word book. There's some time jumps.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:11:46

But they were together. Like, I went to the Musee d'Arcy. The Ethel family archives are housed in the Musee d'Arcy, and I got permission from the archivists and the family to go. Wow. That's And that was amazing. I went for one day on a vacation that I was I was doing a a regular, you know, pleasure vacation with my husband in 2022, but then I went back for a week in 2023 and spent 3 very intensive days in the archives just snapping photos with my phone. But we had, you know, a ton of correspondence, but it wasn't from that period Okay. Between Claire and her father because they were together.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:12:26

And so we had a lot of correspondence from right around the time her mother died to other people, and that was where I was able to extrapolate bits of her personality.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:12:36

Wow. So very different than what you had done before.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:12:40

Yes. And I had to reverse engineer kind of where she was and what she was doing, and then, of course, invent certain things. I made it that so that she's an artist and that was her passion before her mother died because it was something that's believable. A young lady could definitely pursue painting, at least not to a certain degree. It would have been very hard to pursue it seriously, especially in a very machismo culture like the French culture. And we touch on that subject as well. You know, Rosa Bonheur is mentioned, and she has a doppelganger, her best friend, Ursul, who does pursue art.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:13:14

And it's a rough slog for a woman to pursue that, but I wanted to give her a passion Yeah. And a driving force of her own that would also tie in to her father's work as an architect, a designer. She has the same aesthetic eye that her father does, but she just hasn't had the engineering education.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:32

And she's a woman, so not allowed. Yeah. So I would imagine that your experience being a French teacher had a lot to do with choosing this.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:13:43

Absolutely. So I knew following my previous very, very much beloved bakery in Paris, which was a dual timeline 18 seventies, which has to do with a very unknown period in history, which is the Paris Commune and the siege of Paris. The, you know, the siege of Paris was, before and then the Paris Commune was the aftermath. People don't know all that much about it. Right. And I wanted to do a follow-up that was, you know, 10 years later or so, which is what this is, dealing with how Paris rebounded in the most spectacular fashion. We have the belly puck, the beautiful period, and I wanted to celebrate that. And what I'd originally wanted to do was, like, a split narrative between, like, a can dancer at the Moulin Rouge and Clarisse.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:14:27

And my editor said, you've got so much grist for Claire. Why don't you just stick with that? And I'd be like, you're right. You're absolutely right. But you get to touch into the Moulin Rouge just a little bit. Excellent.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:14:37

Just a little bit. That is excellent.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:14:39

That's super fun. Yeah.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:14:40

Well, you have a lot of books for people to choose from. There's clearly the one that is coming out or just came out. Where can people find more information about you and your books? Do you have a website?

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:14:55

I do. Www.Aimiekrunyan.com, and that's aimiekrunyan.com is my email, and I am on Facebook. I am on Instagram. I am on threads. I am occasionally on TikTok. I have an account on Twitter that is very rarely used, but you can find me in any of those places, and I try to post at least on the semi regular basis. And I will be posting a lot like you're gonna see beautiful pictures of Paris and things over the next couple of months to celebrate this book. And I'm so glad it's coming out on the heels of the Olympics because every you know, Paris is fresh in everybody's mind.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:15:33

Absolutely.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:15:34

It's just such a beautiful place. And, yeah, I've been posting the occasional food video.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:15:40

Oh, nice.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:15:40

Yeah. That started with, a baker in Paris and continued with the memory of lavender and sage while Madame Mozartell isn't really a foodie book. In fact, I had to cut a really descriptive scene about a meal out of it. My editor said, this is not a bakery in Paris, Aimie. Calm down. But I am going to do a video about French hot chocolate because I think that needs to be done.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:16:03

Absolutely. 100%. Well, if you can believe it, our 15 minutes is up. And Oh, my goodness. We have Alright. Covered a lot. And Yes. Indeed. People are probably hungry at the end of this because we're talking about hot chocolate and French baked goods. And they're definitely gonna be interested in going out and getting your book, and it was such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Aimie K. Runyan [: 00:16:25

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it so much.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:16:31

Thanks for joining us. We hope you take a second to give us stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform, and we'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram at author express podcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget, keep it express, but keep it interesting.