Episode 46
Perseverance is really all author Amy Hagstrom knows (lol)
On today’s episode, we get to chat with Amy Hagstrom, a Contemporary Fiction author with her debut coming out this fall. Amy began her writing career as a travel writer and editor whose work appeared in US News, OutdoorsNW Magazine, Travel Oregon, and Huffington Post, among others, and for over a decade, she was lucky to travel all over the world, often with her children in tow. A lifelong outdoors enthusiast, she also served as a volunteer EMT with her local county search and rescue unit before launching her fiction writing career. After raising her three children in the Pacific Northwest, Amy traded the Cascade, Siskiyou, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges for the Sierra Madre mountains, making her home in central Mexico with her wife.
Perhaps thanks to her love of travel, Amy finds much of her inspiration for her novels in a deeply entrenched sense of place, often considering the setting of each of her novels to be a character in itself. Amy's four completed manuscripts take place in treasured locations across the American West, ranging from the California Sierra to the Pacific Northwest's San Juan Islands, Wyoming's Tetons, and her longtime home in Southern Oregon. The many wildfires of this region inspired her second book deal in her novel currently titled, SMOKE SEASON, which comes out with Lake Union in 2024.
You can learn more about Amy on her website www.amyhagstrom.com and follow her on Instagram @amyhagstromwrites or on Threads under the same handle. Sign up for her newsletter on her website to stay up to date on her upcoming releases, and preorder THE WILD BETWEEN US on Amazon at www.amazon.com/dp/1662511485/ or support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of The Wild Between Us at https://bookshop.org/a/90599/9781662511486
A little about today's host-
Author and musical composer Kathleen Basi is mother to three boys and one chromosomally-gifted daughter. Her debut novel, A SONG FOR THE ROAD, follows a musician on an unconventional road trip. Bestselling author Kerry Anne King writes, “In a novel filled with music, heartbreak, and surprising laughter, Basi takes us on a journey that encompasses both unimaginable loss and the powerful resilience of the human heart.”
Meaty, earnest, occasionally humorous, and ultimately uplifting, Kathleen’s fiction highlights the best within ourselves and each other. She writes monthly reflections on life, writing and beauty on her newsletter. Subscribe at https://kathleenbasi.substack.com/.
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Learn more about our hosts, the guests we've had, and their books -
Transcript
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Kathleen Basi [: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, Kathleen Basi. I'm an award-winning musical composer, a feature writer, essayist, and, of course, storyteller. Let me tell you a little bit about today's guest.
Kathleen Basi [:Amy Hagstrom worked on fiction manuscripts for over a decade and had queried three separate novels with her agent before landing her first book deal in 2022 with Lake Union. The Wild Between Us, which draws on her experience as a search and rescue volunteer and EMT, comes out in November and has been described as part thriller, part tender love story in early reviews. Amy, it's so fun to have you on the program. Welcome.
Amy Hagstrom [:Very fun to be here. Thank you.
Kathleen Basi [:I want to just warn everyone who is listening that this is the first time I've actually been close friends with somebody that I am interviewing on this. So, I am really looking forward to this. Amy and I have been critique partners for, I don't know how long. How long has it been since we started talking when we were both doing blogging?
Amy Hagstrom [:Oh, gosh, at least like, seven years, I think.
Kathleen Basi [:Oh, I think it's longer than that.
Amy Hagstrom [:Longer than that. Oh, gosh.
Kathleen Basi [:I have tinies.
Amy Hagstrom [:Yeah, you did. You did.
Kathleen Basi [:When did you stop blogging?
Amy Hagstrom [:When did I stop blogging?
Kathleen Basi [:Mm-hmm.
Amy Hagstrom [:I think I stopped my blog in 2010 because I started travel writing then.
Kathleen Basi [:Okay, you mentioned travel writing, so let's start there. Because you have been to so many places in the world and I know many of them, I want to ask you this question. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live and why?
Amy Hagstrom [:Anywhere in the world? Oh, my gosh. The first thing that comes to my mind is Iceland, and I wouldn't live there because I couldn't afford it, but if I could afford it, it's the most beautiful place I may have ever been. And I love the outdoors, and so it's all about that in Iceland. So, I think that might be one of my top picks. I also seriously considered moving to Portugal, and I would definitely live there as well. But my list is long of places I would live in.
Kathleen Basi [:I bet it is.
Amy Hagstrom [:I probably will live in several of them.
Kathleen Basi [:Well, actually, we normally start by asking what's the most interesting thing about where you're from. So, I would like you to tell everyone where you are as you are speaking now.
Amy Hagstrom [:Oh, yeah. So, currently, I live in Ajijic, Mexico, which is a small town in the state of Jalisco in central Mexico. And I actually just moved here three months ago from Oregon. So, it's interesting because people think of Mexico as, most of the time, they think of tropics or beaches or things like that. But we are in the mountains at over 5000ft elevation. So, we're getting a whole different kind of Mexico here in the central part of the country. And it's much more diverse in terms of terrain and land than I had even realized myself.
Kathleen Basi [:And so, not necessarily hot.
Amy Hagstrom [:No. We chose this area because it's supposed to never get over like, 80 degrees here.
Kathleen Basi [:Oh, my.
Amy Hagstrom [:Now that has not proved true because of climate change. So, the month we moved here at the end of May was like the hottest it's ever been here or something like that. Like, oh, no, what have we done? Then everyone kept telling us, this is not normal, this is not normal, this is not normal. But now it's settled in. I think it's like, the high is like, 75 or something like that. So, very nice. Yeah.
Kathleen Basi [:That sounds wonderful.
Amy Hagstrom [:Because where I moved from in Oregon, we had so much wildfire smoke all the time that a summer without wildfire smoke and such a low temperature is a real treat so far.
Kathleen Basi [:Well, I bet it is. Let's actually use that as a sort of a segue to talk about your book. It's called, The Wild Between Us. And this is the book, I will tell the readers that this is the book Amy was working on when we met each other, however many years ago that was. She's written several since then, but this is the one that came out. It's gorgeous. So, do you want to talk about the setting of that book a little bit?
Amy Hagstrom [:Yeah. So, you know, your question about interesting things about where you live is important to me because place always plays such an important role in all the books that I've written. And it informs my characters in ways that I think speak to me. Like, I usually know the setting of each novel before I even know anything more about it. To me, that's the genesis for almost everything I write. So, this one, the first one, like you mentioned, the first novel I ever attempted, it's set where I grew up, fictitiously, of course, but basically where I grew up in the Northern California mountains, Sierra Nevada. So, I knew I wanted to write about that location because it really is a magical place. And then my years with search and rescue in Oregon kind of sparked that idea of combining the experience I got in Oregon with search and rescue and the setting that I loved so much growing up in this year in Nevada.
Kathleen Basi [:Yeah, no, that's really interesting about the search and rescue, all this time we'd spent together. And I don't think that it ever occurred to me to ask why you knew so much about search and rescue. Tell us more about the search and rescue. How did that get started?
Amy Hagstrom [:I've always lived in the Pacific Northwest until moving here to Mexico. And so, when I first moved to Oregon, I had very young kids and I was not working full-time in my journalism degree that I was working in before. And so, I decided to go ahead and get EMT degree in Wilderness EMT Medic, for something exciting to do that I could do part-time. And so,
Kathleen Basi [:that’s really exciting.
Amy Hagstrom [:Yeah. And then I ended up having my third son during that time. So, I never ended up working as an EMT, but instead, I volunteered with the County Search and Rescue and had so much fun with that. And it was on my own time and at my own leisure of how many searches I could go on. So, it worked for me for our time with young kids. So, I really enjoyed learning about that, and it never left me after I stopped doing active searches, when my kids got a little older and I was a little busier, I continued to work for a program they called Lost but Found, which teaches kids in schools what to do if they get lost in the forest. So, I had that in the back of my mind for years before I started attempting my first novel.
Kathleen Basi [:Well, and these things, they really do just dovetail so beautifully in this book because of search and rescue. Tell us, it's the Sierra Nevada, and you tell us about that setting a little bit more so that I don't just talk about it.
Amy Hagstrom [:Well, the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California is really like, when a lot of people think of Northern California, they think Bay Area. We're talking much further north than that. Up above Tahoe, about an hour further north from, like, Reno, Nevada. It's way up in the mountains, and the counties that are up there are very small, and it mostly stems from railroad jobs or forestry jobs. And it's still a very magical place, and a lot of people don't really know about it, and other than knowing about Tahoe and the Lower Yosemite area of the western Sierra Nevada, et cetera, but it's an area forest that is high granite and ponderosa pine and very high elevation. So, it's a mountain wilderness for sure.
Kathleen Basi [:Hmm. Every time I've read it, in every iteration of this book, I've always just thought it sounded magical. So, I love the fact that it's finally out there in the world for other people to see.
Amy Hagstrom [:Yeah. Thank you.
Kathleen Basi [:Since it's been in process for so long, I'm going to ask you what's the hardest thing about writing this particular book.
Amy Hagstrom [:Hmm. I think the hardest thing about writing this book, well, the setting came so easily. I think the hardest part for me, as you already know, as a critique partner, plot really gets in my way of just wanting to write pretty things.
Kathleen Basi [:Darn that plot.
Amy Hagstrom [:For me, as soon as this book started to lend itself to being more of a suspense mystery than literary fiction, which it honestly started out as many, many years ago as many, many agents told me, entirely too slow, too introspective, too poetic, you know, not marketable. And so, I kept working at it and working at it, and as it started shifting, and I started realizing this is more of a mystery. And then I thought, oh, no, because I don't know how to write those. So, yeah, coming up with that.
Kathleen Basi [:But not necessarily in the traditional sense.
Amy Hagstrom [:Yeah.
Kathleen Basi [:Yeah, it's hard. So, let's ask then. You had to go through kind of a process to get from literary beautiful language to something with a really suspenseful plot to it. So, that's, like, part of your journey is making that transition. What piece of advice really sticks out in your mind as being something that's helped you in your writing journey?
Amy Hagstrom [:Well, there's always a fine line, I think, between trying to write commercially and writing what you want to write, and you have to go with the latter and write what is speaking to you. But I think something I learned was to not be precious about exact lines or exact scenes and be willing to be flexible and think through, how can I make this more active, more engaging, more forward-moving. As, you know, personally, that's always been to me like, okay, move it along, move it along, move it along. So, I think you have to listen. You know, you have to adapt and make changes to your writing if you want to be relevant in the world, we're in, you know.
Kathleen Basi [:Well, and it's not a bad thing to want to please, I think there's always a matter of needing to please the reader as well as yourself. We have all these competing, like, you have to consider the market, but you also have to be true to yourself. And I think that learning that balance is such a skill.
Amy Hagstrom [:I think you first have to learn to be true to yourself and then worry about the market after. I think if you start writing just for the market, that would feel soulless to me. I think you have to start with something that is speaking to you, or I wouldn't have the energy to follow through on it, I don't think if it wasn't something that was important to me. But I'm sitting here with two completed manuscripts that have not been marketable yet, so I know both sides of it.
Kathleen Basi [:Mm-hmm. Yeah. Publishing is just a brutal industry in general. You got to really love it.
Amy Hagstrom [:Yeah. I mean, and you never know what it wants in any given time.
Kathleen Basi [:Okay, so let's ask as we start to wind this up today, let's ask what's the best place for people to find you if they want to know everything that is Amy Hagstrom?
Amy Hagstrom [:Amyhagstrom.com is the easiest place to start, and it has all my ways to contact me, all my social there, and advanced sales for The While Between Us.
Kathleen Basi [:Great. Okay, so as we finish up today, I want to ask you what book or story is inspiring you the most these days?
Amy Hagstrom [:Hmm. That's such a hard question.
Kathleen Basi [:I know.
Amy Hagstrom [:The first thing that came to my mind was all of Anne Lamott's work. Her book, Bird by Bird, about writing craft has inspired me numerous times. When you're in the trenches and when you're just doing the solo work of writing that feels so long and daunting, her approach of just taking it piece by piece and step by step and keeping your eye on just that next small goal instead of looking at the huge, big picture that feels so overwhelming, that has spoken to me multiple times over the years and it stays relevant to me now.
Kathleen Basi [:That's really cool. Well, thank you for that and thanks for being with us today. We look forward to your book coming out. Do you have a formal release date yet?
Amy Hagstrom [:Yes, November 7.
Kathleen Basi [:November the 7th.
Amy Hagstrom [:Of this year.
Kathleen Basi [:So, everybody be looking for The While Between Us. And thanks, Amy, for being with us on Author Express today.
Amy Hagstrom [:Thank you for having me.
Kathleen Basi [:Thanks for joining us today. We hope you'll take a second to give us some stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform. We'll be back next Wednesday, and in the meantime, 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.
