Episode 66
Mining Life's Small Moments for Big Meaning with Erin Bartels
On today's episode we got to chat with Erin Bartels, an award-winning author who is endlessly fascinated with why people do and say the things they do and say. Her preoccupation with human nature has led her to write character-driven novels that book clubs adore for their layered storytelling and loads of discussion starters. Whether she's delving into history or tackling contemporary issues, whether set in her beloved state of Michigan or venturing abroad, her novels reflect the questions and issues all of us struggle with in life.
Her latest, The Lady with the Dark Hair, can be found here: https://erinbartels.com/home/books/the-lady-with-the-dark-hair/
Because the creative life is so important to her, Erin has looked for opportunities to teach and encourage other writers from the beginning, organizing conferences and retreats, teaching workshops, visiting high schools, coaching writers, and doing in-depth developmental edits that help other writers level up. She also loves using her skills as a longtime professional copywriter in the publishing industry to help writers market their self-published books. She recently started a Substack called Experimental Wolves to teach and encourage writers and offer weekly writing prompts to spur their creativity.
Check out Experimental Wolves at https://experimentalwolves.substack.com/
You can also find her on Instagram @erinbartelswrites and Facebook @ErinBartelsAuthor.
Support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of The Lady with the Dark Hair at https://bookshop.org/a/90599/9780800741662
A little about today's host-
Kristi Leonard is a modern Renaissance woman deeply rooted in the book world. When she's not immersed in crafting novels, she's orchestrating writing retreats through her business, Writers in the Wild, or lending her voice to non-fiction audiobooks. She leads the Women’s Fiction Writers Association as the president of the board, and interviews her writer pals as one of the hosts of the Author Express Podcast. She will start querying her first book in 2024.
Beyond the realm of words, Kristi embraces the Florida sunshine by hiking with her writer-hiker group and leisurely walks on the beach. She and her husband juggle a couple side businesses and take turns sharing the couch with their goofy Golden-doodle, Maddie. Kristi enjoys travel adventures with her twin sister and living vicariously through her grown children. You can learn more about her and connect at: https://linktr.ee/kristileonard.
Be sure to follow or subscribe to Author Express wherever you listen to podcasts and to follow us on Instagram @AuthorExpressPodcast
Learn more about our hosts, the guests we've had, and their books -
Transcript
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Kristi Leonard [: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.
Kristi Leonard [:Readers call her work engaging, unexpected, original, and inspirational. Reviewers label it powerful, astounding, compelling, and thought provoking. But to Erin, she's just writing the stories she feels she has to write.
Kristi Leonard [:Erin is an award-winning author of 6 books, and her newest, The Lady with the Dark Hair, comes out on March 26th. Erin has been a publishing professional for more than 20 years. After 18 years in the capital city of a state that is 40% water, she now lives with her family in a charming small town surrounded by farm fields and pasture lands.
Kristi Leonard [:Welcome, Erin Bartels. I'm so excited to have you.
Erin Bartels [:I'm so excited to be talking to you today.
Kristi Leonard [:People are going to get tired of hearing this, but you and I know each other from the Women's Fiction Writers Association.
Erin Bartels [:Yes.
Kristi Leonard [:We actually met at one of the fantastic writing retreats that they have. And I want to say that we had an unusual outing when you and I were together in Alexandria, Virginia.
Erin Bartels [:We do. It was a fun one.
Kristi Leonard [:Why don't you share with our listeners, yes. Share with our listeners the hobby you and your husband have.
Erin Bartels [:Yes.
Kristi Leonard [:That prompted several of the authors to visit a particular type of venue while we were in Alexandria.
Erin Bartels [:I was very surprised, but right on one of the main drags in Alexandria, in that beautiful little old town is a cigar bar. And my husband and I both smoke cigars. He smokes more than I do. But every Sunday night, we go out into our cigar lounge, which is a building that we've renovated on our property. It's a very swanky place. It's got a pool table. It's got a bar, and we have a movie screen that comes down, and we watch either a movie or a show that we're watching and have a cigar and relax.
Kristi Leonard [:Oh my gosh. That is so amazing.
Erin Bartels [:So, yeah. We went out to the cigar bar.
Kristi Leonard [:That was an experience I will never forget.
Erin Bartels [:It was fun. Live band. It was a really good time.
Kristi Leonard [:Yeah. I don't think we were expecting a live band. That was pretty amazing. Yeah. So, we always start with the same question. Tell me the most interesting thing about where you're from. And you can talk about where you grew up. You can talk about where you live now or maybe your favorite place, anything goes.
Erin Bartels [:Yeah. So that's a really dangerous question to ask me because I know too much about where I'm from. So, I'm going to limit myself to a few fun facts about Michigan.
Kristi Leonard [:Okay.
Erin Bartels [:It boasts the longest freshwater shoreline in the world. It's more than 3,200 miles long and the only state that has a longer shoreline than us is Alaska. One third of that distance is islands, shorelines. So, we have a lot of islands as well. And we also have 1/5th of the world's fresh surface water in the great lakes. And if you removed just the water from Lake Superior and spread it over North and South America, it would cover the entire land mass in a foot of water.
Kristi Leonard [:Okay. Those are quite specific details that you know about your home state.
Erin Bartels [:We're all about water in Michigan.
Kristi Leonard [:Yes. Yes. That is awesome. And Michigan actually features in your book as well.
Erin Bartels [:Yes. It does. It features in all of my books.
Kristi Leonard [:I did enjoy your book very much. So, let's get to know you a little bit. Was being an author what you always wanted to be when you grew up, or did you have other aspirations when you were little?
Erin Bartels [:It was definitely one of several. I also felt like I would be a veterinarian. I'm glad that,
Kristi Leonard [:Of course. Didn’t we all?
Erin Bartels [:Yeah. I'm glad that I'm not though, because I feel like that would actually be a very sad job because people bring you their pets when they're sick. So, I also thought that I would just move to Montana and have a ranch where I would take care of animals, like an animal sanctuary. There was no funding in mind. Like, there was no way I was going to run this thing. I had no idea. But in my mind, that's what I was going to do. I was going to run an animal sanctuary in Montana.
Kristi Leonard [:Excellent. What is something you wish you could have understood more deeply when you were 20 years old?
Erin Bartels [:Oh, well, related to writing, I would say that just because you're a good writer doesn't mean you can write a novel. Because I was always a very good writer, and storytelling is something different than being a good writer. And it's something you have to learn. And when you go to school for English, you learn how to talk about books. You learn how to critique books and write essays about books, but you never actually learned to write books. So, it's something that takes time, and I think that it took more time than I thought it would.
Kristi Leonard [:Yeah. Definitely. I was an English major as well. Shock, shock, shock.
Erin Bartels [:So, you know?
Kristi Leonard [:Yes. I do. Absolutely. I am still working on getting published, so I totally.
Erin Bartels [:It's a long road.
Kristi Leonard [:I wasn't 20 when I found that out, but
Erin Bartels [:Well, I had a benefit of working for a publisher starting when I was 22. So,
Kristi Leonard [:Okay. That helps. Well, I am so excited about your book. I'd literally speed read it so that we could, you know, talk about it, and I'd know what to talk about. It was just so good and so just unique. What a unique concept. Dual timeline and the whole thing. How would you summarize your book in one sentence?
Erin Bartels [:Okay. I would say, The Lady with the Dark Hair tells the stories of 2 artistic women, separated by time and geography who are looking for the same thing. The right and the nerve to live their lives according to the desires of their hearts, rather than the limiting expectations of the world around them and within them.
Kristi Leonard [:Wow. Very, very app that I mean, it helps to have read the book to like listen to that and be like spot on. Nice job. You did that really well.
Erin Bartels [:Thank you.
Kristi Leonard [:So, what part of your book was the hardest to write?
Erin Bartels [:I think that what was the most time consuming was doing the research for the past storyline. It's a dual timeline story, and the past storyline takes place in a time that I obviously didn't live and in places I've never been. So, I did have to do a lot of research and it was hard, but I am very careful. I don't ever want to have something that's wrong that pulls somebody out of the story who knows. And so, I'm very careful about the details. So, that's time consuming.
Kristi Leonard [:Oh, yeah. Definitely. When did you come up with the idea for your book? It's so unique.
Erin Bartels [:It's hard to say. I feel like these questions are so hard to answer because you get different ideas at different times and then they sort of attach to each other, you know, and they become something bigger. And so, I couldn't tell you if I decided to write something set in Gibraltar and then decided it was going to be about art or vice versa or you know, I have no idea.
Kristi Leonard [:Right. Well, so related to the research and sort of the process aspect, did you know about art? It's so well written in term and, like, I felt like I was reading a book by an artist or an art historian or someone who knew a lot about art and painting, not even just art, but, like, the act of doing the painting and all of that. Are you a painter? Do you have that background?
Erin Bartels [:Yes, I do.
Kristi Leonard [:Okay. Good. I was going to say, I am so impressed if you did that from research.
Erin Bartels [:No. I've been artistic since I was a kid, and I've been painting since I was a kid. So, it's something that I've always loved to do and something that I took extra time to do. I took extra classes outside of school. I just, that's all I did was I read, I painted, or drew, and then I pretended to be animals. That was my childhood.
Kristi Leonard [:Okay. I get a really good picture of who you are now.
Erin Bartels [:You really do. But I do paint regularly, and I have one of the fun things I got to do as part of my research for this book was, I decided I was going to learn how to paint a portrait. And so, I painted a self-portrait every month of the year 2022.
Kristi Leonard [:Okay. That's what you were doing.
Erin Bartels [:Yeah. So that I could get better at it.
Kristi Leonard [:I Followed you on social media after that, and I was like, gosh. That's so, I didn't even put that together. That is so awesome.
Erin Bartels [:So, it is drawn from my own experience. And then the things that I don't know about specifically, you know, the things about particular colors and where the pigments come from and how painting was different in the 1800. Those are things I had to research.
Kristi Leonard [:Totally. Yeah. Well, I would imagine I mean, obviously, they tell you write what you know, so that came through in flying colors. But I would imagine that doing the research would be super fun if you're already interested in it.
Erin Bartels [:Yes. That's how I choose anything that I write about. It's always something that I'm interested in and that I enjoy doing. So, if I get to spend extra time doing it and call it research.
Kristi Leonard [:I love that. So, when you were thinking about the characters, do they speak to you? Do you come up with the background first and then they come alive, or were they already alive in your head, like, knocking around?
Erin Bartels [:That's a good question. The character of Esther, who's the modern-day person, to me is very, she was already kind of fully formed in my mind of the type of person she would be, the person who is limited in some ways, but a lot of her limitations are the expectations she feels that others have for her and what she should be doing. And what is she, she's making excuses for not doing things that are a little scary.
Kristi Leonard [:Oh, that sounds so familiar.
Erin Bartels [:Yeah. That's been familiar to a lot of us.
Kristi Leonard [:I might know a few writers that have that problem.
Erin Bartels [:Right. But the character in the past timeline, Viviana was a little more difficult because she goes through so many different things that I have never gone through. And so, it's a matter of, you know, kind of putting yourself in that position at that time in your life, that age, and thinking how would this really feel and what would I be afraid of and what would I wish I could do that I couldn't do. And so, it's just, I use empathy when I'm developing characters. Like, what would it be like if I were this person?
Kristi Leonard [:So, do you find that when you're researching, when you're thinking about the character Viviana in 1800s and you are thinking about what would you do, how do you take yourself out of 2024? And do you do research about what's happening in the time and the, so explain that process.
Erin Bartels [:Certainly. I think one of the things that people will find a little unique about this book is that it's set in the Victorian age, but it's not in England or America, right? So, it's a time period that is very well established, especially in France, there are certain cultural rules for women and they can't go places without chaperones. They can't do a lot of things that you take for granted today. So, a lot of it was done reading their words, like the words of artists in that time, female artists, like Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond who actually have little cameos in the story.
Kristi Leonard [:Oh, so I didn't know if those were real artists.
Erin Bartels [:Those were real artists.
Kristi Leonard [:I didn't know that. That's so cool.
Erin Bartels [:Yeah. And they wrote a lot about their experiences being women artists at that time. And so, a lot of it has to do with just looking at what other people were saying about their work and whether they thought it was any good and why wasn't it? And people say a lot of awful things about women throughout history, and it's not hard to find like other people's opinions about them. So.
Kristi Leonard [:Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. That must have been pretty difficult to manage all of that. And so, when you go through the revision process, did you find that you had to fix, like, timeline type, like, something that couldn't happen? I've heard of that with other people where you'll read a book and be like, that couldn't happen.
Erin Bartels [:Right.
Kristi Leonard [:Like, did you find some of those things when you were going through the editing process?
Erin Bartels [:I'm usually pretty, I'm a stickler as I go along. So, if I run into something and I'm like, I don't know about that. Even the way somebody says something, if it rings too modern, I'll look it up and say, when did people start using this phrase and why? And so, I don't run into usually big things where I'm like, oh, shoot. I need to change the decade that this is set in because I've messed up somehow. I do my research as I go along. Like, I do a chunk in the beginning before I start writing, and then I continue.
Kristi Leonard [:Do you find that during the research process, new story lines or new smaller plot lines develop?
Erin Bartels [:Absolutely. Absolutely. So, it really is, especially for Viviana's story because her background is that she's from Catalonia, and Catalonia and Spain have had many times of conflict throughout history.
Kristi Leonard [:Oh, yeah.
Erin Bartels [:And so, one of the things that determined when this story would be set had to do with when a particular war was and because she was somehow involved in that, and that's why she had to leave Catalonia, and she's ended up in France. And having those sorts of time frame limitations is exciting to me because then you say, okay. What could happen at this time? What can't happen at this time? Oh, I've run into this thing and I had no idea that was even a thing. And so now I get to incorporate that into my story. And a lot of times, those things become very meaningful. Like, they turned into the theme that you're developing.
Kristi Leonard [:Absolutely. Probably more about the character too.
Erin Bartels [:Yeah. Certainly.
Kristi Leonard [:Definitely. So, what is the best place for folks to look for you? We always want people to be able to find you.
Erin Bartels [:Well, I am on Instagram, @erinbartelswrites, and I'm on Facebook at Erin Bartels author. And of course, you can find me just by Googling my name. I'll be there. It's me and a podiatrist in Indiana who has the same name. That's usually the top results.
Kristi Leonard [:No way. Okay. Alright. Now I'm curious. I'm going to do that. I’m going to look you up.
Erin Bartels [:Or maybe it's a dermatologist. One of the 2.
Kristi Leonard [:1 of the 2. Okay. What book or story inspires you the most?
Erin Bartels [:That is really, really difficult.
Kristi Leonard [:We like to leave you with the most difficult question.
Erin Bartels [:I’m one of those people who does not have a favorite movie, who does not have a favorite book, but I do think that there's a type of book that inspires me. So, when I think about the books that I spent the most time reading as a kid, they are typically kind of dark. They involve somebody whose world is kind of turned upside down and they have to survive or find a new way of looking at the world. So, like, things like, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Watership Down, A Wrinkle in Time, those were things that really attracted me as a kid. And I feel like that's something that feeds into what I write. I tend to write about people who have to reexamine their life or their viewpoint or the way that they see themselves or see others because of something that happened. And it might,
Kristi Leonard [:Sounds like women's fiction.
Erin Bartels [:Yeah. It might be a big thing, but it might be a very small thing, but they tend to be thoughtful books, you know?
Kristi Leonard [:Yeah. That is so awesome. I can totally see that in the books that I've read of yours. Well, believe it or not, we are already at 15 minutes. It went by so fast. I feel like we talked about so much, but it has been an absolute delight. Make sure you go out and get her book. It is absolutely delightful, and it sounds like she's going to be on lots of podcasts. So, just look her up. You're going to see her everywhere.
Erin Bartels [:I’m all over the place.
Kristi Leonard [:And her book comes out next week, so enjoy it.
Erin Bartels [:So exciting. Thanks a lot, Kristi.
Kristi Leonard [: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.
