Have you read Under Story? When Chloe Benjamin joined us as Author-in-Residence at the retreat in 2024, she was in edits but wasn't ready to talk about the book--and even now, it's such a hard book to discuss without giving away what's so miraculous about it! What a joy to see a writer spread themselves, to create something entirely original that sits with you long after you've put down the novel. I hope you'll pick up a copy if you haven't had a chance yet! In this conversation, we talked about how she first found her agent, what it was like on submission for her first novel (spoiler: it didn’t sell!), and what happened the next time around. We talked about the industry as a whole (bring back more trade paperback originals!), and what it’s like to go from being a low priority book to a lead title. I hope you’ll give the pod a listen!

​Chloe Benjamin is the New York Times bestselling author of Under Story, The Immortalists, and The Anatomy of Dreams.

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick for September 2026, Under Story was also an Indie Next selection, a Barnes and Noble Book Club pick, and an Amazon Editors’ selection. The Immortalists—a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, LibraryReads favorite, and #1 Indie Next pick—was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and others. The Anatomy of Dreams received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Originally from San Francisco, CA, Benjamin is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives with her husband and two Maine Coon cats in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About Under Story: “We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”​​At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family.​But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?​A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.

Buy Chloe’s novels on Bookshop.org!

A quick reminder! If you’d like to join us as the Poppy Retreats in Spring 2027, get your application in by midnight on November 5th! More details on our website and here’s an overview of who will be there!

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Happy reading and writing,

Heather

Heather Lazare, founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat

For the Book Journey this month, I chatted with our 2020 and 2023 alum, Andrea Thome, whose latest romance novel, Mine Again, publishes October 13th! On the pod we talked about The Hesse Creek series, Andrea’s first three books, and how she decided to publish them through Girl Friday Productions starting in 2016. After attending the virtual retreat in 2020, Andrea landed an agent and had hoped to get a traditional publishing deal with her next novel. When that didn’t happen, she parted ways with her agent, but kept writing, getting another agent down the line who represented an earlier version of what would become Mine Again, the novel Andrea was working on at the retreat in 2023. Although she didn’t get a deal with a publishing house with her second agent, she kept writing and in 2025, she decided to undertake publishing this new series, The Sunflower Series, herself. She’s learned a lot about becoming her own publisher and went all in, hiring a PR team to ramp up preorders and attention ahead of publication. It has been an incredible learning experience!

As with many of our Book Journey conversations, Andrea proves that if you want to get your work out in the world, you’re absolutely capable of doing it! I hope our conversation inspires you!

​Andrea Thome​ is the author of four romance novels, the most recent of which is Mine Again. When Andrea was still in college, she started working as a sports reporter for a local television station. She went on to anchor both sports and news for affiliates in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, where she interviewed and fell in love with her husband of almost thirty years, Hall of Fame Baseball player, Jim Thome. Andrea won both Ben Franklin and NAIA awards for her popular Hesse Creek Trilogy, set in Eastern Tennessee and Aspen, two of her favorite places in the world. An avid baseball and hockey fan, Andrea also loves hiking, traveling, and cheering on her two children.

About Mine Again: Delilah Spencer is a rolling stone. A big city attorney from Chicago on a temporary work assignment in Sunflower, Montana.

Ranger Beckham’s Sunflower roots run deep. Three generations to be exact. The high school band director and single father is adrift, fresh out of a marriage of convenience. He’s all but given up on finding true love.

Until he bumps into Delilah, the fixer with trust issues who has a hard and fast rule: never get attached to the places she visits or the people in them. They strike a deal when the chemistry between them burns too hot to ignore, convincing themselves they’ll be able to part as friends when Delilah’s gig is up, no matter how scorching things get between them.

But the slower pace in tight-knit Sunflower is a balm for Delilah’s restless soul, and it becomes impossible to imagine leaving Ranger or Montana behind.

Will Delilah break her own rules and finally put down roots, or will she cut and run when her contract is up, leaving Ranger and the life she never knew she wanted in the rearview mirror?

A small-town, friends-to-lovers, found-family, single-dad romance, Mine Again is the first book in the Sunflower Series.

Buy Andrea’s novel on ​Bookshop.org​!

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Happy reading and writing,

Heather Lazare, founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat