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

When I met Kathy Sherbrooke at the retreat this year, I was excited to learn about her novel This Much Is True, which publishes September 18th from Sibylline Press. I was also interested in her entire book journey, as this marks her fifth publication! Kathy has a lot to share, from her first foray into publishing with the family memoir she published in 2011 (Finding Home), to securing interest from Hollywood and an agent for her debut novel, Fill The Sky. She’s worked with a small press (SixOneSeven Books), a mid-sized publisher (Pegasus), and now Sibylline Press. She’s been agented and unagented. What has remained consistent has been her writing community—starting with a class at Grub Street, where she ended up chairing the board for ten years!

I was really inspired by Kathy’s journey and what she shares here exemplifies that there are so many different ways to get your stories out into the world. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation!

About This Much Is True: A mother faces an impossible dilemma as her daughter’s future hangs in the balance

On her fifty-eighth birthday, Veronica Harmon feels blessed—with a fulfilling veterinary career, a wonderful marriage and three grown children, her youngest newly engaged and celebrating her first solo art show that very night. But when Veronica meets her daughter’s future in-laws, Ted and Belinda, who’ve flown across the country for the show, she is shocked to recognize Ted from an incident during high school that changed the trajectory of her life. Having never told a soul about that night, Veronica’s past reemerges like a live grenade.

Over the course of a pre-arranged weekend at the Harmon’s home intended to better acquaint the two families, Veronica unearths troubling memories, questions her own recollections and grapples with the impossible. If she quietly welcomes this man as a permanent part of her family she will be forced to live with a devastating lie, but if she reveals their shared history, she will expose her private shame and destroy her daughter’s future. Just when she thinks there is no viable solution, she has an epiphany that flips the script on what it means to be a survivor and the choices that are hers to make.

Buy Kathy’s novel on Bookshop.org!

​Katherine A. Sherbrooke​ is the award-winning author of four novels: the New York Times notable Leaving Coy’s Hill, which was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award; Fill the Sky, finalist for the Foreward INDIES Book of the Year and winner of an Independent Press Award, The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly, and her most recent, This Much Is True. Her work has also appeared in Cognoscenti and Zibby Magazine. She served as Chair of the Board of GrubStreet, the nation’s premier creative writing center, from 2013-2023 and lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts.

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Happy reading and writing,

Heather

founder + director of Northern California Writers’ Retreat

Carinn Jade is currently living her dream: her second novel, The Dahlia Suite, was just published by Atria (Simon & Schuster), and her debut novel, The Astrology House, is being developed by Peacock, with Christina Ricci set to star and executive produce! But dreams are rarely linear.

The first novel Carinn wrote was strong enough to get her an agent, but when it went on submission, no editors bit. Devastated, she went back to practicing law, but the need to write never left her alone; so she wrote another book. That one also didn’t find a publisher. She decided to switch genres, she also parted ways with her agent, who didn’t work in the thriller space. She wrote another novel, then began to strategically target the agents she thought would be perfect for her book, a story about an astrologist that she’d been percolating on for years. You’ll learn more about how she got her agent, and then how her debut novel was sold (in a two-book deal), in our conversation! We also discuss her podcast, Pop Fiction Women, where she has spent the past five years being invested in the literary community and talking with many authors about their novels. It was a great chat!

Carinn Jade is a lawyer, writer, and cohost of the Pop Fiction Women podcast. Her debut novel, The Astrology House, was a 2025 International Thriller Writers’ Awards finalist in the category of Best First Novel. The Dahlia Suite is her second novel.

About The Dahlia Suite: Three women come together to investigate a string of haunting disappearances in a tropical paradise.

When Paige arrives at Sueños, the Caribbean’s most exclusive resort on Beck Island, she’s eager to use the time away from her young son to shake off the writer’s block that has stifled her new career as an author.

Hollywood starlet Lindsay Law is on a mission of her own at Sueños: spiraling from a recent Oscar loss, she’s determined to find out why the winner in her category gave thanks to Mara Morgan, the legendary actress who owned Beck Island before her tragic death.

While Paige and Lindsay are drawn together by creative inspiration, Gabby, the resort’s concierge, is torn apart by the loss of a coworker and the mysterious appearance of a man from her past. Gabby still has the power to grant her guests’ most over-the-top requests, but she’s helpless against her own grief and confusion.

As the sun-soaked days of bliss morph into sinister connections, Paige, Lindsay, and Gabby are united by a shocking twist, and must race to untangle the knot of Beck Island’s mysteries before another woman vanishes.

Buy Carinn’s novels on ​Bookshop.org​!

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Happy reading and writing,

Heather

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat

What’s it like to become a debut author at seventy-one? Pretty exhilarating! I had a fantastic time speaking to our 2024 alum, Marianne Lonsdale, about the journey to publish her novel When the Road Curves (Sibylline Press, June 2026).

Marianne’s journey started a while back—when she was a new mother at forty-one, she started writing personal essays, sharing with a small group of writers. Little by little, she decided to pursue publication for those essays and later, she began to dabble in fiction. She founded the group “Write On Mamas,” a gathering of about forty mothers one day a month at the Mill Valley library. Their goal was to write for at least an hour and then they would have local authors come speak to them. It was this community and the writing community she’s continued to meet throughout her writing journey that has helped sustain her through this long road to publishing! It was a joy to get to speak to Marianne, and I hope you’ll take a listen!

Marianne Lonsdale writes fiction, personal essays and poetry. Her work has been published in several print anthologies and various online journals including The New York Times, Literary Mama and Pulse. She’s read at many events including San Francisco’s Litquake festival, and is honored to be an alumna of the Community of Writers, and The Napa Valley Writers Conference. She’s committed to youth literacy efforts and volunteers with 826 Valencia and the Oakland Literacy Coalition. She lives in Oakland with her husband and their dog, Ricky Ricardo.

About When the Road Curves: When The Road Curves follows thirty-six-year-old Nora as she navigates love, friendship, and loss in the Bay Area in the 1990s. Returning home to Oakland after spending a decade working and playing hard in New York City, Nora is at a crossroads—evaluating career choices and wondering if she wants marriage and children.

Then she meets Paul—a singer-songwriter who is gorgeous, attentive and great in bed—but struggles with anger issues. The road curves once more when her best friend Linda is diagnosed with AIDS forcing Nora to make life-altering decisions.

Buy Marianne’s novel on Bookshop.org!

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Thanks for reading and listening,

Heather Lazare

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat

When Lina Patton finished college, she did what every responsible adult (who secretly wants to be a writer) should do: she went into advertising to make money. For years, she fought the idea of being a writer—it was not the smart, organized, Type-A thing to do. But when she applied to the George Mason MFA program and got in, and then to the 2018 Northern California Writers’ Retreat and also got in, it seemed the universe was trying to tell her something.

Lina was working on a dark literary novel when I first met her. She signed with a literary agent for that novel (hi to our former Guest Literary Agent Danya Kukafka!). So how did she end up debuting with a soapy thriller rather than that dark literary novel? The answer is reflective of many stories we hear from debut novelists—the first book didn’t sell. Rather than give up, Lina kept going, and with the support of her agent and writing friends she made at NCWR, The Lake Club was born.

On the Book Journey Podcast, Lina and I talked about her persistence in becoming an author as well as her other artistic outlet: drawing. She calls herself a “doodler” and enjoys being able to sit down for ten minutes or an hour to create something tangible that doesn’t need hundreds of edits before it’s ready for a reader—it can immediately be appreciated. Here’s a bookmark she created for the retreat years ago:

Lina Patton​ is a writer, illustrator, and teacher. Originally from Maine, she moved to Minnesota at thirteen, trading the ocean for 10,000 lakes. Her work has appeared in ELLE, The Cut, Narrative, and Driftwood Press, among others. After seven years living abroad, she and her husband currently reside in Washington, DC, where she teaches Creative Writing at The George Washington University and co-produces the storytelling series Generation Women DC. The Lake Club is her first novel.

About The Lake Club: When Danika Crawley attends events at the Aldon Lakes Country Club, heads turn. Danika has it all—beauty, money, a successful husband, and two perfect children. She plans on making this summer her best season yet and has a secret weapon to secure the envy of her neighbors.

Augie Elling has lost it all. Reeling from a post-grad scandal amidst her now-former life in New York, she returns to Aldon Lakes with her tail between her legs. Augie wants to keep her head down, save money, and find a way to leave her hometown for good, but someone keeps distracting her.

Danika and Augie have one thing in common: they are both a little obsessed with Chat, the male nanny Danika hired for the summer. But, unbeknownst to either woman, Chat’s appearance in town sets off a chain reaction that threatens Aldon Lakes’ carefully maintained ecosystem. As the heat rises between the three of them, the truth behind a long-buried scandal comes to light, and everyone at the club must reckon with the consequences.

The Lake Club is both an addictive, rollicking beach read, and a stylish, deft exploration of a lesser-known region of American wealth.

Pre-order Lina’s novel on ​Bookshop.org​! Visit her Etsy shop at byLinaPatton!

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Thanks so much for listening,

Heather Lazare

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat