Today I am super excited to share an interview with author Kathryn Ormsbee. Kathryn writes young adult and middle grade fiction (the latter of which are published under K.E. Ormsbee) and got her first agent when she was just twenty years old! She has a total of six books currently published, with two more coming out in 2019. Her most recent book, The House in Poplar Wood, is a macabre folk tale set in rural Tennessee and is the perfect autumn read. Kathryn was a delight to talk to, sharing her advice on being published so young, how traveling and working in different mediums has influenced her writing, and the importance of stories in today’s political climate. We both graduated as English majors from Samford University, so I knew she would be fabulous, and she didn’t disappoint!
You can click on the video below to listen to my full interview with her (about 35 minutes long), and I also picked out some of my favorite parts of the interview to highlight below. Enjoy!
So you were comparatively young when you got an agent. Do you have any advice to share for other young writers looking to be published?
I suggest first do your research on your agents. There’s been a little bit of drama in the publishing community about agents who haven’t been acting in the best interest of their clients or been dishonest, so just try as much as you can to do your research. Especially if you’re young, it’s easier for people to take advantage of you, which it shouldn’t be, but it is. So a true agent will never charge you money. They will 
always only work on commission, so their interest will be aligned with yours—when you sell a book, that’s the only time they make money. So that’s more practical, nitty gritty advice, but on a larger scale, just keep writing and keep reading. The advice that I have heard from several authors who are mid-list authors like myself, all the way up to NYT bestselling authors, is you just have to keep writing. If your book doesn’t sell or you don’t get an agent, write another one. If it does sell and you do wonderfully and you get all the good reviews, keep writing another book. That’s the only thing as author you can really control. You can’t control cover design or the title of your book or how it’s publicized, anything about the marketing plan, but you can control the quality of your words, so persevere, don’t give up. It’s an industry where you have to develop some thick skin because even after all the rejections, once you do get in, you’ll still get people who just don’t like your book and you just have to be okay with that and keep on keeping on.
The House in Poplar Wood is a spooky, autumnal folk tale set in rural Tennessee about three middle grade characters: twin brothers Felix and Lee and the daughter of their family enemy, Gretchen. The brothers serve two Shades, Death and Memory, and Gretchen is the daughter of a Summoner, who can summon the Shades. When a local girl dies in town, the three join forces to try and get to the bottom of the murder, uncover dark secrets about the town, and break an agreement that’s kept Lee and Felix’s family separated. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea?
Generally when people ask about inspiration for stories, I’m at a loss. Because it’s often times a hybrid of a lot of different ideas. But with this one I can actually point to a source inspiration. And that’s the Brothers Grimm tale “Godfather Death.” It’s a really creepy tale—as most Brothers Grimm tales are—of how a young man who serves as an apprentice to Death and follows him all around as he makes his rounds and reaps lives. There’s this lore that, depending on where [Death] stands, whether at the head or the foot of the bed, the person is going to live or die. All is going well, until the woman the apprentice has fallen in love with comes up on Death’s appointment list. And he decides to trick Death by turning the bed around—which, you’d think Death would be smarter than that—but that’s the general idea.
I’ve always been fascinated by stories about Death incarnate and what that says about us as a society at the time. I think it gives us a good lens for how we view death, how we view life itself, and so I wanted to write my own story about Death himself. So the mythology sort of sprawled out from there. I also wanted to set a book in Tennessee because I spent a lot of my time growing up in Appalachia and I grew up in Kentucky so that region itself means a lot to me. I also wanted to write a book that is my love letter to autumn—that’s what I call The House in Poplar Wood. Something that was thoroughly spooky and creepy and felt like it belonged in the month of October.
You’ve published both middle grade books and YA books. What have you learned from writing and publishing for different ages?
I find it really refreshing to write—in some ways there are similarities in the books, but in a lot of ways they’re very different projects, my middle grade and my young adult, and it’s refreshing during the book process, once I come out of a hermit cave having drafted a young adult realistic book, to dive back into edits for a more fantastical middle grade book. It kind of keeps things fresh, keeps me from wanting to pull my hair out. Most of my middle grade tend to be in third person as well, and that’s very different from the first person point of view I generally use for my young adult. So it keeps things interesting, but it also helps me to sharpen different writing skills.
So in light of everything going on culturally and politically now, you know, it’s a very controversial and divided time, why do you think it’s still important to tell stories?
I think it’s more important than ever, because from my perspective, I think stories involve empathy. Good stories involve empathy. They put you in the shoes of another person with different experiences from you and they allow you to see the world, however temporarily, through their eyes. So I think it’s more important than ever now that we read books from diverse perspectives written by marginalized authors. There’s been a really big push for it in the industry and I hope that continues to happen. That we read the perspectives of people of color, from people in the queer community, from people of different cultural experiences than we do. It’s really easy, especially in today’s political climate, to just surround yourself with all the people who think the way you do. I know I’m guilty of it. I think it’s a human instinct. And to live inside of an echo chamber where you create an ‘us versus them’ mentality and everything is black white and you set up strawmen and you bet them and you engage with internet trolls and you don’t actually view the world through someone else’s perspective. It’s really easy to get self-centered. And I think books are more important than ever because they allow you to break away from that and to step outside of that circle. Hopefully, if you’re making choices to read books that you wouldn’t necessarily pick up or books from a perspective you’ve never encountered before. I think they do such a good job of educating and increasing our humanity. I think they still have really important work to do. I know I’m biased because I’m a writer, but I wholly believe in the power of stories to transform people’s lives and perspectives.
Which of your characters would you go on a road trip with?
It would be Gretchen Whipple, from The House in Poplar Wood! I really love Gretchen because she’s a lot of what I’m not, but I would want to be. She’s just very gutsy and doesn’t care who she’s…not offending, but she’s a very determined character. She’s not afraid to break windows to get what she wants. I think that if we went on a road trip there would be so many good stories to come out of it.
(FYI–This post includes affiliate links. I promise to never recommend anything that I haven’t loved and think you should try!)
If you want to learn more about Kathryn and her books, visit her website.
Buy The House in Poplar Wood here.
