Greetings Inklings!

This month’s Ink Splat Author Interview features author Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic. She has produced a diverse portfolio of work and is particularly excited about her upcoming release, Hummingbird Season. During the interview, Stephanie spoke with us about who has influenced her work, the value of bringing authenticity into the writing process, and the crucial things she wishes she had known about writing when she was younger.

You can follow Stephanie’s writing journey at www.stephanielucianovic.com and pick up a copy of her book at Bookshop.org or your favorite local bookstore.

Writing Challenge

“Let’s Talk About Lunch”

Sometimes things in our lives that seem to be the most boring or mundane are the exact places that need to be mined for hidden gems. Think of a geode: it looks plain and like an ordinary rock on the outside, but crack it open and you find crystal caverns full of jagged edges and sparkling light. Lunch. Let’s talk about lunch. “Lunch?!” I hear you moan, “That’s boring!” No, my friends, lunch is a geode.

Long ago, some famous writer wrote about describing your lunch and really digging into every element of it. I did exactly that and when I cracked that geode open, I found such treasures of memory, feeling, and opinions what bananas did to a brown bag lunch (stunk it all up) as well as the best bread for sandwiches that it became a major part of the first book I ever wrote.

Write about a lunch that meant something to you. It could be because of what you ate — good or bad — or who you were with. It could be about who made that lunch or who you were with when you were eating it. It could be the moment in time when you had that lunch. It could be about the food and how it tasted. It could be about all of those things and also how they came together — how they bounced off each other or influenced each other.

Nothing about your life is boring or mundane. Every moment means something. Because you lived in those moments, and when you pull them out, you can give your writing life, fire, and truth. It might seem like a tiny spark, but it blazes bright and strong.

Tell us about a writer who has been influential for your work.

Julie Fogliano. Five or so years ago, I had no idea I wanted to write children’s books. I mean, I had been a writer for nearly 15 years but I had only written for adults. While I had wanted to be a children’s book editor back in the day, I had never considered writing those books myself. I didn’t think I had the ability to do so.

However, that all changed when my mother-in-law gave my youngest son (then barely a year old) Julie Fogliano and Erin Stead’s book And Then It’s Spring. I was immediately captivated by the lyrical voice and that it was written in second person. I was also intrigued that one could write a picture book that wasn’t character-driven and didn’t have a traditional narrative arc. That kind of book seemed to be breaking all the picture book rules I had internalized over the years and naively thought were written in stone. I was so in love with everything about that book that it made me want to see if I could write picture books like that. “I’ll just try one and see if I can get it published,” I told myself. Well, about 100 books later (not all published, of course), here we are!

What do you think makes a good story?

Every good story has a bit of truth stuck throughout. That’s not to say what you write has to be a true story or even one of non-fiction, it’s more that when you infuse your stories with a truth you feel deep inside — something you experienced, something you truly understand at your core — it gives them a kind of life that doesn’t exist when something is wholly made-up. For instance, in my middle grade novel, I took dialogue from my sons — actual sentences or terms they had said and used at a certain age and that I had recorded in their baby diaries — and I put them in the little brother’s mouth, word-for-word. It made Hugo come alive and turned him into everyone’s favorite character in the book (even though he wasn’t even the main character).

Another bit of truth in that same novel is that there’s a scene where Minerva (the main character) is shamed by a friend’s mother about her eating habits. I experienced that as a picky eating kid and drew on a very specific and painful experience in order to write the scene the way I did.

If you could, what is a piece of advice that you would give to your younger writing self?

It’s okay to be scared of rejection. It’s okay to feel hurt when people pass on so many of your stories. It’s even okay to give up and announce to everyone around you that you never want to write another word again.

Rejections are painful and awful and sometimes you really do need to take breaks away from writing to recharge your emotional stores as well as your creativity. Your writing will still be there when you’re ready to pick it up again.

A special thank you to Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic for sharing with us! 

Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic writes books in the San Francisco Bay Area surrounded by a few kids, a few cats, and one husband.

She is the author of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Eat the Foods We Hate (2012), The End of Something Wonderful (2019), Hello, Star (2021), The League of Picky Eaters (2021), What is Hope (2023), Hummingbird Season (coming soon 2024), Touch the Sky (coming soon 2024), Zombie and the Brain are Friends (coming soon 2025) and When Breathing is Too Loud (coming soon 2025).

Stephanie still sleeps with the teddy bear she had as a baby, she has a bellybutton phobia, and she was born with six wisdom teeth (she doesn’t think this makes her any wiser than the average chewer but it does give her a biting sense of humor.) Her favorite words are “knelt” and “cloak.”

She is represented by Jennifer Laughran at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. You can follow Stephanie’s writing journey at www.stephanielucianovic.com.

Check out Stephanie’s book and all of our recent Ink Splat authors’ works at our Bookshop.org Store.