This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on August 5, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.
This week's Creating While Parenting interview is with Stephanie Kate Strohm, a YA/MG author and mom to a four-year-old son. Stephanie's next book is a YA graphic novel Shakespeare retelling—Twelfth Grade Night, the first book in the Arden High series, cowritten with Molly Horton Booth and illustrated by Jamie Green—and it looks like so much fun.
Here's Stephanie's website, and here's where you'll find her on Instagram and Twitter. Don't forget to BUY HER BOOKS!
Read on for Stephanie's answers to my three questions.
1. How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker?
I'm a writer! These days, what kind of writer I am feels like it is ever-changing, but the one constant is always the words on the page. After a decade of writing contemporary YA romance (the kind that makes you smile, not cry), last year I released my first middle-grade book (Once Upon a Tide: A Mermaid's Tale), and this year sees the release of my first graphic novel, Twelfth Grade Night, the first book in the Arden High graphic novel series of Shakespeare retellings! When I first became an author, I never anticipated writing graphic novels, but in the past few years, between Arden High and adapting Disney's Twisted Tales series into graphic novels, I've spent the vast majority of my time working on graphic novels.
2. How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life?
Molly Horton Booth and I first started working on the pitch for the Arden High series while I was pregnant...and that baby bump will be a four year old kid when Twelfth Grade Night comes out! I was learning how to write a graphic novel at the exact same time I was learning how to be both a writer and a parent. Learning to write a graphic novel meant poring over other people's scripts to learn how to write not only the dialogue, but the panel descriptions as well, and understanding the immense freedom that comes with using images as well as words...but also the limitations of the genre, like being aware that there are only so many words you can fit in a speech bubble, and only so many panels you can fit on a page. (And so many exact page numbers to hit...who knew I would be so bad at counting...) Learning to write as a parent meant utilizing every single minute of free time I had—no more waiting for inspiration to strike. Especially after Covid hit and I no longer had any sort of childcare, inspiration had to strike at naptime, or it wasn't happening.
3. What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days?
As hard as it was writing only during naptime and bedtime during that first Covid year, it felt like the only thing that kept me connected to my creativity—that connected me to any sense of self or identity I had outside of "mommy"—was the time I spent at my computer. And these days, even though I have much more time to write now that my kid's in preschool, I find I connect to my creativity the exact same way: when it's just me, my laptop, and the blank page.
