Monica Wood: On the Necessity of a Writing Group

Monica Wood is a novelist, memoirist, and playwright; the 2019 recipient of the Maine Humanities Council Carlson Prize for contributions to the public humanities; and a recipient of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Distinguished Achievement Award for contributions to the literary arts. She lives in Portland, Maine. Follow her on Facebook.

Monica Wood

Photo by Dan Abbott

In this interview, Monica discusses how a voice from within helped inspire hew new novel, How to Read a Book, her hope for readers, and more!

Name: Monica Wood
Literary agent: Gail Hochman
Book title: How to Read a Book
Publisher: Mariner
Release date: May 7, 2024
Genre/category: Literary fiction; contemporary fiction
Previous titles: The One-in-a-Million Boy, When We Were the Kennedys, Ernie’s Ark, Any Bitter Thing, My Only Story, Secret Language, The Pocket Muse (vol. 1 and vol. 2)
Elevator pitch: Fresh out of prison after killing a kindergarten teacher in a drunk-driving crash, Violet Powell finds unlikely allies in rebuilding her life: a retired English teacher who ran the prison book club, and the widower of her victim. Life-affirming and deeply humane.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I was in a mild but persistent depression in the summer of 2019, plagued by insomnia, thinking about hanging up my quill once and for all. This was before the pandemic, and I wonder now if the whole thing might have been a premonition.

One of the weirdest symptoms of my malaise was a constant, distant monologue in my head that I knew was a fictional character waiting to be born. I told her to please go away, find another writer, I’m just not up to another novel, thank you very much. One night in late summer, I woke around three, grabbed a notebook, crept downstairs, sat on the bottom step, and by the light of a streetlight coming in through my screen door I wrote what would become Chapter 1 in the voice of a young woman struggling toward self-forgiveness. The rest of the novel unspooled from there.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I normally edit heavily as I go, so that the “first” draft is the equivalent of a third or fourth draft, and from there it’s draft after draft until it feels whole. This time was different. I sped along (“sped” used very relatively here) until I had a true first draft. I still wrote many, many drafts thereafter, but I finished How to Read a Book in record time (for me): two years. That’s half my normal. As we get older, time gets shorter, and we start writing faster! Who knew I had it in me?

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Oh, boy, this is a doozy of a question. My book was originally scheduled for May 2023. The six or so months before publication are critical to the life of a book; lots of things must happen (including delightful interviews like this one!) that require the author’s full cooperation: approve the cover, complete the copyedits, go over the proofs, attend meetings with editors, publicists, sales folks, marketing.

Just as all this was gearing up, the HarperCollins union went on strike, a devastating turn of events for a book already positioned in the pipeline. As someone from a dyed-in-the-wool union family, my choice was crystal clear: Pull the book until the strike ended. The strike lasted three long months, and I feared the book would lose its chance altogether. But sometimes karma is your friend; How to Read a Book was published after all—exactly one year later, with an enthusiastic publishing team and a grateful author.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

This is the first book I’ve written with the moral support of a writing group, and I don’t know how I ever wrote anything without them. All of us are established, serious novelists (Bill Roorbach, Kate Christensen, Lewis Robinson, and Sarah Braunstein) who read literally hundreds of pages at a time for each other. We’ve become a family of sorts, have become proprietary about each other’s work, investing a lot of love and time and effort to make ourselves better at what we do. I never thought I needed a writing group, and the “surprise” is that I required one!

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

We humans are not the worst thing we have ever done, nor the best; we reside on a continuum of human strength and frailty, a continuum stuffed with all manner of jackassery and grace. To forgive that messy dichotomy, in ourselves and in others, forms the heart of the human condition.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Read widely.

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