Fierce Sisters, Cool Stories and Poison Plants: Amy Stewart

激烈的姐妹、酷炫的故事和有毒的植物：艾米·斯图尔特

Good Life Project

2015-10-09

58 分钟

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At first glance, you might think Amy Stewart had an obsession with gardens and bugs. She's written a series of bestselling books on the topic and had her garden of poison plants hailed as one of the 18 strangest gardens in the world by Popular Mechanics. Underneath that, though, lies a far deeper devotion, one that's fueled her since she was a kid. Amy Stewart is possessed by the craft of writing and storytelling. It's not so much gardens or bugs, it's the stories of people that arise out of those places and creatures that fascinate her. And the opportunity to tell them in her wonderful voice. After tremendous success as a nonfiction writer, Amy decided to do something most people in the industry view as a huge risk. Having built a large audience around her nonfiction creations, she stumbled upon a bigger story that had to be told. One of three beautifully colorful sisters who decided to take the law into their own hands, leading to an outcome nobody saw coming. But the story was old, the research was incomplete. There were gaps even living relatives couldn't fill. So she as forced to fill them in with her own imagination and write the story as historical fiction. When that book, Girl Waits With Gun, came out, Amy was faced with the usual anxious waiting every author faces. Would people like it? Had she done the story right? Heaped on top of those emotional questions were whether the families of these real-characters would feel she'd done right by them. And, whether her long-won nonfiction readers would follow her down the fiction path. We talk about all these questions, plus an exploration of the craft of writing and storytelling in this week's conversation. We talk about the writing life, and her time growing up in Texas. We also talk about indie bookstores, what it's like to own one (she does) and how that universe is changing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stories help us work out for ourselves how we're gonna live our lives, you know, how we're gonna make moral choices.
The world of writing books is a pretty interesting and sometimes bizarre world.
One of the sort of unspoken rules is that you either write fiction or you write nonfiction, and you build a following.
You build a readership and a career around one of those things.
But as a general rule, it's brutally hard to switch from one to the other because they're completely different.
And if you do that, you take a huge risk at your audience, your readership, and your publisher abandoning you.
Well, that's exactly what this week's guest, Amy Stewart, has done coming up.
She actually built a tremendous career as an internationally best selling and award winning author, writing very often about gardening and botany and bugs and plants, and, in fact, that she's even named by popular mechanics as having one of the 18 strangest gardens in the world featuring poison plants.
But with her newest book, girl waits with guns, she's decided to make a really big change.
She stumbled upon a story researching her last book that she thought just has to be told, and she developed it into historical fiction.
Now, a lot of people would say, but your audience doesn't know you as that, and you're taking a really big risk by doing that.
So I wanted to have that conversation with Amy.
What's it like to be in sort of, like the middle of that, to be writing this and just really following a voice saying, this is the thing that I have to write now, and I don't know how it's going to be received.
So that's just one of the things that we dive into, along with just her beautiful career, her deep, mad passion for the craft of storytelling and language and writing and what drives her and what will continue to move her as she grows her career.
I'm Jonathan Fields.
This is good luck project.
I'm so excited to just jam with you a little bit, and I have so many questions just about you and your path, your journey, your story, however you want to phrase it.
You grew up in Texas?
Arlington, Texas.
Yes.

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Fierce Sisters, Cool Stories and Poison Plants: Amy Stewart

激烈的姐妹、酷炫的故事和有毒的植物：艾米·斯图尔特

Good Life Project

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