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Cassandra’s life was changed forever when she was taken captive by a haunted college yearbook as an Ohio University senior in the summer of 2004, though it would be some time before she set to work on crafting a novel around the experience.
She lives in central Ohio with her wife, house rabbits, and video games.
Most readers probably don’t know this, but in January, shortly after starting The Redhead Notes, I put out a call for a book set in the 1920s that told a love story. You responded within 24 hours. How did you find that tweet and what made you respond?
Totally by accident! The algorithm decided to show me your tweet that day, for whatever reason. I don’t remember if it was on my feed or someone else’s. But I saw it and I was like, “Oh god. This is too perfect not to respond. She’s asking for MY NOVEL.” I haven’t had the best luck promoting my book online – it feels like waking up every day, stretching into the sunrise, and being like “Another great day to tie myself to the back of a truck and get my face dragged across the pavement!” I used to think this story was something most people could relate with, but it’s not. Courtney’s a misfit for a reason, and people aren’t interested in things they can’t relate with. And with you, I expected to be ignored. But your tweet was too perfect to pass up; I had to at least tell you about it.
Imagine my surprise when you messaged me back asking for details.
Mary, Everything is hard to categorize because there are so many different elements to it. Modern fiction. Historical fiction. Time Travel Romance. LGBTQ+. Action. Magical Realism. Yet all these genres work together in the context of your story. Did you set out to write a story with these elements or did they emerge naturally as the story developed?
I don’t think I really considered genre during the writing process. The time travel romance thing – I didn’t even know that was a genre when I was writing the book, but from the earliest half-readable versions of Mary, I mean the ones I was writing when I was in the middle of that whole weird episode that inspired all this, yeah, Mary was always the love interest. The main character was in love with Mary, it was one of those love at first sight things and it was the core of what pulled her back in time, so yeah, it was the core of the story, too. And if I set out to write anything at all, I think some part of my brain starts with fantasy. I think fantasy is in my DNA from all those years playing D&D and reading Dragonlance, so…leopards and spots, I guess. So…I’ve got a girl in love with a girl from eighty years ago, how do I get her there? What happens? Somehow magic always enters the picture, and swords and killing people. And there’s the action, too, because everything has to be fast-paced with me. Historical Fiction and Magical Realism happen when I set it in Ohio and become hellbent on making it as real as possible, making it a visual experience, so…I guess some genres happen naturally, some happen because I don’t really know how to write anything else, and others happen as features of my personality.
One of the first things I said to you is that this is a book that breaks the rules. This is true in the formatting and the story itself, but it somehow all works! Do you think it breaks the rules and was that intentional?
That might be the best compliment anyone could give me. :) I’d like to hope it breaks all the rules! I’ve never been a fan of rules. You can’t create art with rules any more than you can build a house out of melted ice cream. You can do accounting with rules, or geometry or carpentry or a lobotomy. But art ceases to be art the instant you’re told what you can or can’t create. Then it’s just a painting or a sound or a paragraph.
I think on some level it might have been intentional; I don’t think it was conscious. Part of it might have been the authors I’d been reading, the distinctive styles I’d picked up – Chuck Palahniuk, Frank McCourt – and Frank McCourt especially, like, there are no rules. The only thing I really wanted to do was to tell the world what was hurting me and what my deepest wishes were, and I wanted to talk about those things exactly how I had experienced them or how I felt them. And I don’t think I’ve met anyone else who has experienced the weird stuff I have, with the archives and with, well…I think we’re coming to that question next, right?
In your author’s note you reference what inspired you to write Mary, Everything. Can you share a bit of that with readers?
This book had been a long time coming, actually; there’s a lot of my life in it. In the summer of 2004, I was working at my university archives. It was this big scary turning point in my life, this kind of calm before a nasty storm. I’d just finished my senior year and things didn’t look good for me – I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. But just like Courtney, I got a new assignment at the Archives, and it was a lot like in the story – I had to catalog this collection from this famous big band artist at my college and write his bio. I started with his yearbooks, and it wasn’t long until this weird feeling came over me. Soon I started feeling all these emotions, all this longing and nostalgia when I looked through them. They felt like my memories, and before I knew it, I was living in a daze. My body was in 2004 but the rest of me was in the 1920s. I was always excited to go to work in the morning so I could spend all day with those pictures and those pages.
I’d go back to my apartment in the evening and just be cold and lonely and dead inside because I felt so far away from people who had somehow become dear friends and places that had become deeply important to me. My roommate said I was just gone for like a month and a half; I was just a body in the room with a thousand-yard stare. I spent a lot of time in these fugues, just hours where I’d sit and wander back to the 1920s. Being there gave me this sense of love and belonging I’d never felt before. I hated trips back to my hometown on the weekends because people could sense that I was far away and they kept trying to shake me out of it. I started feeling a disconnect with the present, like I didn’t belong here, and in a way I think people sensed that. People in general started treating me with a lot more loathing and hostility, like I was some pathogen or foreign body, while the people closest to me behaved with this sort of frenzied denial where they were determined to believe everything was exactly the same as it always had been. I grew frustrated and sad that I couldn’t escape completely, that I couldn’t just vanish into the night and be in the 1920s forever. I wanted to go home, and the 2000s weren’t home anymore – my life was just this ugly place full of a few lunatic friends and hostile strangers, and nobody knew who I was.
Life eventually went on, and the fugues dried up, and most of me was pulled back here against my will. But something had changed. I’d experienced living in another time, another life, and you don’t just forget that and leave it behind. I’d always been weird, a bit apart in the crowd, but my inexplicable time slip experience just amplified that. I don’t know if this guy – the one whose collection I’d worked on – had shared his experiences with me. Maybe he had, maybe it was kind of like one of those things where a grandfatherly figure opens up to you and shares his reminisces with you; it’s an endearing thought. But if it’s from beyond the grave, then it’s a more spiritual thing and those experiences are imprinted right onto you, because someone who has passed on can’t just sit at a table and tell you stories – they have to show you, and it’s like being hooked right into their emotions. That makes it your experience as much as theirs – it means it happened to you.
Life got really hard for a long time, as it does in your twenties, but I always felt like I left part of me back in college. I spent years trying to think of a way to go back. It wasn’t until about seven years ago that I wondered, ‘what if it isn’t college I’m trying to get back to as much as it is the 1920s? What if I left part of me there?’ I’d see grainy stock footage from the 20s, girls walking down the street arm-in-arm, and it would keep me up at night sobbing. I felt like a ghost. So as a writer, I thought, “is it possible to recapture any of this through a novel?” I mean, I’d written the foundations of a story all the way back in 2004, after all this happened. Could I build on that?
The minute I decided to do it, I felt whole again. Only one thing mattered – somehow making it so I could tell this story to the world. I could wrap fiction around it so I could do what we all want – get a second chance, defeat childhood bullies, and get back to where I belonged.
So I spent the next five years or so trying to figure out how to turn it into a novel people would actually want to read. That was nightmare mode.
This is your debut novel and the first in The Flapper Covenant series. What was your experience with creative writing prior to this novel?
I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t write. Words always came to me more easily than anything else; I was always the odd little girl with a mouthful of words for any situation I was in, anyone who was mistreating me, whatever. Those words were always jostling over each other to get out and I just sounded awkward and dorky. In junior high, I wrote novels in study hall because it was so damn boring and I had no idea what else to do with my time. In the spring and summer of eighth grade, I started writing a novel around my fantasies of traveling back to the Middle Ages with my friends; I guess the time travel thing started early. Then I learned what D&D was, and that it had fantasy novels, and that’s really where I got my whole literary start – in a really non-literary place with dragons and spells. I ran a long D&D game in college that was really well-received; I started a novel around that but I was always less confident about the authorship itself than I was about running the game. Of course, it was right after college ended that I began my long flirtation with homelessness, and maybe some people can write a novel living in a car, but I sure couldn’t. But once things settled, I did the whole world-building thing over again when my wife introduced me to her ideas for an epic sci-fi story. I wrote some really good stuff but it was never very well received when I showed it to others. I was soft, I let that get to me. Maybe part of me let people convince me I didn’t have any talent.
Long story short, I wrote and thought and planned a lot but never published anything for anyone. I was like one of those girls in high school that wears sexy outfits every day and acts like a total tease but turns into a blushing virgin when someone mentions relationships or sex. For reasons that might be obvious by now, that wasn’t gonna work with the 1920s thing, with Mary, Everything.
I’m always curious about the author’s writing process when the book contains multiple first-person perspectives. You did a fantastic job of organizing and executing these perspectives and, I believe, that is why it worked. How did you write the various perspectives? Did you switch back and forth between characters or did you write from one perspective for a longer period and then reorganize it?
Thank you! I think I was always switching back and forth. I did a year of this Performing Arts vocational program in high school – it was this intensive program where you did drama half of the day instead of the normal high school stuff. So I think I came to see writing as performance art more than just…writing, I guess. D&D really trains you like this, too – when you’re writing an adventure for your group, you’re constantly thinking about how your friends’ characters are going to react to things. It helps put you in other people’s shoes, and if you’re a DM in that D&D group, you’re constantly switching from one personality to another anyway. Writing a novel is actually easier, because in a spiritual kind of way, these girls are actually part of you. They’re eager to speak to you and through you so all you have to do is learn to chill, put yourself on the back burner, and let them take over. They’re usually happy to write their part of the story, especially if you have really powerful personalities like Sadie and Courtney.
I blame my wife. ^.~ I’ve always been interested in science but she was the one that started our longstanding tradition of relaxing in bed with science documentaries – evolution, astronomy, physics, everything. When I was helping her with her sci-fi world (I should say our sci-fi world), we were always devouring all the latest physics stuff we could get our hands on – quantum physics, theoretical physics, and especially time travel stuff. I’ve always thought it was a fun idea to explain magic in a more scientific way, but years of exposing myself to Brian Greene and Michio Kaku made me someone who couldn’t really be happy unless everything was solid, everything made sense. And maybe part of me was insecure about the idea of some know-it-all d-bag on Youtube poking holes in my systems. Part of it was also that I wanted things to be as immersive as they could be for the reader. I want this story to be real for you. Like, too real. Like, “I liked this better when it was just a book but I’m at Braddock College now” real. It seemed like the best way to do that was by creating logical, airtight systems where 2+2 always equals 4.
The last thing I wanted was to write stories where kids waved sticks and jabbered nonsense and got these looks of wonder on their faces when the soundtrack became all whimsical.
Certain characters such as Courtney/Sadie and Courtney/Mary seem to have an instant connection. What do you think drew them to each other?
I’m silly in the way that I’ve always kinda liked the “love at first sight” trope. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to most people but it does to me. I think Courtney is tied to Sadie and Mary (and Nettie, to an extent) in ways that defy rational explanation; they’re tied across time and across universes. It will be revealed soon just why Mary and Courtney are tied in this way (I call it a sort of entanglement) – or at least, mostly. I’ll leave some of that up in the air. But if Courtney had been born in the universe she was supposed to be, she and Mary would have been one of those couples you see in English movies set in the countryside – they’d have grown up really close and would have gotten married, probably. But even though Courtney was thrown into Exile (the word I use for the wrong universe), their connection stayed intact. Actually, it was partly Mary that kept drawing Courtney back into the “past”, if you want to call it that.
Sadie is interesting, too. I think they have a sort of otherworldly connection, but I think what really connects Sadie and Courtney in the book is that, despite coming from very different economic backgrounds, they were both subjected to a certain amount of trauma by their families, and they both had these enormously painful things happen to them that crippled them in ways. They both had to develop a lot of strength and determination to overcome these injustices. They were both laughed at and bullied. But somehow they survived – no thanks to their families. I think they see those deep reservoirs of hurt and betrayal in each other, and they see each other’s strength and nerve and intelligence – and loyalty. And Courtney shows Sadie kindness in a moment where she’s weak and in despair. I think it’s entirely natural that they fall for each other as deeply as they do.
Do you identify with any of the women in the book? If so, who and why?
I think I identify with most of them. :-) Courtney is obviously me. I mean, obviously. One of my writing partners (and an early Flapper Covenant beta reader), Dave, actually calls me Courtney more often than he calls me Cassie. Courtney’s just a more idealized version of me. I relate a lot with Sadie, too – a whole lot – for the reasons I mentioned above. Hazel, for sure – she’s had a lonely, painful life, which will be revealed later in the series, and she spent a long time feeling deeply suicidal like I have in the past. Elizabeth, too, but I’ll have to save those details for the books. :-)
What’s next for you and The Flapper Covenant series? Is there a Book Two in the works? Please say there is a Book 2 on the way!
There is! And a book 3 and 4, and most likely a book 5 to tie everything together and serve as a kind of “final act”, I guess. I’ve been working on book 2 for quite a while – since before I published Mary – so there’s a lot of material on the page. The challenge I’m facing is how to set up the rest of the series. In case it hasn’t been obvious, the world of the Flapper Covenant is really strange, and it’s about to get confusing, too. I’m dealing with cutting edge theoretical physics, and to put it bluntly, I’m having to invent a lot of physical laws to accommodate these character journeys. That and I have to figure out vaguely how the whole thing ends, and for me that’s always been really hard. I’m terrible at figuring out where things go. But I do have the emotional seeds in place – the nerves of the story, I guess. From there it’s a matter of spinning plot. For me, that’s the hard part.
What is the one question I didn’t ask that you wish I had?
I really like when people notice the book’s strong music foundations, actually. Music was a humongous part of the writing process for this novel, and not just in the usual sense. Courtney’s Exile – 2004 – has a very real sound, and her choices in music are part of that. Punk rock, grunge, alternative – these are the sounds of her everyday college experience in 2004, the sounds of her life and her reality, the sounds of how she makes sense of what’s happening around her and to her. I consciously tried to incorporate the pace and rhythm and even the sound of a lot of this music into the writing itself. I wanted certain parts of the book to read the way certain bands sound – New Found Glory and Allister, or Afghan Whigs and Nirvana. I wanted this to stand out in stark contrast to 1921, where I was listening to contemporary classical pianists like Ludovico Einaudi, trying to capture this breathless, beautiful world caught in time. And I wanted it to feel like you were in one of those beautiful moments, stretching out endlessly, yours to enjoy for as long as you wanted, which is exactly how it is for Courtney.
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