Your book Love, Joy, and Pees features paper cutout designs alongside poems about motherhood, childhood, and love — a combination of your work as a writer and illustrator. What inspired you to start writing and illustrating? Did one passion come before the other, or did they develop together?

I first found my love of writing in 4th grade. I won a poetry contest, and of course, after that, I began writing copious amounts of bad poetry. I used writing to achieve what I couldn’t in real life. I had always wanted to go to the Moon, but after the Challenger space explosion, my hopes were dashed, and I turned to science fiction writing as a way to accomplish my dreams in a different way. I began to draw art as a child in my church community, and I also worked at a print shop, specializing in graphic design for businesses. During that time, printing was on the verge of moving from the physical to the digital world, and so I really developed both of those skill sets.

Everything we own and use is designed by somebody, and there’s beauty in that. Books are really no different, and so being able to take my own words and combine them into a book, the entire thing is a creative expression.

Your book, Maggie’s Planner, was created with neurodiversity in mind. It encourages healthy lifestyle changes even for those of us with hectic daily lives. What was your inspiration behind creating Maggie’s Planner?

My third child, Maggie, has general anxiety disorder and illness anxiety disorder. A lot of her triggers are around writing. My oldest child has ADHD and dyslexia, so they have to face really big organizational and executive functioning challenges. When our therapist asked questions like “How often have you been eating?” or “How often have you been sleeping?” it became a challenge for them. They would get this “deer in the headlights” look in their eyes — because when the question becomes a trigger, it’s hard to think about it, much less answer it. That was what was happening with Maggie, and it was a horrible way to live your life. There isn’t a pill to solve all of your mental health challenges, but by developing healthy habits and behaviors, you can make whatever medication you’re taking more effective. I created Maggie’s Journal to help with that, so whenever you go to the therapist, you can easily refer to it as a tracker of what you’ve been doing. In making it, I worked with Maggie, her therapist, and other therapists to implement their feedback.

What makes Maggie’s Journal different is that it’s geared toward teenagers and adults. A lot of the mental health resources for people with executive functioning disorder are marketed for young kids, which is horrible because the adults and teenagers with executive functioning disorder don’t have the necessary resources to help themselves. As a teenager, you wouldn’t want to use a sticker chart made for 10-year olds to keep track of your things — that can be condescending and embarrassing, and it likely wouldn’t last very long. Maggie’s Journal is simple and straightforward, and can be used by any age group.

How do you deal with writer’s block?

To be honest, I don’t generally think I experience writer’s block. Often, I’ll have some aspect of my writing or drawing that I’ll have to mull over for a long time. Sometimes, taking a walk or driving somewhere new will help me think about things. When you’re not going around in circles anymore, then you’ll be able to sit down and write, draw, whatever you want to do.

When I was pregnant with my kids, I didn’t have any energy or time to think about writing. I had four kids, and so that was almost a decade of not really tapping into that creative headspace. It was hard to write anything substantial — if I wanted to write a short story, by the time I finished the thread of my idea, I would have forgotten what it looked like at the beginning. Brain fry is real for pregnant women. I found that scribbling small, quick poems didn’t take too much of my energy. When I eventually made a collection of those poems, they sold well, because birth, childhood, and family are all things we can relate to as humans. So I guess the moral of the story is that writer’s block does have an end to it, even if it seems otherwise.

You founded New Alexandria Creative Group (NACG), a cooperative publisher which aims to support creatives so they can control the work they produce. Could you tell us more about why cooperative publishers like NACG are necessary, and how they help writers?

I wanted to create a business model that is fair and supportive for writers, because self-publishing is extremely difficult to do well. Everybody is good at some things. Very few people are good at everything. Especially if you’re a writer, you tend to be more focused on your creative pursuits and less so on your financial and marketing pursuits. The companies that offer services for writers to publish their work are often very expensive and not critical of the work you produce. You could hire an independent editor, but you have to be careful and make sure they’re the kind of independent editor that wants you to grow as a writer, not the kind that wants you to publish possibly half-baked work simply because they want to make money.

When publishing, there are two routes you can go. There’s the traditional publishing route, with a gatekeeper, but it often isn’t the most profitable way and doesn’t allow you to have as much control over your work as you would like. And then there’s hybrid publishing and author’s services. Unlike author’s services, hybrid publishing still maintains that gatekeeping when choosing who they will take on. Hybrid publishing companies have a standard of quality they hold their writers to — cooperative publishers are hybrid publishers where it’s not an individual making the business decisions, but a group of fellow writers and creatives. So it’s not just one person deciding whether your book is ready to publish, but a group of people. You don’t have to learn everything yourself; you can learn from a variety of people’s experiences and decisions.

What is the one most important piece of advice you have for students thinking about pursuing writing beyond high school?

There are as many paths to becoming a writer as there are people. There are some commonalities I’ve seen — a lot of journalists become very successful writers, and I think that’s largely due to learning to check your references and do background research, and also not getting bogged down in the process of writing a novel. You learn from each novel, and you just keep getting better and better. If you’re young, you usually don’t have many life experiences to write about, so journalism is a good, stable way to make a living while you’re accumulating life experiences.

You just have to keep writing. It’s not the best writers who are successful, it’s the most persistent writers who are successful. I have 20 books of crappy poetry in my room, but all of that was practice that made this possible. Nothing is wasted that you are doing right now. I went to clown school when I was 13. I went to modeling school for a year when I was 12. Both of those experiences have been totally useful to me. Those skills — of carrying yourself with confidence, of faking it and being confident, have been invaluable to me over the years. I could have never stood in front of an audience and read my poetry if not for those experiences.

It’s tempting to be impatient as a teenager. But embrace that process, and just keep writing and writing.