| Interview with Philip Beard |
First off, thanks so much for joining us for an up-close and personal interview for TeensReadToo.com! My
name is Jen, and I’ll be your server toda…oh, wait, wrong job! Anyway, thanks so much for taking time out of
your writing schedule—which I’m sure is busy!—and answering a few questions for your readers and fans.
Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you wanted
to be a writer?
It was probably my senior year of high school. I had always been a reader but not a writer. I never kept a
journal or a diary or anything like that. Then my mother gave me a copy of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, and
they became almost like a touchstone for me. Over the years, I’m sure I’ve read some of those stories twenty
or thirty times. When I was in law school, I remember sitting in the hall outside of the year-end exam room,
everyone still cramming, leafing frantically through their notes and outlines, and I would sit in a corner reading
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to stay calm.
Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?
Wow. You’ve just asked a fifteen minute question, but I’ll try to give you the Readers’ Digest version. Even
though I wrote faithfully during college and law school, I stopped completely once I started practicing law. I
didn’t write a thing for ten years, and it was really starting to get me down. Then my wife and I were in our
favorite Chinese restaurant one night, and I was on a rant about the lack of creativity in my life when our
fortune cookies arrived. Mine said (I am not making this up): “You are a lover of words. Someday you will write
a book.” Never one to ignore obvious signs, I went to part-time status at my firm and started work on my first
novel.
I finished the manuscript in about a year and was very fortunate to find a great agent to represent it. I thought
I was set. My agent submitted my novel to 27 different New York publishing houses; all of them rejected it.
Then I wrote DEAR ZOE, and the same thing happened again: twenty-seven submissions; twenty seven
rejections. This was in early 2003, and I was told: “New York isn’t ready for a 9/11 novel yet.” I was completely
demoralized. I had never failed at anything, and now I was failing at the only thing I really wanted to do. After
a few months of feeling sorry for myself, I saw an article in the NYT about the rise of self-publishing, and I
decided to take back control of my career. I spent 6 months treating the publishing of DEAR ZOE as my full
time job, hiring a cover artist, printer, a publicist and convincing a national distributor to take it on. Sometime
during this process, I gave the manuscript to an indie bookseller in my neighborhood who told me that his
Penguin sales rep was coming to town the next week—an up-and-coming guy who had the ears of the editors
there. I told him I was pretty sure every Penguin imprint had already rejected DEAR ZOE, but gave him the
manuscript anyway.
Long story short, the sales rep loved it and put it directly on the President of Viking’s desk. She loved it too
and called me with an offer exactly one day before I was to write a big fat check to my printer in Michigan.
Crazy, huh? If any of your readers are interested in the long version, the whole publishing backstory is on my
website: http://www.philipbeard.net/backstory.html
Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing
about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?
This is a tough question for me because I don’t really write “Young Adult Fiction” (whatever that is—I’ve never
really understood the label.) Even DEAR ZOE was written and marketed as an “adult” book, but teens have
discovered it and have become among its most passionate readers. Anyway, my new novel is called LOST IN
THE GARDEN, but it’s not really teen-appropriate ☺ (Geez, that probably will tempt everyone to buy it.
Please tell your parents I told you NOT to.) It’s sort of a middle-age coming-of-age story, if that makes any
sense.
What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?
For me, reading great writers is what inspires my own writing. A few of my favorites are Salinger, Tim O’Brien,
Susan Minot, Lewis Nordan, Richard Russo and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!
Although DEAR ZOE isn’t autobiographical, the family structure in the novel is mine. I am married and have a
stepdaughter who is much older (she’s 20 now) than my other two girls (who are 7 and 11). My wife, Traci,
has been amazingly supportive through my transition to writing. When I stopped practicing law, we had to
make a lot of lifestyle adjustments to account for the fact that there was (quite literally) no money coming in.
The house is crawling with animals, too: one Golden Retriever, one cat, two hamsters and a lop-eared rabbit
who is litter trained and chases both the dog and the cat.
Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?
Peanut butter and jelly, every night at 11:00 while watching The Daily Show.
What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?
Wake my wife up (hard), wake my middle-school daughter up (nearly impossible), do a little yoga.
If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise me
the most?
You would find my childhood collection of 800 different beer cans.
Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If you
could be a color, which color would it be, and why?
I would be green, because it’s not easy . . .
Who is your favorite cartoon character? Which cartoon character is most like you?
My favorite is Patrick Star, but I’m probably most like Bugs Bunny: outwardly harmless looking, but a bit
mischievous and irreverent underneath.
If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history, where
and when would it be—and why?
Corny or not, I like it just where and when I am right now.
So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while you’re
writing?
It’s funny because I feel like my love of music really influences my writing sensibilities. I play a little guitar, and
I sang lead for a rock band in college. But I never listen when I’m working. A few favorites are James Taylor,
Jack Johnson, Patty Griffin, Wilco, Joan Armatrading, Annie Lennox and Lyle Lovett. Looking at that list, I
think the one thing they all have in common is great lyrics, so I guess that makes sense.
Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie you
saw at the theater?
We don’t have HBO (sad, I know) and that seems to be where a lot of the good shows are now. The only
things we watch religiously are Seinfeld re-runs (while doing the dishes), The Office, My Name is Earl and
The Daily Show. I’m a movie fanatic though, and would love to try my hand at a screenplay one of these days.
I could name a hundred, but a few of my favorites are Donnie Darko, Cinema Paradiso, The Station Agent,
Pulp Fiction, Best in Show, The Breakfast Club and Parenthood.
You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?
Read what you love, and read a lot. As an adult, there just isn’t time anymore. I had to quit my job to start
reading again. ☺
One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?
Honestly? I have absolutely no idea. That’s part of the fun. I come to work every day prepared to be surprised
by what my characters want to do. And I usually am.
Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!
name is Jen, and I’ll be your server toda…oh, wait, wrong job! Anyway, thanks so much for taking time out of
your writing schedule—which I’m sure is busy!—and answering a few questions for your readers and fans.
Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you wanted
to be a writer?
It was probably my senior year of high school. I had always been a reader but not a writer. I never kept a
journal or a diary or anything like that. Then my mother gave me a copy of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, and
they became almost like a touchstone for me. Over the years, I’m sure I’ve read some of those stories twenty
or thirty times. When I was in law school, I remember sitting in the hall outside of the year-end exam room,
everyone still cramming, leafing frantically through their notes and outlines, and I would sit in a corner reading
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to stay calm.
Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?
Wow. You’ve just asked a fifteen minute question, but I’ll try to give you the Readers’ Digest version. Even
though I wrote faithfully during college and law school, I stopped completely once I started practicing law. I
didn’t write a thing for ten years, and it was really starting to get me down. Then my wife and I were in our
favorite Chinese restaurant one night, and I was on a rant about the lack of creativity in my life when our
fortune cookies arrived. Mine said (I am not making this up): “You are a lover of words. Someday you will write
a book.” Never one to ignore obvious signs, I went to part-time status at my firm and started work on my first
novel.
I finished the manuscript in about a year and was very fortunate to find a great agent to represent it. I thought
I was set. My agent submitted my novel to 27 different New York publishing houses; all of them rejected it.
Then I wrote DEAR ZOE, and the same thing happened again: twenty-seven submissions; twenty seven
rejections. This was in early 2003, and I was told: “New York isn’t ready for a 9/11 novel yet.” I was completely
demoralized. I had never failed at anything, and now I was failing at the only thing I really wanted to do. After
a few months of feeling sorry for myself, I saw an article in the NYT about the rise of self-publishing, and I
decided to take back control of my career. I spent 6 months treating the publishing of DEAR ZOE as my full
time job, hiring a cover artist, printer, a publicist and convincing a national distributor to take it on. Sometime
during this process, I gave the manuscript to an indie bookseller in my neighborhood who told me that his
Penguin sales rep was coming to town the next week—an up-and-coming guy who had the ears of the editors
there. I told him I was pretty sure every Penguin imprint had already rejected DEAR ZOE, but gave him the
manuscript anyway.
Long story short, the sales rep loved it and put it directly on the President of Viking’s desk. She loved it too
and called me with an offer exactly one day before I was to write a big fat check to my printer in Michigan.
Crazy, huh? If any of your readers are interested in the long version, the whole publishing backstory is on my
website: http://www.philipbeard.net/backstory.html
Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing
about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?
This is a tough question for me because I don’t really write “Young Adult Fiction” (whatever that is—I’ve never
really understood the label.) Even DEAR ZOE was written and marketed as an “adult” book, but teens have
discovered it and have become among its most passionate readers. Anyway, my new novel is called LOST IN
THE GARDEN, but it’s not really teen-appropriate ☺ (Geez, that probably will tempt everyone to buy it.
Please tell your parents I told you NOT to.) It’s sort of a middle-age coming-of-age story, if that makes any
sense.
What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?
For me, reading great writers is what inspires my own writing. A few of my favorites are Salinger, Tim O’Brien,
Susan Minot, Lewis Nordan, Richard Russo and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!
Although DEAR ZOE isn’t autobiographical, the family structure in the novel is mine. I am married and have a
stepdaughter who is much older (she’s 20 now) than my other two girls (who are 7 and 11). My wife, Traci,
has been amazingly supportive through my transition to writing. When I stopped practicing law, we had to
make a lot of lifestyle adjustments to account for the fact that there was (quite literally) no money coming in.
The house is crawling with animals, too: one Golden Retriever, one cat, two hamsters and a lop-eared rabbit
who is litter trained and chases both the dog and the cat.
Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?
Peanut butter and jelly, every night at 11:00 while watching The Daily Show.
What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?
Wake my wife up (hard), wake my middle-school daughter up (nearly impossible), do a little yoga.
If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise me
the most?
You would find my childhood collection of 800 different beer cans.
Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If you
could be a color, which color would it be, and why?
I would be green, because it’s not easy . . .
Who is your favorite cartoon character? Which cartoon character is most like you?
My favorite is Patrick Star, but I’m probably most like Bugs Bunny: outwardly harmless looking, but a bit
mischievous and irreverent underneath.
If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history, where
and when would it be—and why?
Corny or not, I like it just where and when I am right now.
So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while you’re
writing?
It’s funny because I feel like my love of music really influences my writing sensibilities. I play a little guitar, and
I sang lead for a rock band in college. But I never listen when I’m working. A few favorites are James Taylor,
Jack Johnson, Patty Griffin, Wilco, Joan Armatrading, Annie Lennox and Lyle Lovett. Looking at that list, I
think the one thing they all have in common is great lyrics, so I guess that makes sense.
Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie you
saw at the theater?
We don’t have HBO (sad, I know) and that seems to be where a lot of the good shows are now. The only
things we watch religiously are Seinfeld re-runs (while doing the dishes), The Office, My Name is Earl and
The Daily Show. I’m a movie fanatic though, and would love to try my hand at a screenplay one of these days.
I could name a hundred, but a few of my favorites are Donnie Darko, Cinema Paradiso, The Station Agent,
Pulp Fiction, Best in Show, The Breakfast Club and Parenthood.
You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?
Read what you love, and read a lot. As an adult, there just isn’t time anymore. I had to quit my job to start
reading again. ☺
One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?
Honestly? I have absolutely no idea. That’s part of the fun. I come to work every day prepared to be surprised
by what my characters want to do. And I usually am.
Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!
