Interview with Steph Post on her novel Miraculum, and writing

Release Date: 2019
Genre: Fantasy, Interviews, Literary Fiction, Mystery/Historical, Mystery/Thriller
Author: Steph Post
Publisher: Polis Books

Steph Post is the author of the novels Miraculum, Walk in the Fire, Lightwood, and A Tree Born Crooked. She graduated from Davidson College as a recipient of the Patricia Cornwell Scholarship for creative writing and a winner of the Vereen Bell writing award for fiction. She holds a Master’s degree in Graduate Liberal Studies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has most recently appeared in Garden & Gun, Nonbinary Review, CrimeReads and the anthology Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics. She is a regular contributor to Alternating Current and LitReactor and has published numerous book reviews and author interviews. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Rhysling Award and was a semi-finalist for The Big Moose Prize. She lives in Florida.

Lou Pendergrast

Welcome, you have a new novel out Miraculum, all the best with its success.

How long were you in the writing process of this?

Steph Post
Miraculum took me a year to write, from concept to finished and submitted product.

Lou Pendergrast

How did you find the road to publishing, rejections was there many?

Steph Post

I published Miraculum with Polis Books, the publisher of my Judah Cannon Florida crime series, including the novels Lightwood and Walk in the Fire. I was fortunate enough to have a publisher already who completely supported me and my work, even though Miraculum is in a very different genre from my crime series.

Lou Pendergrast

What was the inspiration behind Miraculum?

Steph Post

HBO’s television series Carnivale was the original spark for writing a novel about carnivals. It stayed in the back of my mind for years before the bigger themes and ideas for Miraculum began to form.

Other than writing, what else is your passion?

Steph Post
I love raising chickens, working on visual art and spending as much time as possible with my dogs.

Do you write in a journal?

Steph Post
I do, but it really depends on what stage I am on in the novel-writing process as to how much time I spend on it.

Writing, when, where, and with what?

Steph Post

I write constantly- though the writing process goes throughout many stages over the course of year. I write at home in my studio, planning by hand in notebooks and then drafting and writing on a laptop.

How did you find the path to writing your first novel?

Steph Post

I wrote my first novel about six years ago. I’ve always been a writer, but it took a conscious decision to go from being a writer to producing a full-length novel and becoming a published author.

Which authors and books inspired you to be a novelist?

Steph Post

Michael Ondatje is my favorite author and showed me that poetry and prose could blur genre lines in a way that still stays true to the ultimate storytelling form.