Shaping Words with Writer and Editor Julie Kingsley

Today, I am here with Julie Kingsley, who is the author of an award-winning young adult novel and also the co-founder of the Manuscript Academy and Manuscript Wishlist. So many wonderful things to talk about, and I'm so glad you're here today. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming in. So I was reading the beginning of your piece, your book, "The Space Between You and Me", which received the IPPY Gold Medal for debut YA, Young Adult, and also the Moonbeam YA Gold Medal 2025. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, I feel like I could have stepped into this young adult novel because you were talking about memeres and LL Bean boots and all the things that are very quintessentially Did you draw from your own background when writing this? Well, of course. And when I was a teacher, and so when you look at Maine kids, I got really curious about the fact that kids' stakes aren't all the same here at Maine and in our country right now, and I was thinking of my French Canadian grandmother and what it meant to be French Canadian. And I just kind of really started musing on how Maine is such an amazing space, but also how it's kind of complex. So do you pronounce it Meme or Memere? I've heard it. Meme. Okay. I've heard it pronounced both ways. So I want to clarify this for people who don't have French Canadian roots that this is grandmother. Yeah, right. And it's really, it's sort of my mother, but it's like what people would say is Grammy, right? Correct. And so I had, we called her Memere. And then when my Memere became a great grandmother, she became just mem and my mother became memere. I love that. And it's something that unless you have that background, you would have no concept of what that means. So what did it mean for you in addition to having a memere or a meme, what did it mean for you growing up with that French Canadian background? I think the most interesting thing about it was that it wasn't something to be prideful of being French Canadian back then. It was something that it was kind of quiet, you kind of pushed that away, you just assimilated. And I think that's so much what we see with immigrants today, that it's always this push and pull in the United States. And I just wanted to play with it. And I went to Paris and I was like, oh my gosh, we're so French. My grandmother is so French and she's gorgeous and the whole thing. And I was like, why haven't we embraced this culture at all here? So why do you think that is? I think when you came down from Canada and you were poor and you were living in Westbrook and you were in the mills and there was just a lot of poverty and I think they all lived through a really difficult time. So I think that they once again settled in. I would agree with you. And I have relatives that were Westbrook based, but mostly Biddeford, Saco, right? And you're right. I think there was a pride around, look how far we've come, but also when I go into mills now, I'm thinking I had relatives who worked here. There are these beautiful renovated spaces and I think it's wonderful that we've repurposed them, but these were places of manufacturing that people would walk to on cold days. I went to a Mill in Westbrook last week for a fair and you could feel the grooves of the stairs they walked up on, which is incredible. Yeah. And humbling, right? It is really humbling also because you know that in addition to working really hard once they immigrated and came from other places, my relatives came from a farm up in Oh, mine too. We're probably related. We probably are, honestly. And then my grandfather and one of my grandfathers ended up working for the phone company, joined the army, like got some education, made sure his kids got educated. Why wouldn't we be proud of that? I know. Well, that's kind of the point of it. And I think if you think about ownership and the land and what it meant to own things to them, it was huge. So you grew up in I did. But you set your young adult novel up in No, it's up past Bar Harbor, so kind of DownEast La Croix Cherry Field. And I was obsessed by the idea of these places that are so small that young people have to radiate towards each other. And I felt like it was a perfect backdrop of kind of trouble. And why young adult? Why did you go toward that genre? I write in everything. So my book is in young adult, but I'm also doing some adults. I'm doing some television shows. I'm working on some screenplay. So I write widely, but I think the most interesting place to write as young adult because that's the place where possibilities are endless and you have that coming of age that you can play with. And I think that's such a fascinating time. So my mother was a teacher for decades. Same. And so again, we're probably cousins. We don't know it yet. We'll figure it out. We probably are related. And she loved working with that age group, that sort of seventh, eighth grade age group that was sort of honest and raw and- Seventh grade is one of my favorite grades to teach. So tell me about your teaching experience. So it's insane. I've taught almost everything from preschool to grad school, primarily fourth, fifth, and seventh grade when I taught the younger kids, 10 years at SMCC, the community college, which is ... I think seventh grade and community college has such intersections of creativity and spirit and everyone's kind of all over the place. And I think that's what I've enjoyed most about that experience. They just made me laugh. They brought me energy. And when, just going back to the book, when I taught SMCC, I really saw the immigrant plight again, how hard it could be for immigrants coming to Portland, different education, different levels of language, and then mixing those kids with kids that have been here forever. It's interesting. So how did you get to a place? So you are an author, you're an educator, you now have, it sounds like kind of parallel businesses that are also around writing. So walk me through that kind of life trajectory. Yeah. It's a shock to all of us that I'm doing what I'm doing. I think once again, you go back to what we talked about with the roots and kind of the book. When you have parents that had to really struggle, I think at times early on, it was getting, my dad was a fire chief. My mother worked for insurance, but also worked for City of South Portland. So you had very kind of grounded to your community, like how do you shoot out to be an entrepreneur? Not easily. I think the answer is I was teaching, loving it. I taught Cumberland my last job and I would've never left, but my kids just needed me. They both had some health issues when they were born and I found myself kind of being torn between other people's kids and my kids and I chose mine. And once I chose mine, I ended up with side hustles and just kind of like the more side hustles you do, the more entrepreneurial worlds kind of opens up to you and the more you start walking into it. And it's so exciting and it's so much fun and as education is turning into kind of a more contained situation, my spirit just kind of pushed me through into more creative endeavors. So I really love hearing that Because I think talking about sort of the roots in the French Canadian background, I mean, there was such safety in working for the mills. Oh yes. Yeah. And great pensions. Right. So there's safety, longitudinality, people kind of, they made it to this country and they dug in and they just kept doing what they were doing. And I think in my family, the family businesses ended up being kind of medicine, which is a great profession. And I'm a doctor and there's a lot of honor to it, like being an educator, but you're right, it doesn't ... The people that I know who are entrepreneurs within my family are not really my generation. They're not my grandparents' generation. They're probably not their parents' generation. I'm like one of the few in doing this now and then the next generation because it requires you to move outside of that safety that was so important, that mill job that you showed up every day and you got a paycheck and then if you stayed healthy, you stayed safe. So how did you leave that safety zone yourself? I mean, I think funny you would ask, I mean, a lot of therapy ... I mean, like I had to fight myself. I had to fight my trust that it would work out. I had to fight that ... I think every writer and every entrepreneur has like little voices in their heads. They're like, "You're an idiot, just go back to safety." You start, I call mine like Chuck. I'm like, "Shut up, Chuck. I'm just going to keep going. I can see the pathways to this. " But I think that it's really difficult that if you didn't grow up with that ideology and safety net to do it. And I think I gave myself a deadline. If you don't publish this book by this point, if you don't get this business going by this point, you're back to teaching. And not that that's a bad thing. It would have been perfectly fine to go back to teaching, but I see through the book and through the Manuscript Academy that I'm able to impact people on a much larger platform than I did as a teacher with 20 kids. It seems like there probably are transferable skills. Absolutely. I don't want to assume that. So tell me what you've learned. Yeah. Well, my master's is in literacy and so I don't have an MFA, which most people in writing and publishing do, but the skills that I've brought are really main hard scrabble, right? Like putting yourself out there, see if it works, see what the response is, build community. My whole business was built on now X was crowdfunded that we consider ourselves the happiest place in publishing, that we are a safe place for people to come with a manuscript and we will help you get over that hump to publication. We have a faculty of 70 agents and editors from top houses. And so we have our experts and I am much more like almost like the class manager, which is exactly what I did in the classroom. I'm there to pick you up. If you have a bad experience, I'm here to cheer you on if you had a great experience. And it's been really, I think if you build Maine online, people will come. People come to Maine because it's vacation land, but they come because of the energy of Maine. And I think that's what we did. It's often said that most people have a book within them and- Everyone has a book in them. Okay. Well, there you go. Everybody has a book within them. Everybody I go to has a book in them. Yes. Okay. How though, I mean, if everybody has ... I mean, obviously everybody has their own story and some of the stories are really interesting, but to get from kind of the inspiration to the operations is, that's a thing. It's a thing, yeah. So how do you meet people wherever it is that they need that prompting, that pushing or pulling? Well, I think it's exactly like teaching at the community college level. You have kids from all over and they're all ... I think every person has inherent genius in them. And that's the biggest lesson I've learned over the last almost 30 years of teaching is that you might not be good at math, but maybe you're an amazing singer, or you might not be great at grammar, but you have an amazing voice. And so there's all these things. So finding where they're at and then figuring out how to communicate the steps towards that learner. And we do that at the Manuscript Academy with Small Steps, we model what good work looks like and publishing has very specific rules, very specific kind of like things that they look for the agents and the editors to vet the system and the products. And so of course you have to ... It's baby steps to that point. And I often say it's like, I was in the restaurant business too for 10 years, 14 to 24, as most Mainers are. I was too. Of course, right? You just start waiting tables, but it's like wine tasting. When you first taste wine, you're like, "Oh, Boone's Farm tastes really good." You're like, "This is delicious." And then all of a sudden it's not. And you're moving up through the different wines and all of a sudden you're like, "Oh my gosh, this bordeaux. Where did this ... It came from someone's basement. Why did you bring it to Mr. Sushi that happened to me once?" The most amazing glass of wine I've ever had was at Mr. Sushi in Providence from someone's basement. But it is like that. You don't really know that you're drinking the most amazing Bordeaux or reading that amazing book until you've kind of read all the books or gone through the process of editing books and editing yourself. It's a funny process. Well, there's a lot about the process itself of writing, at least my experience, that is about really letting go. I really love this sentence and I really love this paragraph. Kill your darlings. Absolutely. And yet that's so much easier said than none. Well, have you heard ... I mean, the boneyards, have you heard this? You take all those beautiful sentences that don't serve your book and you put it in your boneyards and that is just a document where you just stash all that amazing writing that you cannot use for that story that doesn't serve the story, but doesn't go away. I heard recently that every word that you write is ... Every word that you write actually creates a platform that you can stand on, the best platform to stand on and learning to get to that point of an actual book that people read, there needs to be a lot of kind of grounding in the book, but also thrust. And so how you can ground a story, but also have enough thrust to keep the reader interested and have Easter eggs about where you're going and have all those things effortlessly kind of brought together like a piece of art is really hard. So write messy, edit smart. This idea that a lot of people have about the quote unquote creative process is that we're inspired by a walk down the street and then the words come to us if we're writers and then somehow we magically put them all together, we throw them out into the world, everybody loves them, it's fantastic. It kind of belies the actuality of it, which is that you're sitting there with these words in front of you, whether they're on paper, whether it's on a screen, mostly on a screen these days. And you're trying to figure out like, how do I put these things together or tear them apart so that they can represent this initial vision of walking down the street and whatever I was inspired by. Yeah. And I think, and once you get that done, that beautiful piece at the beginning done, you have the middle, which is incredibly hard to keep moving. But just going back to what you said about that inspiration, where that is, I think we all have the inspirations, but the muscle, the creative muscle needs to be honed. So if you're every day saying, "I'm going to write for 10 minutes." It could be 10 minutes, it could be, I'm going to write 100 words, it could be one sentence. As long as you're touching a piece of work, I find that when you're walking the dog or in the shower, all this inspiration starts hitting you, it kind of like oozes back on me. You can go to bed and say, "I'm kind of stuck with this idea." And you can wake up and it's like, it's there. But if you're not playing with that ... I mean, I think Elizabeth Gilbert said that, playing with universe, big magic, right? But all that is true. You could have an idea and not do anything with it, and then someone else is going to take that idea and you're going to be like, "I had that idea." But if you are actively working with a piece of art, with a manuscript, with an essay, you're going to start finding the road. So you've talked about the actual process of kind of getting things to a certain place. What also I think people don't always understand is the next thing where you hand your baby off to a person/group and say, "Here you go. Here's my baby. Isn't she pretty?" And the person says, "Well, you need to change that outfit. We're going to put her in a different bassinet and maybe we're going to keep her long enough so that even though she's not walking now, she'll be walking by the time we're done with her." And that is so incredibly difficult because you're like, "This is my baby and I worked really hard to get her to this place and she's so pretty." And when you have a baby, you're like, "My baby is so pretty." And then you look back and you can be like, "Oh, you're a little bruised." That was a rough go that baby. So writers are often emotional. Artists are emotional, right? And I think it goes back to that safety, right? It's easier emotionally to have the job where you know you're safe and you know you can do your job. Putting yourself out there artistically is not that. So the thick skin that you need to wrap around your body, it's real and figuring out ways to deal with that. I mean, rejection, rejection comes when you don't want it. Bad news comes in the publishing industry when you are not emotionally ready to have it. And so you have to figure out the core why and what you're able to handle. And I think once you do that, that your work gets stronger and your editorial eye gets stronger and your ability to defend your work gets stronger. And there is a point where you have to defend your work. So of course, I have editors, I've worked with Hollywood quite a bit with my book. So you have producers, you have screenwriters, you have directors that everyone has an opinion about what it should look like and who it should cast and even what the book cover looks like. So there's all these really interesting things, all the steps of the way. So of course, start practicing that with a critique group. Come to the Manuscript Academy and hear from an agent editor what they initially see. School yourself, don't write something in isolation. It needs to be part of a conversation. There's so many interesting things that you brought up. I'm trying to figure out which direction to go in first. I think I'll go with this idea of trust Because before you get to a place where you defend your work, you have to be open to people critiquing it and you have to really trust the people are not doing it out of any malice. It really is in your best interest. And I remember it took me when I was first writing for magazines, I was working with a copy editor and I was working with an editor in chief. I mean, I was working with so many different editors and initially that was hard to have that trust. Like I'm the writer. Why are you not just taking what I put out there? And when I did, I think some of my favorite people were the editors because they made my work better than it was when it came to them. And then again, we would bring the photographers in and we would do captioning and all the pieces would fit together in such a beautiful way that I had to actually trust that there was an overarching vision that was going to get me further than on my own. Did you have to work through that process yourself? I think I was pretty schooled by the time I got to that point with my book personally. I've been in a writing group with really amazing women, New York Times bestselling writers, Kirkustart, like all of it. And so I trust them and I trust when they say something, they're absolutely right. But I think that sometimes you can be in a situation early on where people, everyone has an opinion, but figuring out whose opinion matters to you and what opinion is going to actually move your book forward and the story forward to where it should be. I mean, I critique people all the time.That's something I do for the Manuscript Academy. I often work with the people that had an agent, like their feelings are hurt or they're frustrated. And I will come in as a teacher and be like, "Okay, I'm seeing that you have an issue with grounding. I'm seeing that you're showing too much." I mean, telling too much, not showing, excuse me. And there's simple things that you can do to make this line that I see here shine. I'm really good at finding the lines people are walking with writing and then trying to figure out which is the best way to show off that line. But that's 20 years of I taught screenwriting, I've been in these groups, I've done all these things, I can kind of see it, but to learn how to see it takes a lot of time. I don't know if that makes sense, that it is once again, that practice. It's that editorial part of your brain that you have to really expand. We're all readers, we're all consumer stories, our whole beings are meant to take in story, but to create them, to capture an audience is just more difficult. And I like that what you're talking about is sort of your experience of being an editor and being able to create that trust for people because you've had the experience of learning how to trust yourself and having also been an editor, I absolutely know that that ... I think I was able to be a better editor because I had been edited so often. Correct. Yeah. And that was really worthwhile. And also, it leads me to my next question/comment, and that is, how do you know when it's actually time to defend yourself? Because sometimes we're so used to saying, "Oh yeah, you're right." And you kind of leave your own table. How do you bring yourself back to that table so that you're saying, "I hear what you're saying and I just feel really strongly about this. " Well, I think it's that expertise, right? I mean, when you're dealing with people that are not from Maine and they're pointing out things they want to change about Maine, I was like, "Oh, I'm sorry." If I change that, Maine is going to come and get me, that is a non-negotiable. I remember the biggest fight I had was about the word Rakers, Blueberry Rakers, and people thought maybe that was racist. And I was like, "No, in Maine, anyone that rakes blueberries is a blueberry raker." And it was a fight that I had to fight that fight because I didn't have another word for what happens in the blueberry fields. So that was something that I really went down for, but those things that, no, we're not going to turn this into a Hollywood idea because I worked with Hollywood prior to publishing the book because I've had multiple almost contracts and I have a team there. I can say that much. I have a team in Hollywood helping me out and in conversation. But so yeah, you're dealing with multiple ... You have your editors, but you also have often other people that have stakes in your work and that comes down to what can you negotiate and what can't you negotiate? And for me, as a native, there were certain things about me that that was my absolute no, the way I told the story, the flow, all of those things, I was of course willing to change as needed. That makes a lot of sense. And I mean, now you've introduced another thing that I want to talk about and just this idea that once people become interested in your work and they invest in your work, I mean, absolutely they have a stake in it being successful because they are investing in it. I mean, there's often money behind that's going into this and they're not doing it because they're thinking, "Oh, that's so nice. There's a nice girl from Maine and we want to support her." They're like, "Yes, we have given some money here. We would like to see that money come back to us." And so understanding what other people need to get back out of your own initial project, and I suspect that's not something that everybody quite realizes immediately. I mean, I've a producer I've worked with for probably 12 years. I met her in Boston at Grub Street, which she was incredible. And she, I mean, there is that. I do owe her a lot, but I more owe her that she has been the cheerleader. Every spot I've been, she's my cheerleader. I'll get like 8:30 Friday texts, even now, "I'm your fan." And so I think when you have these relationships with people, and they are your mentors, and you see them on, you see their work on HBO, you see their work on Broadway, and you know that if they're giving you time, that there's something in your work that matters. And I think for that particular book, the space between me and you, it was a hard book to sell. We were in a very odd time in the world when I was trying to sell that book. And so having that team in Hollywood, and honestly the team in Island Port with a space where I'm like, "I know it's an important book, but are we ready for this book right now?" And so it was interesting. And it was interesting as the word grit comes up, and it kind of goes back to that, the old banners. Do you have grit? Do you dare to show up somewhere? Do you dare to put yourself out there, even though you might get pushback, even though it might feel hard, and even though you know that you might disappoint people along the way, it's interesting. So back a few years ago, we created a book that, it's published officially by Erie River, but that was a company that we put together to do this book for Safe Passage. But we worked with Island And we worked with Dean Lunt at the time. And it was truly incredible the amount of time that he and his very small group at the time were willing to put into this book that we were putting out there on behalf of this nonprofit. And it also, it was such an education for me that they're the writers and we all kind of know about writers, we all kind of understand editors, but then you're right. There's people who do publishing, there's people who do producing, there's people who do ... And there's all these other people who are there as part of your kind of creative team. And it sounds like you've really benefited from having very strong members of Julie's creative team, both within the state and outside of the state. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just a shout out to Elizabeth Lopez who ... I mean, I have migrant workers in my book. I didn't write under that perspective, but they're there and it is an immigration story. It does go into what we're seeing today with politically people being taken by ICE. And I wrote this well before. It was almost like a warning, I think, with where we are right now. And I Knowing that I had that sensitivity reader, knowing that I had her perspective on the Kinsey, the things in the book that were uniquely Hispanic, how could I have done it without her? I don't know why I thought I could have without her, if she was that important to the project. So I think every book is many hands. It's the people in her critique book group. It's the people that you meet at a conference. At the Manuscript Academy, we just heard that a book that went to auction, a book that they're saying is going to be one of the best, the new classic. She came and she tweaked her query a little bit. All of a sudden it was seen. Having your story seen, because it's hard to condense that into a query letter. And so sometimes it's just, I think to the listeners, success is often just around the corner. You have no idea where that turn is. And if you give up, then you'll never know. And it might not be that first book. It might be your second book. It might be your third book. But people that persevere, they often make their way through this industry. One of the things that you've described is also the importance of just being willing to just let go. If something that you expected was going to come along for you, maybe you thought your piece was going to turn into a major emotion picture, something falls apart. You have to work through the process of letting that go. But that's a hard ... Again, that is something that takes work. Right. What is that Wayne Gretzky? Shots on goal. If you can get one, if you can get one option, you get another. If you can get two options, you can get four options for movies. I mean, if you can get one agent, you can get another agent. There's this ... Yes. I think it's still our bias that it's like the sunk cost fallacy. I've got so much work into this. How could I possibly let it go? And I think what's so interesting, and I met with my mentor, Shout to Top Gun, which is the entrepreneurial incubator we have here in Maine. And I met with my mentors from a failed business this week. And we talked about how that one incubator, that one massive failure, right? All the things I learned from that failure built the Manuscript Academy. Lots of failures in the Manuscript Academy because we're a bootstrapped company. We did everything ourselves for years. Two women that didn't have business backgrounds, we both had publishing backgrounds or she had publishing and I teaching. And so if you think about that, you realize that there's always a door. I think I've just gotten harder. Yeah. I think the notion of creativity ... Going back to, this is for Mainers, right? So Mainers are the most creative giving people. And so I would say to people out there that they say I have a story or say, "Start putting yourself out there. Go to Maine Publishers Alliances Gather, show up. And even if you just have a poem, go to your local library and see if there is a writing group." Just be brave. If you feel that you want to do it, it doesn't take long. I mean, it takes a long time to actually write a book, but it doesn't take ... If you think about how much time we spend scrolling, right? What if you got off Instagram for 10 minutes a day into something creative? What if you painted something for 10 minutes versus Instagram? What if instead of watching that other show on Netflix, you sat down and made a list of creative projects that you have. It might be a business. I mean, that's the thing. Creativity