Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead

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Show notes

In this interview with author Maggie Shipstead, we discuss her best-selling novel Great Circle. In this sweeping saga, we follow fictional pilot Marion Graves from her feral childhood in Montana where she first encounters a barnstorming pilot team and decides that flying is her life’s purpose. She flies as a bootlegger transporting liquor, the flies as a bush pilot in Alaska before joining the Air Transport Auxiliary to fly during the war. Post-war, she decides to fly around the world, North to South, and disappears. The story is intercut with a modern day Hollywood actress set to play Marion in an upcoming bio-pic whose own childhood scars include the loss of her parents in a small airplane crash. Maggie talks about the inspiration for the book and the research that led to this gorgeous novel.

Correction from the end of the interview: we will discuss the book Aviatrix, by Mary Bush Shipko, in the Aviatrix Book Club next month, and THEN we’ll read The Fabulous Flying Mrs. Miller in July.

Transcript:

LA_Book Club Maggie Shipstead_AUDIO_2024

[00:00:00] Liz: Hello and welcome. I’m Liz Booker, Literary Aviatrix, and I’m excited to talk with the author of the Aviatrix Book Club discussion book for May 2024 about her historical fiction novel, Great Circle.

Fewer than 10 percent of pilots and aircraft mechanics are women. These are their stories of tenacity, adventure, and courage stories with the power to inspire, heal, and connect.

Welcome to the literary aviatrix community, where we leverage the power of story to build and celebrate our community and inspire the next generation of aviation.

Maggie Shipstead, welcome.

[00:00:44] Maggie: Ah, thanks for having me.

[00:00:46] Liz: I am so excited to talk to you about this gorgeous sweeping novel. For anyone who hasn’t had a chance to read the book yet, could you give us a synopsis of Great Circle?

[00:00:57] Maggie: Absolutely. Great Circle is about a fictional female pilot named Marion Graves, who disappears in 1950 while trying to fly around the world north to south, so over the poles. And that’s intercut with a story of a modern day movie star named Hadley Baxter, who’s playing Marion in sort of a biopic about her life.

[00:01:17] Liz: It’s amazing. That’s such a simple synopsis of a really huge saga from my perspective.

[00:01:27] Maggie: I find if I go any deeper than that, it’s like a five minute thing. It’s like the two sentence thing or a five minute thing.

[00:01:32] Liz: Well, we’ll round it out in the conversation here. And I just wanna gush about some things about it first. First of all, these characters are so deeply and richly well drawn. I just, this is the kind of story that I fell in love with as a teenager. A saga, an East of Eden or a Michener book, where I would get to follow characters for decades and see how they navigate through their respective times.

And I, obviously I’m thrilled that you decided to include a pilot character in this and to follow not only her journey, but in places in this book where you place her in the context just some of the choices that you made about her own path and the context that you give us in these very condensed, beautifully written summaries of where she is in the history of aviation and what’s going on in the aviation world. I absolutely loved those passages. And I think they’re very instructive too for people who maybe don’t know the history of aviation. So that was so well done. So many questions about the inception of this idea and how you wrote it.

But first, just give us like an overview of your writing life. I want to talk more about that in the writing portion and get deeper into it, but just how did you become a writer?

[00:03:03] Maggie: Sure. Yeah. Again, this is a story that can be real short or really long, but I wasn’t one of those children who always wanted to write or wrote short stories, but I was always a reader. And so I went to college, not really planning even to study English. But that’s what I fell into. And then I went to grad school for creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. And the year after that, when I was 25, I wrote my first novel, Seating Arrangements.

 And then I was at Stanford for two years on a writing fellowship. Seating Arrangements came out, my second novel came out pretty rapidly after that, within two years. And then it was a nice long seven years until Great Circle came out. So, yeah, I consider myself primarily a novelist. I also write short stories and I write for travel magazines pretty regularly.

I was doing more before COVID, but yeah, I write for Conde Naste Traveler and Outside and the New York Times, things like that.

[00:04:07] Liz: Well, where can we find all of that kind of work?

[00:04:09] Maggie: Yeah, if you go to www.maggieshipstead.com there are different tabs, so the one that says articles has a lot of my shorter writing travel writing and essays, and then there’s a link to books, there’s some videos you can also find me on Instagram, that’s pretty much the only social media I use, but Yeah.

[00:04:27] Liz: Excellent. Okay, let’s get into this book. I have to hear everything. Did you come up, what’s the inception? What inspired you? Why a pilot? Tell me all of it.

[00:04:39] Maggie: Yeah, so it was an accident. I had started writing what I thought would be my second book when I was at Stanford. So this was in my sort of mid twenties, and it just wasn’t going anywhere, and so I got sidetracked revising a short story that became my actual second book, Astonish Me, which is about ballet. And then after Astonish Me was done, was in edits, I said, okay, I’m gonna go back to that original book idea that I thought was going to be my second book.

And at the time I was traveling, I was in Australia and New Zealand for a month or six weeks, something like that. And this would be in 2013. So my first book was out. My second book was on its way out. I’m in New Zealand trying to work on it, this manuscript’s not happening.

So I realized this is dead. I have to give up on it. And I was getting ready to leave New Zealand. I was sitting at the international terminal. And there’s a statue of the pilot, Jean Batten, there, like a bronze statue, and it’s a really beautiful image of her, she’s wearing this sort of overcoat, and she’s waving to some imaginary crowd, and holding a bouquet of flowers, and I read the plaque, and it said something like I was born to be a wanderer or something like that.

And I, that stuck in my head. I thought, Oh, I should write a book about a pilot. And for people who aren’t familiar with her, she was the first person to fly solo from the UK to New Zealand, which was in 1934, 36. I’m starting to forget all the relevant dates, but anyway, so I was like, okay, perfect book about a pilot, no problem.

 And the inscription on her statue became the first line of great circle, which is. Oh no, I think hers was as destined to be a wanderer and I used I was born to be a wanderer. But I had no plan for the book. I’m not an outliner. And so all I knew is that she would disappear flying around the world north south.

And I had chosen her route around the world, which sort of, there are two possibilities just because of geography. And I’d chosen her plane, a C 47. And so I sat down and started writing and found myself writing about the launch of an ocean liner in 1912. 19…, something like that.

So then I started to get an inkling that this book was just gonna sprawl and maybe within a month of working I’d introduced Hadley the movie star, but it just yeah, it became this really expansive project I wasn’t anticipating and it took over three years to write the first draft, which was almost a thousand pages.

[00:07:22] Liz: I am so relieved to hear that And I was going to save this for the writing portion of this I had a couple of questions about just being a writer like you and writing a piece like this I wanted you to tell me that this was hard because if you told me that this was easy for you, I would have been like, Yeah, it’s never going to happen for me. I’ll never be able to write like this.

And secondly or on the other hand, I also wondered if when somebody tells you that your characters are so richly drawn and you, your descriptions are so lovely, are you like, well, duh I’m a writer? That’s my job. If somebody told me I did such a great job flying straight and level, I’d be like, well, I’m a pilot. That’s what I do. But thanks.

[00:08:15] Maggie: Yeah. A little bit. I think the compliment about the characters, which thank you, by the way, is specific. I think one thing when people will be like, well, this is beautifully written, and I’m like, yeah, it’s my third novel.

 That’s a funny one and I see that a lot. I don’t read my Amazon reviews or Goodreads or anything like that, but yeah to a degree, it is my job. And this certainly was difficult. What I’m finding is that it never gets easier. I guess my second book was borderline easy. I wrote it in five months from start to selling it to my publisher. And so that sort of set me up to be like, this is what I do. I just toss these off and I started this book with the expectation I’d write it within a year. And that was, I just hadn’t grasped the scope and the research and something so research heavy it’s like climbing a sand dune, it’s just pushing you backwards the whole time.

[00:09:08] Liz:

That is a great metaphor. Another author that we talk about a lot because she has written prolifically in historical fiction that features women in aviation is Elizabeth Wein, who she, her book, Codename Verity, was, she claims, like the easiest thing she ever wrote. But she’s, and of course is a bestseller, but she’s still a working writer.

And I wrote to her a couple months ago and I was like, I’m struggling. And she said, you know what? It took me 11 rewrites to finish the novel that I just published. So it doesn’t ever get easier.

[00:09:47] Maggie: Yeah, you do. And it’s a question of keeping momentum alive. I think. What was helpful for me with this book was that I was passionate about some of the underlying questions.

And I really put most of the things I was interested in into this book just, it all went in. And so that was really sustaining, even though there were some particularly difficult times and even some of the technical choices I struggled with, like past tense or present tense, first person, third person.

Although Marion’s part of the book, the pilot’s part of the book from the first draft on was pretty much the same chronology, and it didn’t change all that much, and the harder part was bringing the two components of the book together.

[00:10:28] Liz: Yeah, that, that dual perspective thing is one of my favorites, and you did that so well in this book also.

 And I love that they’re in separate chapters. Separate times separate historical periods and just the look back. So talking about Marion, you made a lot of really interesting choices. Interesting to me thinking about what your options were. I don’t want to spoil, certainly not the ending, so we won’t do that.

But I assume that most people if you got this far, hopefully you’ve read the book. In particular, I am curious about the choice of when you send her into World War II, deciding to make her an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot. Tell me about that choice.

[00:11:15] Maggie: Yes, that was actually one of the few things I knew from the beginning.

I knew she would disappear, and I knew she’d fly during the war, but I hadn’t decided between the US or the UK both of which were historically possible. And I did the research for both, even when I was really far away from it in the chronology of writing the book. I don’t think I got to that part of the book until I’d been drafting for at least a year and a half.

I can’t it’s hard to reconstruct these decisions. I think I was just interested in sending her to a different environment. I read Diana Bernato Walker’s memoir, Spreading My Wings, about flying in the ATA. And there were just some really exciting elements of that, that I borrowed actually for the book, like how she was toward the end of the war, flying to continental Europe.

And she had this sort of racket going where she would bring back chocolate. And she didn’t bring a parachute and she just used that space for bringing back things that you couldn’t get in the UK at the time. So I was just intrigued by the setting. And it’s interesting and manageable. And so one of my research trips, I went up to Stanford to the Hoover institution where they had the personal papers of a few of the pilots and tiny prints and onion skin letters home, that sort of thing.

And it had their ferry pilot notes and all these sort of personal photos. And those women were just so cool. So that was a really fun part of the research. I went to the museum at the ATA museum at Maidenhead in England, and it was pretty funny because the museum’s not just about the female pilots.

It’s about all the pilots, and a volunteer took me. There was this slightly stuffy guy who was in charge of the whole thing, and he said, what are you doing here? And I said, well, I’m writing a book about a pilot. He went, ugh, and was like, don’t over romanticize it and don’t over dramatize it.

And I was like, okay, I’ll try my best. And then a volunteer took me upstairs to fly a Spitfire simulator and so I flew it and I’m not a pilot, but it was fun and we went back downstairs and this sort of stuffy guy was like, Oh, how’d it go? And the volunteer said, Oh, great. Great pilot.

And he goes, Oh, is he still up there? It couldn’t possibly have been me.

[00:13:32] Liz: Welcome to our world.

[00:15:14] Maggie: Oh, exactly. I know. I was like, even in this museum that has this big display about these pilots. And it was like, where’s the man you’re talking about?

[00:13:49] Liz: Happens every day. Happens every day. Wow. So great. I love that you just sniffed out that trail.

What I thought it did for you as well, as a writer, was it brought her closer to the war so that the people who she knew who were over there, she could meet up with in-theater instead of being, I think the A. T. A. was so much closer to the action, and the war, whereas our women were stuck here in the continental U.S., for the most part, except for those who went over and did the A. T. A. first, so that was really great. And of course, you incorporate all of the history around that, including Jackie Cochran and all of the great very rich history around that whole part.

 There’s another choice that you made that I find really interesting because it also happens in Kate Quinn’s book when she writes about the Night Witches that you both chose to put your characters in a situation where they were having same sex relations with the other women. And I’m just curious about that choice. Is that based on research that you guys did and that’s what you found out happened or tell me about that.

[00:15:14] Maggie: Yeah I definitely found traces of it in my ATA research, like in this sort of reunion notes from the American pilots. It would be like I can’t remember any specific names, but it’d be like, Claire has lived on a ranch with her friend Frida for the past 20 years.

And it was this code for these relationships. And I also, from the beginning, I thought Marian had a slippery relationship to gender and sexuality and part of it was just that I started with this idea of this woman vanishing and I almost had to reverse engineer, how would she get to be that pilot in 1950?

Like, how do you have the means to attempt this flight? How do you learn to fly as a girl in the twenties and thirties? And what I came up with her childhood in Montana, pretty feral childhood with a benignly neglectful uncle, was just that she wasn’t really aware of the limitations that were socially imposed on women starting from the beginning and had the opportunity to think of herself as almost genderless as a child and then she starts hitting these roadblocks as a woman and I think she, just as a person, is, you know, open in a way.

And so when she meets a woman, she’s connects with she’s willing to try it out. And yeah, it was just it aligned with a historical record and I think also with the character.

[00:16:47] Liz: That’s so interesting. And a lot of what you said is very reflective, I think, of a lot of us. We talk a lot in our circles about being surprised when we finally got to aviation.

And professionally, we were surprised that we weren’t welcome because we had no idea, because, whatever context that we were living in as a child that allowed us to imagine ourselves wanting to do this thing, did not put gender limits on us. And so it was just a huge shock to enter the environment and discover that we weren’t wanted.

So I think that’s very accurate. And well done developing . . .

[00:17:27] Maggie: . . . a real encounter with injustice where you’re like, wait, what do you mean? And I also noticed as I said, I’m not a pilot and part of the reason is just that I’d never, my brother was in the Air Force for 20 years and was a C 130 pilot for sort of the first half of that.

And so he was always obsessed with airplanes. I never had any interest in flying. I flew, I was behind the controls of a glider for five minutes once, and I did not like it. And I’ve noticed, it’s that people who fly have this deep instinct. They’re like, I need to fly. This is something I need to do. I’m going to find a way to do it.

And so part of the reason I didn’t really pursue taking lessons, even when I was writing this book was I was like, there’s just something in me that says, this is not for you. And I don’t have great spatial relations, that sort of thing. But it does seem to be a real common thread.

People will move mountains to fly.

[00:18:18] Liz: They will. And you’re forgiven for not wanting to fly because you brought your beautiful writing talent to us. So, we appreciate that.

You talked a few minutes ago, you mentioned that you were in the writing, trying to address some underlying questions.

Talk about some of those.

[00:18:41] Maggie: Yeah, I think fairly early in the writing process, a friend of mine said if you had to say in one word, what this book is about, what would it be? And I said, scale, and she was like, that’s not super sexy, but okay, but there really was what I was thinking about how do you measure one life against the size of the planet?

How do you measure the planet against the universe, the life against time, like all these sort of impossible to reconcile scales, dimensions and what Marion’s doing in her around the world flight is she’s just trying to, you know, see as much as she can but the thing is you make that circle and your back where you started. So what does that mean?

 So I was interested in that. I was traveling a lot and doing travel writing I would pitch stories for places I needed to go that connected to the book. So, I ended up becoming a little bit of like a polar specialist my travel writing and was also seeking out, you know, ways to fly not myself, but experiencing different kinds of aircraft, like landing on ice.

I did a story for outside where I rode in the back of the C 130 from upstate New York to Greenland. And we landed on the ice cap in Greenland on skis and what I was trying to do is get a sense of the Antarctic interior, because that applies to the end of the story. And yeah. So that was when I was interested in this courage required to be a woman within an unorthodox life.

Like Marion, it’s not just one decision to be like, I’m gonna lead a different sort of life for women in the twenties and thirties. It’s a decision she had to make over and over again, just rejecting a more domestic existence. And then, I was also interested in this question of disappearance. You say you’re writing a book about a pilot, a female pilot who disappears and people are like, so it’s about Amelia Earhart, and I’m like, no, it’s not about Amelia Earhart.

But what interested me maybe most about Amelia Earhart, and obviously she’s a fascinating person, wild life, but I was like, why is it so hard for people to accept that she probably crashed in the ocean and died? The difference between disappearance and death is really hard for people to wrap their heads around.

And I think particularly because it was this vivacious charismatic, energetic woman. It just became, no, she has to have had this island castaway existence or something. So it’s also, I was also interested in exploring that.

[00:21:21] Liz: Yeah. Wow. Well, you were successful, I think, on all counts. And thank you for sharing all that.

And one of the things that I felt when I, almost in the middle of the book, but definitely towards the end is that you, it’s not just about this pilot, it’s just about the human experience and all those scales that you were just talking about and all those comparisons and it almost felt like that book had so much truth in it, like you captured so much human truth in a story that it almost feels like it’s too much human truth for one person to know, like for you to, it’s almost, even though I intuit all of those human truths as well, it’s just having them all encapsulated in a package like this, that presents them is both overwhelming and just feels so, so insightful.

Like you can see, I’m assuming that you’re not an accomplished artist. You’ve already shared that you’re not an accomplished pilot. So you have obviously done so much work to make those things feel natural in the narrative, but then also just all of the spectrum of human experience is so well captured in this book, so I will stop gushing about that. I felt overwhelmed by that in the way that brought me joy reading those other authors that I talked about when I was young, so I loved that.

So what things surprised you in your research that we haven’t talked about yet? Or what other parts of this story in terms of Marion and the choices you made were really big decisions.

 And how did you come to those?

[00:23:18] Maggie: Yeah so much of the plot of the book actually derives from research because I’d you know started to acquaint myself with the history of aviation, which I honestly knew very little about going into it. I had, you know, the background you pick up just from having a pilot in the family.

You know, an older brother who you think is cool as a child, so I’m aware of some things about aviation, but I don’t know, like learning about the sort of barnstormers. I thought, okay, here’s a way Marion could have an early encounter with airplanes in Montana and also finding really specific aviation history in Montana.

Oh, this was another good kind of serendipitous piece of luck. I was, I spent two months in Missoula, Montana in 2014, before I started writing the book. And I’d had the idea for the book, but I thought I was going to set it in Nebraska. And so I wrote a little bit while I was there, but it wasn’t until after I left, I thought, Missoula’s a pretty good setting. And so I was working and maybe after another year, I went back to do more specific research. And I went to their little aviation museum, and they have a C 47 there. So I sit in the cockpit and wandering around. And these 2 guys came and pushed open the doors of the museum, of the little hangar and started pushing out this historic aircraft and just over their shoulder to the person at the desk, they were like tell that lady if she wants to come she can come too and, so that was me. I was the lady and so I went up with them in a 1927 travel air. That became the plane.

I had Marion and learned to fly so it was like I could see it. I could smell it I could take video I could see Missoula from that vantage. And that was amazing. And so that guided what type of plane she learned to fly in.

And yeah, there’s a, this sort of native figure that plays a role Sitting in the Water Grizzly was a real person I found in the historic record.

[00:25:15] Liz: I was hoping that was true. I didn’t look it up, but I was hoping that was true. That’s cool.

[00:25:19] Maggie: Yeah. It’s for people who haven’t read it yet, it’s this native person who is first encountered by explorers as a woman and marries a member of a trader’s sort of retinue and then vanishes and reappears, now living as a man with a wife and giving these prophecies.

And I think that was in some ways quite common amongst the indigenous population, but these explorers, I think indigenous people were so other to them already that they weren’t very phased by it. They were just huh, Sitting in the Water Grizzly is a man now. And it would just be recorded and in the journals of these different people.

And he was a translator too, which I thought was a beautiful detail. So I wrote this sort of history, these little sections in the book, the incomplete histories. And so I wrote one for Sitting in the Water Grizzly really early in the book without knowing how it would tie in later if it would, but I just had it.

I really enjoyed writing those incomplete histories. Like I did the history of aviation as I went, although they did, as I said, when I finished my first draft, it was 980 pages, and that’s about how long it was when I sold it to my publisher, and my editor was like, This is too long. So over the course of several drafts, I cut more than 200 pages, but I did it really just with small pervasive cuts.

And so those incomplete histories got really condensed and there used to be one of Antarctica that got cut, but I was pretty staunch that they needed to stay in, and also that it just needed to be a long book. I think people are scared of long books sometimes, and so there’s talk about cutting all sorts of things, but I just, I thought for what this book is about it just needs to be fat, and

[00:27:08] Liz: Oh, we’re so grateful.

I’m so grateful that and actually, I didn’t want it to end. And my husband is listening to it right now. And he has two hours left. And he’s I don’t want it to end. It’s like a 25 hour audio book. And so like, when you get into it, it’s like binge watching your favorite show, you don’t want it to end.

So that’s where he is with it right now.

[00:27:35] Maggie: I have to say by the time I was reading the second round of proofs, I was ready for it to end. I had to read it so many times. I was just like, why did I do this to myself? I can’t read this book anymore.

[00:27:50] Liz: That’s awesome. That is so funny. Oh my gosh. Did you ever make it to Antarctica yourself?

[00:27:56] Maggie: Yes, I’ve been twice. I went in 20, late 2015. Is that right? No, maybe it was early 2016. Yeah. I actually wrote a New York Times Modern Love about this. It was essentially a first date. A five-week long first date from New Zealand with the expedition leader of this trip. So I got on the ship having met this man before.

We knew we wanted to see each other again. And this was the way to do it. And that was amazing. We went through the New Zealand sub-Antarctic down to the Ross sea regions at a McMurdo station. And to where she would have to the Ross ice shelf, which is where Marion’s sort of second landing place in Antarctica.

 And then I went again on an assignment for travel magazine from South America. I think in 2018, but yeah, Antarctica would have been the big hurdle for a flight like hers in that era because in 1950, there were no permanent bases and no – I mean it’s still a real navigational challenge from everything I’ve heard from pilots down there.

But I lined up her flight with a historic expedition to East Antarctica that could conceivably carry fuel. And then if she got really lucky, she could fly across the interior to the Ross Ice Shelf, where there would have been cached fuel as well, and then take off again for New Zealand. So Yeah, it was really important for me to see these polar regions.

I just felt like I couldn’t imagine them without seeing them. And so that was a big part of my pitches for travel magazines.

[00:29:37] Liz: That’s so great. What a great way to do that as an author to get that research is to write your way into them. That’s awesome. Yeah. And I want to just on a personal note.

So Antarctica has been a thing that has, plagued me my whole life. I enlisted in the Coast Guard when I was 18 and out of boot camp of the opportunities for women available, one of them was a polar icebreaker and I had first choice out of boot camp for the women, but it was going to be in the yards for six months.

Six months this ship and so it wouldn’t be getting underway. I wouldn’t go anywhere and I had all these plans of getting, advancing and going to training schools. So I missed the opportunity then. Then as a pilot, we had this polar operations division that put helicopters, the helicopter that I flew for a living, on the back of those polar breakers and went down there, but I had a child, a small child at home, a baby. And those deployments are like six months long and I just couldn’t do it to her and to myself. But what happened was my eldest son joined the Coast Guard and he got to serve on that ship and go to McMurdo.

So yeah, the Coast Guard ship is. It’s the one that goes down and opens that channel that goes to McMurdo. So I’m very, I get to live vicariously through my son. So anyway,

[00:30:57] Maggie: I hope you get there for yourself too someday. It’s a, it is spectacular and I think it is, yeah, it’s, I took my mom with me on my, when I went for the magazine and it changed her life.

I think like she became obsessed with penguins. She actually died a year and a half ago. And her one after life wish that she expressed and only to me, it turned out was that she wanted her ashes scattered in the ocean off of Antarctica, which I have not done yet, but I will.

[00:31:31] Liz: It’s really interesting, it’s like fiction inspiring real life that’s very interesting. Wow. Okay.

So is there anything else that you would like to talk about, about Marion and this book, before I ask you about your other work, and what you’re working on now?

[00:31:50] Maggie: Not off the top of my head. I feel like it might come back as we talk about writing, but yeah, we’ve covered the big points, I think.

[00:32:05] Liz: Okay, so you referred to a couple of other books earlier that you’ve already published. Can you just give us like a little synopsis of those so we know if we want to go read more of your work, what we’re getting into?

[00:32:13] Maggie: Sure. Yeah, it’s all very different. My first novel was about a sort of waspy wedding on a fictionalized Nantucket, and the main character is the father of the bride, and that sort of came out of yeah, I grew up in Southern California, and I went to Harvard and had quite a bit of cultural shock getting there it’s just this really different world, and I had a really waspy boyfriend my senior year from Greenwich, and sort of encounter this subculture that I found really interesting.

And I wrote a short story in my second year of grad school at Iowa that it couldn’t really make work. And my teacher at the time said, well, maybe it’s too much for a short story. Maybe it should be a novella. And I was like, ah, the world needs more of this. Even though now I know that’s just like something you say.

And so I had a little bit of fellowship money after I graduated and I went and spent eight or nine months on Nantucket in the off season and wrote that book. And it’s a little bit, it’s has a little bit of a satirical edge to it, I guess, and then my second book, Astonish Me is a cold war ballet drama.

 My mom was a really big, Ballet fan and had always been. So I’d seen a lot of ballet, also not a dancer. So I think there’s a little bit of a subculture theme in my books. I’ll go into these worlds and then Great Circle. And then I also have a collection of short stories called You Have a Friend in 10A, which were written the earliest one in there I wrote in at Iowa and then over the course of about a decade and they’re all in different places and have different tones, and I think of short stories in some ways as a little bit of a laboratory.

[00:34:00] Liz: So what are you working on now?

[00:34:02] Maggie: Oh So I’ve been working on a new novel probably for a year and a half and I was trying really hard to keep it simple I was like, I don’t want to do research. I don’t want to write anything historical. I live in LA. I’m going to write a novel set in LA about a contemporary family but it turns out it’s still really hard and I think my sort of M.O. shifted over all the years I spent on Great Circle to be used to dealing with something that gets bigger and sprawls.

And so I really got myself mired and I’ve reworked the first 150 pages so many times. And so I’m actually in the middle of taking a pause that may be a fatal pause. I don’t know. I’m just going to see if I think, can think of how to reframe it or if I need to switch projects, but yeah it’s been…

[00:34:52] Liz: Is there a topic out there that you haven’t hit yet that’s like screaming at you, it needs, you need to go there someday?

[00:35:00] Maggie: I think if there were, that’s what I would do that now. I’m like in the place where I would pursue a different idea. I have sort of fragments of ideas. But one thing I found with the book I’ve been struggling with is that I never had the one sentence description of it, like I could give with all my other books and even Great Circle.

Great Circle is the only book I wrote that started as a novel. My first two novels were both short stories that got out of control, but at least like I had. I had a sense of this sort of confines of it, and I had the voice and so I think part of the reason Great Circle got so big was, I would say it’s like building a house without a blueprint, just end up with stairways to nowhere and things like that but yeah, this book, I don’t know, yeah, it also has just been a challenging time in my life, like my mom died, and I got married in the past year and a half.

I think sometimes just. Sometimes things just all come together and either make your work or break it. And I haven’t figured out if it’s broken yet, but it might be. And yeah.

[00:36:23] Liz: Well, good luck figuring that out or moving on to the next thing if that’s what you decide to do.

And Maggie, thank you so much. Honestly, thank you so much for bringing your beautiful writing talent, your tenacity to write for seven years and actually get it published and create this character. When I graduated from my master of fine arts and writing, I said to all my classmates there, it was a young adult and children’s and young adult program.

And I was like, may you all include pilot characters, female pilot characters in your books, no matter how you choose to do it, whatever genre you’re writing, please include one of us. And so thank you so much for including us in your work.

[00:37:05] Maggie: Oh, thank you. Well, your seal of approval means a lot since there’s always a little bit of a gamble and in writing about things you don’t know.

Same with my ballet book. After it was out and I heard from dancers, I was like, Oh, thank God it worked. It’s okay. Yeah.

[00:37:20] Liz: Where can we find you? You gave us your website earlier, but are you on social media anywhere? Tell us where to find you.

[00:37:27] Maggie: Just Instagram. I’m @Shipstead, and that’s the only one I actively use.

I guess I still have a Twitter handle, but I don’t go there very much anymore.

[00:37:37] Liz: Yeah, me too. I’m in the same boat.

Thank you, Maggie.

[00:37:42] Maggie: Thank you so much.

[00:37:43] Liz: Thanks so much for listening. I’d like to thank Michael Wildes of Massif and Kroo for his help producing this interview and his support of all things literary aviatrix.

Please join us in the book club next month when we’ll discuss the book, The Fabulous Flying Mrs. Miller. Blue skies and happy reading.