Chapter XI: How to Stop Asking for Permission
In Which Writer Roanna Flowers Talks About Creating Her Own Creative Community and Founding a Small Press
Hello from the other side of the Hameln launch!
I hope everyone’s Halloween was appropriately spooky and fun, and that you’re enjoying the book! If not, you can buy it from just about everywhere books are sold, though I do have a soft spot for bookshop.org.
And if you’re in Maryland, I’ll be selling and signing books alongside the interior illustrator and creator of the many rats on my merch, Douglas Draper. Come join us at Mad Hatter Cafe to chat and get some holiday shopping done!
This month, I’m talking to writer and soon-to-be publisher Roanna Flowers (isn’t her name the coolest?!) about her roller coaster of a career in writing, and how she decided to take control of her own creative destiny.
I’ve edited our conversation below for clarity and length, but not cursing.
Nancy: At what point did you know that you wanted a career working with words?
Roanna: Oh, it started young. I knew at 13. I had written a really long, really terrible screenplay, a 250-page screenplay, so 250 minutes. And then I wrote a trilogy actually, between the ages of 16 and 19, which was this big sprawling fantasy. Then the guy that was a screenwriter who worked with Omar Sharif called it “pretentious.” And then I took a break for a time.
Nancy: If it were a man, it would be ambitious, but since it’s a young girl, it’s pretentious.
Roanna: Yeah, of course. I didn’t have that understanding when I was 18.
But I always knew. I went into college knowing. And really, my goal was to have a Ph.D. and be a professor. And then, you know, young girls sometimes do dumb things—like get married—when they’re in school. A big no-no for women. They get divorced when they’re graduating. I still haven’t gone back and gotten the Ph.D., I have some unfinished business. But it was always my intention to do that work and actually focus. I did create my own kind of medieval English literature degree. I studied as much earlier literature as I could, and then I minored in Latin, so I was translating Ovid, I was translating Catullus.
Nancy: Oh, my God, Catullus was such a pervert, right?
Roanna: Oh, my God, such a pervert. I’m like, “Oh, he couldn’t possibly have said that.” Oh, he did. He totally said that. But also funny. And it taught me that you could be funny, even if Caesar’s coming over to have dinner with your father.
I worked for a few magazines, and I tried to chase it down as a 9-to-5, which was not as successful. It didn’t occur to me to just show up at a newspaper and say, “I’ll sharpen your pencils. Just let me be a cub reporter.” I didn’t have anybody in my life who was in the business, and so I didn’t know how to do anything. I did work for a couple of trade magazines, but then I ended up going into public service, which does a better job with paying the bills.
Nancy: Often in journalism, they’re just like, “It’s experience. It’s exposure.”
Roanna: You do it for the exposure! If I had known that getting a job as a stripper and getting exposure as a stripper, and coming away with stories like Diablo Cody would have been a shorter way to get there? I would have done it. But I had nobody to explain this to me. My family were bankers. My mom was a creative person, but she had a regular job. And so I didn’t have anybody to kind of mirror, or to figure out how to navigate that.
Because for the children [reading] this—and by children, I mean, anybody who’s 40 or under—they didn’t have the Internet where you could just look up pathways.
Nancy: And it was very insular.
Roanna: Yes, it was incredibly insular. You did have to be born into it. I didn’t know that if I wanted to work on Saturday Night Live, that I needed to go to NYU or Georgetown or Northwestern or Harvard. I just didn’t know. So you just thought, “Oh, well, those people were just really lucky.” And they are! But they are also privileged. They came from wealthy families, went to the right schools and then the met the right people.
Nancy: What I’ve read of yours has been very biting, modern, absurdist, magical realism. What speaks to you about that genre?
Roanna: I struggled for a lot of years with that trilogy that went nowhere. And then I tried to write other things. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get past page 55 on anything I did. I started a lot of things, but I wasn’t finishing.
And then I got into improv after I moved to Austin and started playing in that realm, just trying to break that editorial perfectionism brain.
And that still wasn’t enough.
Then I took a sketch writing class, and I found that I was able to finish things, and I was able to be quite funny. I met somebody there. He’s like, “Hey, I heard you’re a writer, I’m directing a film, I’m going to do a 48-hour film project. Would you like to be the writer?”
And I said, sure. Had no idea how they worked.
I did a couple of those. Then he came, and he asked me to write something on spec. So I wrote that. It ended up being a 14-minute short film called #RIP about Twitter death, literally. Celebrity Twitter death. That was in 2014. It was quite successful, and I said, “I’m getting really great reviews. It’s winning awards.” And I’m finishing things.
So rather than “write what you know,” I decided to “write who I am.” And who I am is a funny person who loves absurdist humor. I was raised on Monty Python. I was raised on Mel Brooks. And that’s what I decided to do.
Nancy: I want to talk a little bit about your creative process, and the lack of rules. You’re taught—especially women in our society—to follow the rules. If you play it safe, you will be rewarded with success and security.
Roanna: And the rules of novelists were all written by men about men, for men. And women’s stories are seen as frivolous, even though they were writing some of the things that the guys got the credit for. I’m thinking about Zelda here.
Nancy: I’m thinking about literally any man who wrote anything in the 20th century.
Roanna: Yeah. Einstein’s wife—I mean, it goes on and on, right?
Nancy: Exactly. But writing doesn’t really have rules. So, what does your process look and feel like? How do you know when you’re cooking?
Roanna: I write to music, but that’s not completely true. I need to write in silence. But when I’m framing a narrative, I frame it first with music. I’m such a visual-auditory person, that I see the things happening, and I have to write down what I’m seeing in my head. It’s very much a movie, and that’s why a lot of my influences aren’t other novels, they’re actually movies and TV shows, because I am such a visual person.
For example, in the book I just finished, I knew that I wanted each chapter to be the title of a breakup song. So I find a song, and if I am playing the song and I see the scene, that becomes the song of that scene. And it becomes a working song. I can’t listen to it unless I’m ready to work. If I listen to it, my brain will write.
The songs for Too Much Heaven, I realized needed to be from the Nixon era, because it was a post-Trump fable. And initially, Petrichor, the main character, was really into Taylor Swift, especially Shake It Off. But it didn’t really fit the vibes. So he’s basically early 70s soft rock, a sort of Gordon Lightfoot fan. I’ll also have a fairly good idea of what the undercarriage is. For the first novel, it’s Wizard of Oz. for the second, it’s Alice in Wonderland. It’s not a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, but that sort of undercarriage support helps to guide me through the first draft.
Nancy: How long did it take you to develop that process, and how long did it take you to recognize that you had a process?
Roanna: I recognized it with Too Much Heaven almost right away. And it’s because [my main character] showed up with a song. I was listening to a song in the car when Petrichor literally walked across my face and stole people’s sandwiches and then Squirrels started yelling at him. I went, “What is happening here? Who are you and what is this about?” And that scene is chapter three. It’s literally in there. He wakes up in San Diego, and he literally spends his Tuesday taking people’s sandwiches off their plates, taking a free cup of coffee, because he’s given up on life. And so his petty crimes and misanthropy is all he has left. Because that’s kind of how I felt in 2016, 2017. I made him live that life for me, to exile himself to San Diego and just not give a rat’s ass.
Nancy: This is why writing will always be cheaper than therapy.
Roanna: Yeah. I mean, I have that, too.
E Pluribus is the same way. I had the initial idea in 2018, but I was still kind of finishing up Too Much Heaven, and I have to write linearly. I have to finish one thing before I can start another, which is just the way my ADHD brain works. Each book has its own sound. Each book therefore has its own voice. I didn’t know what the voice of each E Pluribus was going to be until I started
Nancy: I want to talk a little bit about Armadillo Author Society, because it is such a robust community that you’ve helped build. How did you find each other, and how have you continued to connect with each other?
Roanna: In 2017, I met Annie and Britta and Gina. I had met Ilene before, actually. She and Q ran a conference, and they were really well-known in the blogging scene here. We all ended up, like the four or five of us, at the same table at the Agents & Editors Conference. We had seen one another throughout the day and kind of connected, then we ended up sitting next to one another at lunch. And we just really bonded, and we had a great time. It was so sweet. And the following year, we saw one another again. And I said, “Why are we waiting and spending $500 to talk to one another? We could actually meet outside of this thing, right?”
We all traded information, and we started kind of casually meeting in 2019. We’d get together socially and just talk about where we’re doing. And the great thing is, we were working across genres, so we weren’t all sci-fi writers, we weren’t all women’s fiction.
But then in 2020, the world changed. So I got a Zoom account. I subscribed and I said, “Well, let’s just be on Zoom.” And we met once a month so we could stay in touch with one another. Partly for writing purposes, but also partly just for community in a pandemic, because we were all in lockdown. It became a habit, and it’s gotten more and more structure as we’ve gone on.
We kept going to the Agents & Editors Conference, and we would vibe with people and say, “You really need to come and hang with us.” That’s what Britta did with you, I think.
Nancy: Yep. That’s exactly where we met.
Roanna: I met Heidi online the year that the conference happened virtually; we were in the same virtual waiting room to pitch an agent. And we vibed. “I like you. You should come talk to us.” And I met Chantal that way, too.
It was just a very organic conversation amongst all of us. And, of course, we put out the anthology as a group project, which was fantastic. It’s been a lifesaver. I had looked for this community all my life and never found it. I needed this community when I was in my 20s and got told by Omar Sharif’s friend that I was pretentious. I needed this community to go, “Fuck that guy anyway. He doesn’t know.” Could I have not lost my 30s? That opportunity, that time, had I had this group of women?
Nancy: So now you’ve got your own publishing imprint, Cackle Books, that you’re working on. Tell me about that.
Yeah, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve got a cousin who’s a lawyer and has worked in the literary circles of law. Of course, she owns the wonderful bookstore, Alienated Majesty in Austin. And she’s going to try to get a circle of us [local publishers] together. It’s almost like the Armadillo Author Society, but of small presses.
I’m going to be doing an Indiegogo for Too Much Heaven and test the waters on that. Fortunately, I do know some people that have their own imprints, so I’m not starting out with no information. Which is a privilege, to be honest.
Nancy: Just visiting your website, you can see how very specific and recognizable it is: this is very much a woman-owned Austin press, focusing on satire. It is a little bit irreverent, but also serious as fuck.
Roanna: Serious about the comedy. I’m excited about learning. I think it’s taking everything that I’ve learned from project management, everything I’ve learned from my opera production experience, everything I’ve learned from magazine production. And everything I’ve learned, of course, from Mixed Bag of Tricks. And I’m really good at building relationships. I think that that’s really the secret of it.
Nancy: Do you want to talk about what you’re working on right now?
Roanna: I just finished E Pluribus. It is my satire of the American moment. It is a story about a team that is put together by a secret bipartisan committee to determine a feasibility survey about separating the United States. What I call “doing a Lewis and Clark in reverse.” And it’s about their experience on the road, and it’s also a mother-daughter storyline. The character is a mess. She’s kind of a reflection of the country. Her truck doesn’t work, her life doesn’t work, her job doesn’t work. Nothing is really functioning. And it’s her experience in how she kind of comes to reconcile that. I’ll start querying it beginning in the new year.
Roanna’s One More Thing: Lucille Ball et al.
I have a lot of what I call my “unofficial writing coaches.” (These are people who don’t know me and have never met me.) One of them is Carrie Fisher, who’s no longer alive, but she’s kind of a guiding star for me.
The other one is Willie Nelson, and this is why: He was successful in Nashville, with his short hair and his little tie and writing music for other people. And then he decided he was going to do this crazy concept album called Red Headed Stranger. And no one wanted to do it, because it was nothing he had done before. It was nothing that anybody else was doing. And it ended up being the thing that made him the artist that he is.
And then, of course, there’s Lucille Ball, who gave the world a quote, “I’m not funny, what I am is brave.” And when I was performing improv, one of the teachers said, “What I like the most about you is that you’re brave.” And so I hold on to that quote by Lucille Ball, and that’s why it’s on my Cackle Books website. So those are the things that kind of inspire me and guide me.
Roanna Flowers is a litcom author based in Austin, Texas. Her comedic short story “The Bitches of Eastwick” appears in the anthology Mixed Bag of Tricks. She is the writer of three award-winning short films, one of which played in over 30 festivals worldwide, including the Cannes Short Film Corner. Her debut novel, TOO MUCH HEAVEN, is due for release in 2026 by Cackle Books. She is a member of the Writers’ League of Texas, the Austin Chapter of Women Who Submit, and a founding member of the Armadillo Authors Society. She has a B.A. in English Literature and Latin from the University of North Texas.