Melissa Bobe
Electric Trees
Uniondale Public Library

Tell us a little bit about yourself. 

I never know whether to start something like this with fun facts or serious stuff. I imagine most writers begin with what they do for work, but what if what people really want to know are my sun, moon, and rising signs?

I’ll start with work. When I’m not writing, I am a children’s librarian. I’m trained to work with kids from birth through adolescence and their caregivers, but my favorite ages are transitional because I enjoy a little chaos. Right now, I run a lot of baby and toddler classes. In a past life when I did freelance writing programs in libraries, I worked mostly with tweens. Whether it be tweens or toddlers, I never completely know what to expect from my library kids and, thank goodness, I’m never bored.

Before I was a librarian, I taught English at public universities in the New York tristate area. I loved teaching; if it had paid the bills, I probably never would have stopped. Even though I had to move on, I’m still surrounded by teachers. My husband is a teacher, my parents were both teachers, and many of my friends teach, as well. In a time when books, libraries, education, and literacy seem more important than ever, I feel I’m in really good company.

In my free time, I’m a volunteer for the NYC region of National Novel Writing Month and for the NY Metro region of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. My husband and I live with our five rescue cats in an apartment with too many books and whichever of my plants are still alive (if something doesn’t meow at me, I don’t always remember to feed it). I love cooking, ballet, and spending time at home. Someday, I hope to keep bees.

Oh, and in case anyone was curious: Virgo sun, Aries moon, Sagittarius rising.

Tell us a little bit about your winning book.

Electric Trees is a strange collection! For a while, I was calling it my home for my misfit narrative children, stories that weren’t really working anywhere else. They’re all speculative fiction but range widely, from the magically real to contemporary gothic to horror. The stories in the collection aren’t always easy; I think they try and provoke readers to engage on a level that’s less stable, more slippery, and hopefully in ways they may not be expecting.

In building the concept for the book, I was inspired by the phenomenon of electric treeing. In the most succinct terms I can manage from the Wikipedia rabbit hole I fell down: electric trees occur when there’s a small fault in a piece of insulation and electricity spikes through, creating a formation that looks a lot like the roots and/or branches of a tree. I was drawn to this idea of something manmade that we wouldn’t necessarily associate with the organic nevertheless taking the form of what is essentially a symbol of the natural world. And then I found myself working on this project that played with stark contrasts and contained material that seemed oppositional, even as the stories are thematically linked.

The book is divided into three parts: Light, Fissures, and Outages. In each part, things get progressively darker, and Outages is where you should probably pause that bedtime reading and wait until morning. I don’t leave readers without hope at the end; I think a mark of a good horror story is that it knows where to place glimmers of light. Overall, the collection should take a reader on a journey, though the nature of that journey will depend as much on what they’ve brought to it as it will on what they find along the way.

What made you want to be an author?
It’s hard to boil this down to a single moment or inspiration. My mom is a retired elementary bilingual special education teacher, and her motto from the moment I was born was, “Flood them with books!” And she really meant it: I had books all over the place. She encouraged me to write as much as I read, teaching me word families and phonics I think before I was even in school. She also helped me make my first “books” at a very young age, binding the chaotically illustrated pages together with lanyard or string. And my family are all storytellers, for the most part. New Yorkers love to talk, and so do Puerto Ricans, and we’re both! So I was hearing stories throughout my childhood, understanding their structures and how to use them to engage others.

I got serious about putting my books out there after a phone call with my friend Eva Papka from high school. We had been writers together back then; I was editor of the school’s literary magazine one year, and then she was the following year. We’d read each other’s stories religiously, delighting in our imagined worlds and sharing them with each other. Eva called me up after we’d finished college and had lost touch for a bit, and we both expressed this kind of quiet despair we’d been feeling because we had stopped writing. It really felt like we’d lost our way, but when we reconnected, we decided together that it was time to recover ourselves. She’s now one of my very talented critique partners, and we haven’t stopped writing since.

How have libraries played a role in your indie author journey?

I was actually pretty surprised to end up being a librarian, at least this early in my life (more on that in a minute). But I was always a library kid, happy to volunteer and attend programs with my friends, and reading voraciously, of course. I was lucky, too, because some of the librarians in my childhood were fantastic.

There was the school librarian at the elementary school I attended, who was an extremely serious, elderly nun. We weren’t allowed to make any noise, but we could look at and check out whatever books we wanted, and she kept a really contemporary, honestly pretty badass collection: The Baby-Sitters Club, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and the Bunnicula books were my favorites. She used to let me and my friends come in from the schoolyard when it was freezing out and we would stamp and sort books with her. I’m not sure whether she was really that fond of kids, on reflection, but she always struck me as a very fair adult, and I liked her.

Then there was my mentor at my local public library, Terry Ain. I learned so much from her, and I really admired even then how she could laugh with the teens she worked with (and honestly, that she had enough patience for me and my many very strong opinions and ideas about pretty much everything). She actually was the one who encouraged me to go for my PhD and not directly into libraries! She’d been a classroom teacher first and enjoyed the transition to public librarian as her second career. When I told her I was considering becoming a professor instead of going to library school, she told me to go for it! And she really drove home the idea that I would likely have multiple careers, which I’m grateful for to this day. I don’t think either of us was thinking that being a librarian would be more financially stable than teaching college, but the notion that I could always do something else really helped me when it became clear that was the case.

Now that I’m in a place where I’m working in the profession, I can see how formative libraries have been for me, in ways I didn’t even consider until I found myself providing them to others. The public library is a really important community space, and I’m not just saying that because I work there! I’m really trying to foster support for indies in my work. I even built three new collections into our children’s department with indie authors in mind: Local Authors, Storytellers, and Author Resources.

The Local Authors collection features picture books by authors who are a part of our library community, both independently and traditionally published. My current supervisor, Chrissy Hirsch, is a wonderful children’s librarian and department head, and she’s passionate about bringing local voices into the library. Many of the books you’ll find in the Local Authors collection are by people she’s brought in for storytimes and signings.

The Storytellers collection is probably my favorite of the three. It’s a collection of writing prompt books for kids, and I’ve been thrilled to see many of the books circulating among our patrons. I’ve always felt the need to support my local author communities, and building a collection to foster the newest creative voices as they learn to tell their stories has been such a rewarding way to do that.

The Author Resources collection is for adults who want to write for children. It’s a combination of craft and market/profession-focused books that will guide authors who want to enter the kidlit industry, whether as indies or as traditionally published writers. After a handful of adults had come into our department seeking guidance on how to write for kids, I figured a dedicated section of resources wouldn’t hurt!

I’ve been long-winded here, but this is a library-related award, after all! Libraries are spaces where anyone and everyone can receive access to information, resources, technology, and community-targeted activities. What other space can say as much? And what author wouldn’t appreciate a place that will happily and certainly support their work, whether by providing them with tools and research materials that contribute to the writing of their book, or featuring the finished tome on the shelf?

Do you have any advice for aspiring indie authors?

Go to the library! I’m only half-joking—you absolutely should be using whatever affordable and/or free resources you can find when you’re starting out, and your local library will definitely be a place to start looking for those.

Don’t be afraid to seek out community. If Eva and I hadn’t shared that phone call, we might never have started writing again. Then we joined our local NaNoWriMo region together, where we met Sara Carrero. Sara’s a really talented writer who quickly became a close friend and critique partner. The three of us created a true writing practice together, one which involved long days spent discussing each other’s work and writing together, all while enjoying lots of good food, of course! For years, I thought I would never need another critique partner.

This is where the next piece of advice comes in: be open when someone seeks you out, even if you think your schedule is a little full. When another old friend of mine, Kate Schnur, called me up to say, “All right, Melissa, I’m ready to do this creative writing thing with you,” I thought, how am I going to handle more critique meets with everything I have to do? Can I commit to another friend who wants to swap work? But Kate is an incredible person who I love, so I said yes. Now, I could kick past-me for my hesitation. I don’t know how the stories I’ve written since we started meeting would have come out of me without her insights.

My three critique partners are invaluable to me, creatively and personally. Sometimes it means going a little outside of your comfort zone, but finding someone who shares your passion and wants to help you succeed is always worth it. I’ve heard some writers say that they’ve faced ridicule, scorn, even mockery from people in their lives when they reveal that they’re writing. This always breaks my heart, but I also try to remind other writers that many creative communities probably come into existence because of crappy relatives who don’t want to hear about your novel. There are so many wonderful spaces out there, in person and online, where a bunch of fellow book nerds are just waiting to hear you talk about your writing! Look for them. If you can’t find them, message me or some other librarian and we’ll help you find them. They’re out there, I promise.

Be open about your writing, too, as much as you can. Owning that this is something you want to do out loud or online, where other people can hear/read you, is sometimes enough to help you hold yourself accountable. It’s scary at first, but the more you say to the world, “I’m a writer,” the more the world will believe you, and much more importantly, the more you’ll believe yourself.