Welcome to the first of Agent Trade Secrets’ vlog series. Every month, I will have a guest come on to talk shop and, there was no better first guest than my friend, colleague, and client, the incomparable literary fiction author, memoirist, and substacker, Jennifer Steil. Jennifer and I met in our annual research cohort at the University of Birmingham for distance learning PhDs. She was doing hers in creative writing, and I was doing mine in Narratology. Before I even knew Jennifer was an author, I was drawn to her incredible storytelling ability as she spoke of an adventurous life living in countries around the globe that nobody else I knew visited: Yemen, Bolivia, Uzbekistan—to name a few. When I found out she was an author, I had to buy her books. In her memoir, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, Jennifer writes about uprooting her life for a career running a newspaper in the Middle East. Her debut fiction novel, The Ambassador’s Wife, is loosely based on her own real-life account of being kidnapped while pregnant with her daughter, and her sophomore novel, Exile Music, is one of my favorite novels of all time. A historical, literary fiction set during WWII in Austria and Bolivia, she writes it with an immersive musicality and lyricism to her prose that is richly atmospheric and stunning. Her third novel, The Underside, coming in Spring of 2028 from Regal House, is a literary fiction novel, once again inspired from her time living in La Paz, Bolivia as well as five years of intense doctoral research into the country’s underground LGBTQIA+ scene. While Jennifer talks about how it is “legal” to be gay in Bolivia, it is far from accepted, often leading to violent targeting and severed family ties. A braided narrative that follows three lesbian characters of different ages and backgrounds, The Underside, depicts what it is like for them to find freedom living in abandoned underground mining caves until an outsider brings the outside world to their threshold in a way that demands action. Recently Jennifer has also been published in The New York Times’ Modern Love column and she writes a weekly substack entitled Liminal where she discusses her battle with cancer and the liminal state in which she often finds and has found herself living. In this month’s Agent Trade Secret vlog, Jennifer and I talk about her incredible career as a journalist, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and former actress. We discuss our shared love of literary fiction and the challenge of selling it in today’s market, our shared frustration of how the industry categorizes genre, and what inspired her to writer her newest novel that is a drastic departure from her usual style with a minimalist urgency that is un-put-downable. If you enjoyed this interview, please like, comment, share, and subscribe to Agent Trade Secrets AND Liminal. You can also join the Top Secret paid tier for exclusive looks into my Agent Inbox, an Agent’s POV to the Trending Stories in Publishing, Suggest Article Topics ask Questions for me to answer, and more. This is Agent Trade Secrets, signing off for the week. Get full access to Stephanie Katz at giraffelightmedia.substack.com/subscribe
