I’m in the middle of reading KB Hoyle’s new book Son of the Deep and delighting in how Karin puts words together – crafting a new story out of a well-loved one. It’s these type of stories that make me glad books exist!
Karin Hoyle is an author and professional writer. She has published 10 books for teens and has taught creative writing and publishing courses, spoken at a variety of venues, created her own writing curriculum, and written for a number of publications. . . and now she and her life-long friend Katie Stewart have started the journey of running a new book publishing company called Owl’s Nest Publishers.
Learn more about Owl’s Nest at https://www.owlsnestpublishers.com/#/
Learn more about Karin at http://www.kbhoyle.com
Below, Karin shares about her new book and Owl’s Nest, and in Wild Things fashion, offers several book recommendations.
Your new book Son of the Deep looks fabulous. What got you started on this? And what was it like to follow your own vision but also take on some ideas from the original story?
Of all my eleven published books, Son of the Deep was one of the easiest to plan and execute since I was working from established content. I got started on it because I was inspired to write a retelling of an original fairytale that felt very much like filmmaker Kenneth Branagh’s retelling of Disney’s Cinderella (my favorite Disney film, as a child). There was so much beauty in Branagh’s retelling in how he pulled apart what was a classic Disney story and filled in the spaces with his own vision—but stayed very true to the original.
I was filled with the desire to do the same—not with Disney’s The Little Mermaid, but with Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale, which is fraught with beauty and elegance (and frankly sometimes gets a bad rap for having a “sad ending”). It was very easy to pull apart the bones of Andersen’s original story, use those bones as the structure of my outline, and fill in the rest with enough material to make up and imagine an original story that still remains true to the source material.
Please tell me about your new publishing company Owl’s Nest. What a wonderful name, which I imagine has a great backstory.
Owl’s Nest Publishers was established this past year as a shared vision between myself and my lifelong bosom friend Katie Stewart. It is an independent publishing house that we created because we see the need to make space for authors who want to write books for adolescents—real adolescents, rather than what the market often mistakes for adolescents. Thus, our company motto is “Capturing the imagination of teen and middle grade readers.” We know that there are many readers out there between the ages of 8-18 who feel lost in the bookstores trying to find books that represent their coming-of-age experiences—or who simply can’t find the books they really want to read! We want to be a reliable source of books for them (and a reliable source for their parents).
The name for Owl’s Nest comes from the family camp Katie and I attended as children—for our entire lives, really. We came together every summer with the same families for one week in July, and we had this group of friends with whom we grew up, at this remote place in Upper Michigan—one of those rare places that was special and unique and felt like a truly “thin place.” Many of the buildings there were named for things from either The Chronicles of Narnia or Winnie the Pooh, and there was a camp library that was the upper room over the rec center—that library was called the Owl’s Nest (referencing Owl from Winnie the Pooh).
The Owl’s Nest had window seats with cushions where you could sit and overlook the fields and the beach and read a book, and I remember spending mornings up there with my class as a young kid, listening to one of the Narnia books read aloud to us. But as Katie and I and the rest of our friends grew older, the Owl’s Nest became a place we would hang out on rainy afternoons, or if we just needed a change of pace and place—without any adults or supervision involved. Lots of laughter and fun and memories and imagination were forged up there.
We had lots of motivations for starting Owl’s Nest! Katie and I are both parents ourselves and feel the lack of options when we search for books for our kids. As a former classical educator, I can also tell you that after many, many conversations with parents, there is a real lack of options for books for young teens. Also, Katie has been involved in the book-reviewing scene for many years and has seen the lack of books—particularly for the upper middle grade age group—herself. Previous to starting Owl’s Nest, I struggled for a decade to find representation and acceptance in the traditional publishing world for my books, which were written for ages 13-16, despite finding acceptance among readers. I’ve watched many authors go through the same struggles.
Our hope for Owl’s Nest is that we can make space for these needed books to be published. We want to become a reliable publisher of adolescent literature for young readers and their parents, to grow and bring on an increasing number of authors who share our vision each year, and to publish books that capture the imagination of teens and middle grade readers in true, beautiful, and good ways.
At Owl’s Nest, we only publish books for adolescents, and our books are broken down into three imprints: Owl’s Nest Middle Grade, Owl’s Nest Teen, and Owl’s Nest Classics. Middle Grade is for books with an audience ages 8-12, Teen is for books with an audience ages 13-18, and Classics is a line of public domain literary companions that we are very excited about! These are public domain books that we will be publishing as study guides with annotations, questions, and essays to help introduce adolescents of today to Bildungsroman classics of yesterday.
And we are open for submissions! All our submissions guidelines can be found here: https://www.owlsnestpublishers.com/submissions
This fall another book is coming out titled Orion and the Starborn. It looks really interesting! What is that about?
We are so very excited about Orion and the Starborn at Owl’s Nest—and I am of course excited about it on a personal level since it will be my 12th published novel and the first in another series!
Orion has been such a difficult novel for me to define for people because it falls in that tricky in-between space: it’s in between genres and also in between audiences. It’s neither fantasy nor science fiction—it’s a little of both. It’s crossover middle grade to teen (so we’ll call it upper middle grade). The characters will age up as the story progresses, so it is true coming-of-age. Orion and the Starborn is the story of a boy who must find his place in the universe, literally, and the implications of what happens when he does. It should feel, when you read it, both like an old story you’ve read before, and something entirely brand new.
What are five book recommendations that you can offer us?
This is such a hard question for me to answer because I don’t like recommending books (especially to children) without knowing what sort of reader I am dealing with. But here are a few go to books:
The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander is a lesser-known fantasy series that is an absolute favorite of mine, as is Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a light and lovely children’s fantasy read.
My non-fantasy reader (who struggled to read as a child) loved to read The Bad Guys books by Aaron Blabey, so I recommend those to parents of reluctant readers.
And if I have a chance to buy picture books for people, I almost always choose Doreen Cronin’s Click, Clack, Moo books.
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This post was written by Leslie Bustard, one of the co-editors of Wild Things and Castles in the Sky.
