My Kids’ Teacher, Ani Katz, Writes Another Novel

[1:29]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. I interviewed Ani Katz at Totally Booked Live at the Whitby. Her novel is Haven, and she's a writer, photographer, and teacher, born on the South Shore Of Long Island, New York and lives in Brooklyn. And FYI, she was one of my kids' teachers. So this is a particular joy for me to spotlight her amazing work of her second book. Welcome to Totally Booked Live. So excited to be here with Ani Katz today to discuss her novel Haven. Congratulations.

[2:42]My Kids’ Teacher: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Yay.

[2:48]Zibby Owens: I have to reveal that you were my son's teacher.

[2:50]My Kids’ Teacher: What? Fourth grade? Third grade? Third grade. Third grade. Third grade. And I'm I'm not just saying this because I'm here, but truly one of my favorite students ever,

[2:59]Zibby Owens: which I'm sure is not a surprise totally to just saying that. Totally not just saying that. Oh, he was so excited that I was interviewing you today anyway. So anyway but thank God. The book was so good anyway. And you are actually we're here at this Totally Booked Live Day, the only novel

[3:16]My Kids’ Teacher: representative.

[3:17]Zibby Owens: I noticed that. Yeah. So congrats on that. Thank you. What it's worth. Okay. Tell everybody a little bit about the book. What's gonna happen? So this book,

[3:27]My Kids’ Teacher: my elevator pitch for this book has been that it is like Rosemary's baby, but with tech bros instead of satanists. So that's the that's the basic premise. And the idea for the book actually came from my best friend, who usually gives me all my best story ideas, was telling me a story about her parents when they were young, and they were at a group rental at Fire Island, and it was when they had their first baby. And they were the only couple in the house that had a baby, and they were surrounded by these sort of hard partying other young people. And then the father was just disappearing during the week to go back to the city to do various things that were, you know, not really what he should have been doing. And so I thought, oh, wow, this is a great premise for a novel, but, of course, in the novel, the baby is going to go missing, which is not what happened in real life, just what happened in the novel. I mean, would be really worried if the things that happened in this book actually happened to your friend's family. Yes. I would I would as well. It gets it gets pretty dark and pretty disturbing. But I I had really wanted to write a locked room thriller for a while. I was actually stuck on another project, which is which had gotten way too complicated. And I thought, I just want, you know, one setting, a limited group of characters, and really, I think I work really well with limitations. And so I thought, great, I have this this kernel of an idea. I'm just gonna write some fun thriller, and that'll be that. And as I started working on the book and adding more specificity about who the characters were, what they were doing there, the time they lived in, the the original story became a basis for me exploring the things that I was really worried about personally and the things that I was worried about politically in the world. So it became much more than just that original thriller.

[5:41]Zibby Owens: Well, there's a lot in here about motherhood. New motherhood, the fear of something happening, the things that are out of our control and how we deal with that, trust, loyalty, ambition, identity. I mean, really, like, cram in a lot of stuff. Memory, right, and what you remember. Is this real? Are these people you know, what happens? Anyway, I think the the writing about that feeling of the flush of new motherhood and trying to sort out who you are is particularly meaningful and impactful. Talk a little bit about that storyline. Thank you. So I actually

[6:22]My Kids’ Teacher: wrote most of the book before I became a mother. Was actually when I was in the process of trying to become a mother, which was a process that took many years and was really difficult for me. I had read a lot of other books, consumed a lot of other art about being a mother, and so I was drawing a lot from that. But really, what informed most of my writing about motherhood was not being a mother yet, desiring to be a mother, and experiencing a really painful medicalized path to motherhood that was really alienating and produced a lot of anxiety. So I think that feeds into that sense of the postpartum anxiety, that feeling of what is going on, can I trust myself, can I trust my body? And

[7:15]Zibby Owens: you do have a character who's having a Yes. Very hard And

[7:21]My Kids’ Teacher: but then the final revisions of the book, I did in the first few months after my daughter was born. I was able to add in that specificity of, in particular, a detail that I never would have known about until I actually experienced it was when when you have the newborn and you wake up from whatever pocket of sleep you've gotten and you're convinced that the baby is, like, stuck under the blankets with you and, you know, that just sort of like panic because you're completely disassociating because of the sleep deprivation. So things like that, it was more of an additive process, putting in those details once I had had the experience myself of being a mother.

[8:05]Zibby Owens: So interesting. Oh my gosh. Well, it definitely took me back, let me say that. You have another whole storyline about Adam's job. It's Adam, right? Yeah. Okay. Adam's job working for this big corporation Mhmm. With some shady dealings. There are lots of secrets, lots of conspiracy theories, and everybody just trying to figure out how this is gonna affect society. Talk a little bit about how you what what were you trying to get across with this? So,

[8:39]My Kids’ Teacher: as I said, when I started adding specificity to the characters, who they were and what they did, and I thought, well, what is a sort of, you know, ethically murky what's what's today's sort of ethically murky job that, you know, affords you a lot of privilege and money and status, but, you know, has certain baggage attached? I thought, well, of course, he works in tech. That's that, you know, that seemed obvious to me. And then, you know, I was basing it on a lot of what's been going on in the world for the past few years. I started writing this book. It was the summer of twenty twenty one, and, you know, we're still in the pandemic. It was really casting a long shadow, especially in terms of people's distrust in institutions, you know, a sort of fraying of that social fabric. And, you know, there are all these tech companies, initiatives, things that are purporting to make life better, but are they really making life better, or is it just sort of adding more noise? And, you know, as I continued writing and revising the book, you have even more sort of alarming uses of tech that we've, you know, seen in the current administration. And so, you know, the book is really about, you know, like I said, it's Rosemary's Baby with Tech Bros instead of Satanist. It's like where where where is sort of the evil coming from, and where where is the demand to make these sort of compromises compromises that really, you know, ultimately threaten our own humanity.

[10:22]Zibby Owens: So can you take us back to your growing up, becoming an author? Did you always want to be an author? Did you want to be a teacher? Like, how did you become a novelist?

[10:32]My Kids’ Teacher: So initially, I wanted to be an artist, a visual artist, and Like drawing, painting? Drawing, painting, photography, ultimately. I when I but then when I was in high school, I really wanted to be a writer.

[10:48]Zibby Owens: And then So this is sixth grade you wanting to be a photographer.

[10:52]My Kids’ Teacher: Yeah. So so I would say, you know, up until up until teenage years, I wanted to be a visual artist. And then I got really into books, writing, and I thought I wanna be a writer, I wanna be a writer. I went to college and I said, oh, I I don't wanna be a writer. I'm gonna I'm gonna go back to visual visual art and photography specifically. And then it was actually once I was in an MFA program for photography, I said, you know what? I think I'm gonna write again. I think I'm gonna write again. The work that I was making felt like it really needed text to go along with it. And so I started writing more and more. I had a professor actually who got me into some of the graduate creative writing courses at the school where I was doing my MFA. And I remember I'd been doing these short text pieces for my photo work, and then I took a class where I I wrote a full fledged short story, you know, sort of your conventional short story. And I brought this to my photography professor, and he read it. And he said, now that I've seen that you could do this, I don't wanna see any of that other text work. You need to just, you know, do do this. And my gift to myself when I finished that program was that I was going to write a novel, my first novel, which has not been published and will never be published. But, you know, writing that first novel was a process of figuring out, like, yes, I can I can do this? It had always seemed like, you know, a novel is such a big thing. How do you, you know, how do you sustain for that long? And then once once I figured I I could do it, that was that was it, and then I just kept I writing had no idea that I was ever going to be a teacher until I sort of just fell into my first assistant teaching job and then decided, oh, this is this is what I'd like to do during the day if I'm if I'm not doing art or writing.

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[15:48]Zibby Owens: And so then your first published novel, how did that get published?

[15:53]My Kids’ Teacher: So that was the that was the second novel that I wrote. And, again, that was also a project where I had the kernel of a story that I heard while I was stuck on another project, the first unpublished novel that we were trying to get published, and it just wasn't working out. You're like the person who, like, gets a boyfriend while you have a boyfriend. Yeah. Exactly. It is exactly like that. And, yeah, and I I thought, oh, this is going to be my side fun project that I work on while while really this is my, you know, the real Side dish. Yeah. The the real the real project that I'm trying to work on. And then I finished, you know, I finished A Good Man. That's the the novel, my first published novel. What what was the colonel for that? The colonel for Matt came from the same best friend, of course. That's why I say she gives me all of my best ideas. It was a tragedy that had happened in her extended family. And the way that the family talked about this person in their family who had committed this horrible thing, who they were also mourning the loss of that person while having to reconcile what they had done to other people. And I thought, This is really interesting and difficult. And that became the kernel of the idea. And it's a novel told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator who does something really terrible to his family. And, you know, it was so different from the first novel that I had written, which was a, you know, pretty conventional coming of age story, and I just thought, you know, well, this this will be weird and interesting, and this will just be something fun that I work on. And then that that actually became the novel that that we published first. And how did you get that deal? It's not so easy to just become a first time novelist. It was not easy, and it was especially not easy with this book. It was so it is so dark that we had a lot of editors who were interested, and then they would be really excited and, you know, tell us like like, yes, we're so you know, we wanna do this. We're so excited. And then they would come back and say, actually, not sure how we're going to market this or not sure if this is a fit. So it took it took us a while, and, I mean, I I adore my agent, Julia Kenny. She just kept, you know, kept going with this book. You know, I think we first put it out on submission in the fall, and it wasn't until, you know, almost the spring that we finally found someone who really recognized the vision and wanted to support it. And I remember at the time, I was doing a student teaching placement at a public school down in Tribeca, and I would take calls from Julia during the day, and I would sneak outside, and there was a there was a dog park right next to the school, and I'd be sort of crouched down out of the wind next to this dog part park and just, like, the wafting of, like, the dog urine coming towards me as she was telling me about, you know, yet another roadblock that we were hitting. It's a very it's a very visceral memory

[19:21]Zibby Owens: of that of that time. And that's why you'll never have a dog. -No, have -I'm two dogs, kidding. I'm kidding. How do you deal with the rejection when you're dealing with students and all of that? How do you go back into the classroom and brush it off? Or how did you

[19:42]My Kids’ Teacher: back in the day? It was actually, I think, the best thing that I could have been doing to deal with that personal rejection of my work, which, you know, it it hurts. It feels it feels bad. It feels you know, the dominant emotion I would feel would be just sort of, like, embarrassed that someone hadn't understood what I meant to what I meant to say, what I meant to, you know, to communicate or feel that, you know, the work itself had fallen short in some way, even though I know, you know, rationally, that's not really what it is. It's just, you know, it's it's a business. Every book isn't for every person. So it was actually great to just go back into the classroom, and that class was it was fifth graders, and fifth graders are really interesting. And just I have one. Yeah. To Interesting is one word. Yeah. Interesting is one word. To, you know, to put aside what I was dealing with and go back to, you know, helping these these kids grow as people and, you know, helping them with their own creative work and writing, I think, has been one of the best things for me and my own creative practice.

[20:59]Zibby Owens: And tell me a little bit more about this dark side. The the books are dark too dark perhaps for your first crowd of editors. Is this just something with the way you've always been? What kind of books are you? Are you drawn to dark books like these as well? I think I am drawn to dark books,

[21:19]My Kids’ Teacher: especially when I was writing Haven. I actually was reading a lot of science fiction, speculative horror. These authors that were really not afraid to go to a place of of, you know, something really really sort of disturbing. And, you know, I've thought about why this is the case, and I think that we we're living in a pretty dark time. So I think as an artist, it feels like in order to make art that is authentic and honest to myself and what I care about, there you know, I I have to include those dark themes somehow. You know, I think that there, you know, there is there are artists, writers who can write really wonderful escapist works, but I've just never been great at doing that. Every time I think I'm going to do something fun and light, it becomes this incredibly dark thing.

[22:30]Zibby Owens: Do a lot of the parents in your current class know that you have this book coming out?

[22:35]My Kids’ Teacher: That's a really good question. A lot of parents knew about the first book, and it was actually it was wonderful. They were really supportive. I had parents the year that book came out who, you know, told me that they read it, they loved it, they were really happy that their child was in my class, which if you've read the book is an interesting thing to say. This year, I'm not sure yet. They might might find out, you know, as publication gets gets closer. What I have always noticed is the the class list for my school come out in July. So, you know, kids find out which teacher that they're getting. And when I check my sales, there's always a slight uptick that first week in July when the class list comes out. I think some I I think it's some parents buying the book to see, you know, to see what what that's all about. That's so interesting. So just last question. As a teacher and someone shaping

[23:42]Zibby Owens: the kind of work that comes out from the next generation, like, are you feeling good about where things are going? And, also, how do you empower them to tell the stories that we all need to hear?

[23:54]My Kids’ Teacher: That's a great question. I think that I I would say that I'm cautiously optimistic. These kids are dealing with a lot. They, you know, they've already lived through a lot of really world changing events, and, you know, we think, oh, they're kids, they're resilient, they're not really paying attention. They are resilient, but they are definitely paying attention to what is happening, and it is definitely affecting the way they move through the world. And, you know, they see what worries their parents. That rubs off on them as well. So so they're dealing with a lot, but at the same time, I think they, you know, they have wonderful ideas and they care deeply. And as their teacher, you know, my goal is for them to, you know, get in touch with and meet their authentic selves, the, you know, the art that they need to make. So, you know, if they need to make something dark, that's, you know it's my job to just help them find where they need to go and be there to, you know, not even guide them along the way, but just kind of be, you know, be there, like, waving at the shore in case they need help. But most of the time, they really they know what they're doing. Amazing.

[25:27]Zibby Owens: And are you working on another book now?

[25:30]My Kids’ Teacher: So I actually I I wrote a

[25:33]Zibby Owens: I wrote a middle grade novel. Wait. Hold on. Let me just say that again. Are you working on another book now? I wrote a middle grade novel,

[25:46]My Kids’ Teacher: which I'm not sure what's going to happen with it yet. In some ways, it's part of it could be considered to be part of the same world as Haven. The elevator pitch for that one is that it's Blade Runner set at a New York City private school. Sounds

[26:06]Zibby Owens: good. I can't wait to read it.

[26:09]My Kids’ Teacher: Annie, thank you so much for coming out. For having me. Thank you.

[26:13]Zibby Owens: Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.