Conversation
The Host Takes the Guest Chair
Ashley Bryant interviews Willow, the host of the Literary Fantasy Podcast. They discuss the impact of writing on personal growth, the challenges of navigating traditional versus indie publishing, and the appeal of dark romance.
Episode notes
For this episode the microphone turns around. Author Ashley Bryant, a past guest on the show, answered Willow's call on Threads for an author to interview her, and the result is one of the most honest conversations in the catalogue.
Ashley starts with Willow's own writing. Willow worked with Ivy Graves on Rock Bottom, an anthology about mental health with 24 other authors. Her contribution is about postpartum psychosis, the stigma around mental health, and her own suicide attempt during that time. The book includes resources for postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis at the back. Writing it was therapeutic, and so hard to edit that she handed part of the work to Ivy. Her measure of success is simple: reaching one person going through the same struggle.
From there the mood lifts. Willow explains how talking with guests opened her eyes to traditional versus indie publishing, why she would go indie, and how much control traditional publishers can have over an author's work. She shares her guilty pleasure genre, omegaverse, recommends Not Your Problem, Cowboy by Harley Knight, and defends a few of dark romance's most unhinged tropes as strictly fictional.
The conversation closes on why the show exists. Willow started it as a book nerd who wanted to promote indie authors for free, and her hope for the next 10 years is for more authors to sell their books and for the writing community, which can be lonely and divided, to feel like a community.
In this episode
- Postpartum psychosis and mental health stigma
- The Rock Bottom anthology
- Traditional versus indie publishing
- Omegaverse and dark romance tropes
- Why Willow started the podcast
Books mentioned
- Rock Bottom
- Not Your Problem, Cowboy by Harley Knight
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