An Interview with Monica Roe

The 25th anniversary season of the Final Thursday Reading Series continues with young adult novelist Monica Roe. Her novels include Air, the Wilderness Ridge series, and Thaw. Support for this event comes from the Ila Hemm Visiting Author Program. The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). Monica Roe takes the stage at 7:30. The featured reading will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click to register for a link. 

Interview by Sheila Benson. 

SHEILA BENSON: I am fascinated by the many, many hats you wear. Can you talk about how your public health hat and disability inclusion hats influence your author hat? 
MONICA ROE: What a great question. Public health and disability inclusion advocacy evolved pretty organically from my early days of clinical practice as a physical therapist. Both look at the overall health and well-being of broader populations of people, including factors which may (or may not) adversely affect access to services, education, jobs, social integration/engagement, and quality of life as a whole. Being rural-born and raised, I found myself naturally drawn to rural and remote area clinical practice—in Alaska and elsewhere—which further led me to consider how factors such as disability, geography, rurality, and socioeconomic status present both unique challenges and opportunities for anyone who exists within those intersections. As for my writing, I think I finally realized that I tend to do my best work when I write what I know—which seems to have led me down a path of writing real stories for real kids doing real things in real places. While I never set out specifically to tell a "rural story," or an "inclusion story," or a "public health story," somehow those bits and pieces of all my experiences and interests always seem to thread themselves into my work in unexpected ways! 

SB: You split your time between Alaska and South Carolina, which is also fascinating. What brought you to both places? 
MR: Straight-up wanderlust. :) I wound up in Alaska about a year after graduating from physical therapy school. While I originally went with the intention of paying off my student loans (plenty of people don't want to work in AK in the dead of winter, so it can pay rather well), I soon fell in love with the place and ended up spending the vast majority of my clinical career practicing in small, off-road communities all over the state. South Carolina happened just as randomly. Four years into my Alaskan career, I asked my (then) travel recruiter to please send me someplace warm—just for one winter. I ended up working at a tiny, rural hospital in the center of South Carolina and enjoyed myself so much that I decided to stay for an entire year (just to see if I could commit to one job and one place for that long). Just as I was about to head back north, I ended up meeting my husband-to-be. Over the years, we've gone back and forth between AK and SC, with a couple of segues down into southern Belize for variety. We're currently based in SC, due to some extended family needs, but travel back to AK when we can and are always ready for the next adventure. 

SB: You keep bees! What brought you to beekeeping? Has beekeeping worked its way into any of your writing, and if so, how? 
MR: We stumbled into beekeeping by accident over ten years ago when we stopped by an educational booth at the South Carolina State Fair. We were immediately hooked and promptly joined our local beekeeping association to learn more. We have had as many as 24 hives in the past (that lasted exactly until we became parents, ha!). In this season of life, we generally keep about 3-5 hives at any given time, leave most of the honey for the bees to enjoy (we do take a frame or two for ourselves, of course!), and offer educational outreach on a local level from time to time. Honey bees are a lot of fun to work with and observe, and I find their strongly female-driven hierarchy wildly fascinating. Bees do find their way into my writing on occasion! For example, in Air, Emmie's best friend, Alejandra, is an aspiring beekeeper. I have a few bee-specific book ideas floating around in my brain, which hopefully may take shape for future projects—stay tuned. :) 

SB: How do you see your writing positively impacting rural health and rural spaces? Feel free to wax eloquent about all things place-based here. 😀
MR: The places that shape us can have such a profound impact upon who we are, how we engage with the world, and how we view ourselves. For rural communities--who are often either absent from or misrepresented by more dominant cultural narratives—I think that having authentic, nuanced, sensitive, and engaging portrayals of their daily realities can hold so much value. In my opinion, we need so many more writers from rural backgrounds working in and contributing to the publishing and storytelling world. Our numbers are slowly growing, but the needs are great. and many aspiring rural writers face unique barriers-—on multiple levels—to being welcomed into those spaces. I don't have many lofty views about my potential broader impacts as an author—imposter syndrome is real, y'all, and deep down, I'm just a kid from dairy country who somehow stumbled her way into this world and is figuring it out as she goes! But if I were to hope for my books to achieve only one thing, it would be for them to encourage kids of all abilities growing up in rural spaces to see and believe that their stories—and the places that shape them—hold value, beauty, and a whole universe of potential. 

SB: Finally, it wouldn't be an interview with me if I didn't ask about pets, specifically dogs. Do you have any dogs? Wish you did? 
MR: I'm not actually much of a dog person by nature! That said, my dog-adoring husband and daughter have brought me a long way since my single days of only keeping pet reptiles. We currently have two dogs running around our place, and I'm reasonably fond of them both. 😉 Sally, our elderly border collie, is far too smart for her own good, chronically anxious, and can be counted upon to ignore at least 75% of the directions I give to her. To counterbalance Sally's high-test nature, we also have Drumstick. Drummy is a corgi/fox terrier mutt with the ears of a fruit bat, the legs of a dachshund, the heart of a lovebug...and a very uncomplicated brain! Pretty much the only thing that ever upsets her is being left out of anything fun.