We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Madelyn Postman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Madelyn below.

Madelyn, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I’ve always loved to write and have had encouraging feedback on the strength of my writing, particularly at line level. However, plotting an entire book—that moreover doesn’t neatly fit into a genre—is a huge challenge. My manuscript is a short story collection that links memoir with narrative nonfiction about my Chinese American family history.

Many types of media have taught me, from JaneFriedman.com to podcasts like The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, London Writers’ Salon, and Write Now with Scrivener. Classes I have taken include London’s City Lit short story class (meeting online 2 hours per week for 11 weeks) as well as webinars on how to write a synopsis, and on creating conflict and tension.

Through author Sacha Black, who spoke at the London Book Fair Writers’ Summit in 2024, I heard about CliftonStrengths and Becca Syme’s writer-specific coaching using the Strengths.

I love craft books on writing, in particular Lisa Cron’s Story Genius, Jessica Brody’s Save The Cat! Writes A Novel, and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

I currently have three beta readers (one through the City Lit class and two through Bianca Marais’s Great Beta Reader Match Up). Their feedback is invaluable in shaping my work. Jason Buchholz at Collaborist provided a manuscript assessment which was very useful and encouraged me to stick with the project.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My (as yet unpublished) short story collection, Staring into the Sun, links memoir with my Chinese American family’s intergenerational tales. I have also researched and written about the Eastern European Jewish side of my family and will likely be incorporating some of those stories into my first novel.

It turns out that having a bunch of short stories is useful for entering competitions and submitting to magazines. I’m over the moon that the collection’s first story, “Things My Dad Told Me,” was shortlisted for The Hope Prize and is published in an anthology, Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, by Simon & Schuster Australia. All royalties from the anthology are donated to Australia’s mental health charity Beyond Blue.

I’m a Nevada native and I spent my formative years in San Francisco and in New England. I hold a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Brown University. I’ve been on my junior year abroad since 1992 and now live near London.

My husband and I own and manage sustainability consultancy Grain, a Certified B Corporation. Grain is a longstanding business member of 1% for the Planet, donating 1% of sales to environmental nonprofits. I serve on the 1% for the Planet board as its first non-U.S.-based board member.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I did my historical research and wrote in relative isolation for many years, in the sense that I didn’t have professionals or even beta readers review my work. Only friends and family, some of whom were featured in my writing, were providing me with feedback. They were biased to not be too critical and sometimes they were reading about themselves, making the situation doubly awkward. And most of them aren’t writers.

Looking back, I could have sought out a writing professional or coach who could have helped me define what the project was. My main challenge was linking what started as sixteen stories (also the previous title of the book), and ended up as a short story collection of nine stories. The big picture, stepping back to see the whole forest, is my biggest challenge.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Writing is not my day job and in fact I haven’t earned a penny from it yet. I’d like my writing to be an income stream but don’t aspire to be a full-time writer. I like having a few irons in the fire.

I love that writing feels like my own thing, that I’m not depending on to make a living, I don’t have team meetings about it, and I don’t have to worry about salaries and overheads. I write in my own time. Because my husband and I own and run our sustainability consulting business, I can manage my time in a balance of client, team, and family schedules. This means that I often write on weekday mornings and may work on weekends. Managing my work time and free/personal/writing time “against the current” like this results in more focused time both for work and writing. While I’m writing, some work emails resolve themselves and working on the weekend has fewer distractions and no meetings.

The most rewarding thing about writing is being in a flow state. Even when writing about difficult things like death and grief, I get joy from playing with language and delving into my thoughts to articulate subtleties. When I’m writing a story, I think about it constantly. You can often find me jotting down notes in the middle of dog walks!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://madelynpostman.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the16stories/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madelynpostman/
• Other: https://bsky.app/profile/madelynpostman.bsky.social