Q & A with Author Maddie Dawson

Have you met Maddie Dawson yet?! If you haven’t then you’re in for a treat! She is the author of 10 novels- the most recent being The Magic of Found Objects. I first found out about Maddie’s books when I signed up to do a book tour for A Happy Catastrophe a couple of years ago. When I started reading, I quickly realized it was the follow-up book to Matchmaking for Beginners and decided to stop and read that one first. I’m so glad I did, because it became one of my all time favorite reads! Maddie has this extraordinary way of writing and creating characters that will worm their way into your heart and stay there.💕

1.  I fell in love with your writing when I read Matchmaking for Beginners! The magic, the quirky characters, the charm, and the messiness that is life and love. I followed that up with A Happy Catastrophe & The Magic of Found Objects, which I loved equally as much! How do you come up with the originality of your stories?

Wow, thank you so much for such kind words! I wish there was a simple answer to your very intriguing question. Where do stories come from? To be perfectly honest, they seem to spring from out of nowhere (and never when I’m sitting at the laptop with my fingers on the keyboard, waiting patiently.) Nope, they come when I’m falling asleep or driving in the car or getting ready to give a talk on some other subject altogether—and BAM! There’s suddenly a story tugging at my brain, and refusing to let go. Usually it starts with a character who has a “what if” question. For Matchmaking for Beginners, the question was, “What if your whole life could change if you just trusted one unlikely person and let yourself follow your heart?”

2. I hear that you come from a long line of story tellers. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Ha! I think I was born knowing I wanted to tell stories. I talked very early, apparently, and at the age of four, my mother said, I talked incessantly about my life in the Navy. Yep, the Navy. No one in our family had been in the Navy, and as far as she knew, I’d never even heard of the Navy. But there I was, correcting the way she vacuumed the floor or planted flowers in the garden. “That’s not how we did it in the Navy!” I’d say. At six, I wrote my first story when my mother wouldn’t give me money for the Good Humor truck, and I went door to door until I sold it to the neighbors for twenty-five cents—enough to buy myself and my sister a popsicle. THAT may be when I decided I wanted to be a writer: it looked like a sure-fire way to have ice cream for the rest of my life!  

3.  You have some amazing character names in your books- Marnie, Blix, Phronsie, Tenaj. How did you come up with these?

Thank you for saying this. I love naming characters. It’s one of my favorite things—and is also possibly (besides ice cream acquisition) one of the best reasons for becoming a writer. After all, in your regular life, how often do you get to name things? Sure, if you have kids and pets, you get a few chances (but even then you have to negotiate with another person usually.) Quite often the characters themselves sort of “tell” me their names, and I just go along. The name always suits their personality, at least in my head.

4.  What is your favorite type of scene to write?

I love all of it! Mostly I love to write scenes where there is growing intensity between the characters and plenty of humor. I love scenes that express their personalities, and make me laugh.

5.  How many books have you written? Do you tend to stick to writing the same genre?

I’ve written ten novels (just finished the tenth one yesterday!) and three books of non-fiction.

6.  Who is your biggest cheerleader while you are writing your books?

I’m so lucky to have a community of writer friends, and we all hold each other up while we’re writing. It’s so handy to be able to pick up the phone and groan in a certain way and have the person on the other end know instantly that this means you’ve lost the plot and need a new motivation for the main character. (This is different from the moan you do when your computer has crashed and you just lost the first four chapters.) Family members try to be sympathetic—they really do—but often they can’t help saying things like, “Just think up a new plot!”

6.  What are you currently reading/listening to/watching?

I’m reading about four different books just now, because for some reason I need to have a book to read in every room of the house. One is The Museum of Broken Relationships: Modern Love in 203 Everyday Objects by Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic; Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, by Abigail Thomas; The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler (for the fifth time!), and Untamed, by Glennon Doyle. As for television, I just finished watching Ted Lasso and Hacks, both of which made me a better person.

7. I always hate getting asked this question because I can never decide, but I’ll ask anyway…What’s your favorite book/ or who is your favorite author?

Ha! NO ONE likes this question, because it’s constantly changing—with moods, with time in life, even with wind currents. Over time, though, I guess I’d say mostly my favorite author is Alice Munro, who has such a fantastic body of work. Her short stories have stayed in my head over many, many years, and I’m always wanting to go back and admire how she manages to create such depth and such feeling with just a few lovely brushstrokes.

8.  How do you celebrate when you finish a writing a book?!

Champagne? Beating a drum outside at midnight? Nope, I’m afraid not. When I finish writing a book, I find that I’m kind of pensive for a few days. It’s an ending, after all. The characters are packing up their suitcases and we are bidding each other farewell. I thank them for moving into my head and telling me the story, and they thank me for trying to get it all down while they dictated it. Sometimes there are a few hard feelings we have to work on: I think they could have been more forthcoming at times, and also could have respected my sleep schedule, even when they had a brand new idea to tell me (couldn’t it have waited for morning, Phronsie??) And they always think I maybe left out some details they thought were important but which had to get dashed due to length. It takes a while for the dust to settle and for me to really feel the exhilaration of I’M DONE! I’M DONE!! For me, the true celebration comes when the galleys arrive in the mail—touching and turning the real pages of the book does something to my heart that I can’t quite put into words. It’s like magic.

9.  Tell us all about your latest release The Magic of Found Objects, and PLEASE let us know how gnomes came to play a role in this book, I can’t see one without thinking of you and this story!

Ah! The Magic of Found Objects, my pandemic book, is still one of my favorites. It’s the story that answers the question: What if you get to be in your late thirties and your dating life sucks, and your best friend says, “Let’s get married even though we’re not in love!”? That’s what happens to Phronsie Linnelle, for whom nothing in life is exactly clear-cut. As soon as she makes up her mind to make her parents happy and accept the proposal of this childhood friend whom she talks to every single day, she meets a much younger new guy at work, a guy who collects gnomes, wears sandals to work, and calls everybody “dude.” Clearly not what anybody had in mind. When she looks back at her childhood—raised by two very different moms, her biological mom who’s a hippie artist and her stepmother, who’s more practical and stable and dependable—it becomes clear she has to go deep to figure out who she really is in order to know what to do.

The gnomes! Ahhh, the gnomes! My friends Beth and Bill have a whole colony of gnomes living at their house, and as soon as I “met” these little guys, I knew I had to have them in a book. I gave them to Adam, the young guy in my book, and he immediately placed them in his office windowsill and bought them a tractor.  

9.  Also, readers want to know-(and by readers, I mean ME) Do you have something new in the works for us?!

I do! I do! (jumping up and down here) I have a book that I just finished—Snap Out of It—which is a comic novel about a middle-aged, three-times-married, fun-loving woman who’s happily given up on love and now just wants to help other people steer clear of romantic agony, so she dresses up in a bunny costume and goes to their houses, where she helps them get rid of all the reminders of lost love so they can move on. When her business takes off and becomes a national phenomenon, all is well until love starts breaking out all around her. It’s coming out in January of 2023.

Thank you so much Maddie for participating in my Q&A and for all of the thought that clearly went into your answers-I can’t wait for Snap Out of It! I hope you all enjoyed getting to know Maddie as much as I did! She’s such a delightful person and if you haven’t yet, I hope you get the chance to check out her books. 💕 Here are links to a few of them below:

Matchmaking for Beginners

A Happy Catastrophe

The Magic of Found objects

Follow Maddie on IG & Twitter, or check out her website!