Today I’m celebrating the release of the new adult novel The Secret of Isobel Key with an interview of the book’s author, Jen McConnel. In this contemporary romance, a recent college grad sets off to discover the secrets of a woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century.

You started out writing poetry. How did you begin to write fiction? What was it like to make that leap?

Jen: When I was young, I wrote everything, but the fiction sort of faded away by the time I got to college. Maybe because I was an English major, analyzing literature on a daily basis, I began to pursue publication with my poetry before I returned to fiction. I still write poetry, but my focus has really shifted, and the shift started when I was teaching middle school. Spending my days trying to get kids excited about reading and writing must have rubbed off, because the summer after my first year of teaching is when I started to seriously write fiction. Continue reading →