Interview with the Author of Flowers for Papa - Margaret Beaver

Margaret Beaver is a nineteen-year-old design student, mental health and LGBTQIA+ equality activist, and award-winning poet and novelist. A two-time Topical Winner of the Live Poets Society of New Jersey, she has also earned the Readers' Favorite five-star cover seal and the 2023 Donna Lynn Quille Award for Best Advocacy Prose. Margaret's work spans nonfiction poetry collections and novels that delve into themes of inclusivity, prejudice, abusive authority, familial estrangement, mental illness, and the triumph of family. Her notable publications include INKWELLS (Vanguard Press/Pegasus Publishers, 2022), FLOWERS FOR PAPA (2024), and SEASONS: AUGUST'S COLLECTION (2024). Beyond her writing, she serves as an ambassador for Focus on Women Magazine and founded Margaret Beaver Books (MBB), a grassroots organization dedicated to enhancing access to mental health and literary resources. Margaret is also a certified Web Designer and a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts' Graphic Design and UI/UX Design programs. In Fall 2024, she will pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Sessions College for Professional Design, continuing her commitment to the arts and advocacy.

Author Q&A

What inspired you to write your first book?

My first publication was a poetry collection titled inkwells. (Vanguard Press, 2022), which seeks to bring understanding and knowledge to a society that struggles to comprehend mental illness by expressing my personal journey through depression, anxiety, and other mental ailments. My debut novel, Flowers for Papa (Vanguard Press, 2024), however, leans slightly to the left of these ideals in terms of being a stronger and more comprehensive literary representative for men's mental health and dismantling the negative social construct against male expression and affection towards one another.

I started writing the novel in January of 2021; I was fifteen and in the tenth grade. I finished in early December of the same year, when I was sixteen and in eleventh. Today, the entire overarching purpose of Flowers for Papa is for it to be a testament to the importance of men's mental health, to men's expression and affection, and to demolish the constructs and stigma surrounding their wellness. There are so many men in my family who forewent treatment and neglected obvious symptoms because they didn't want to admit there was a problem; they didn't want to deal with therapy and medication; they didn't want to get better. Much of that thinking is rooted in the stigma of mental disorders being inherently shameful, and the fact that men are conceptually stronger and more withstanding, and they should be able to handle everything. The world does not have to end because you don't know how to handle your feelings, and this was my own expression of that. This was the beginning of my coining the term "literary activism," which is a writer channeling activism and advocacy into their work. When it comes to what authors and publishers can do to continue to raise awareness, authors are enabled the opportunity to participate in literary activism, to craft a story surrounding a social issue or a misrepresented topic and publicize it to wide audiences.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

There are multiple prominent and underlying messages within my novel: male emotional support, mental illness and suicide, and general sociopolitical communications. My reasons for writing this book stem from a more universal means: We, as a society, so frequently just barely touch the surface of the critical conversations about our quality of life or completely discard these topics in general. Entire generations have been founded on completely neglecting one's needs because they weren't deemed socially acceptable for the time. Not only do I want to validate aspects that may still be viewed as atypical, I want to bring an honesty and detail I don't often recognize in literature, and I also want to represent characters who are so much more intelligent and powerful than how society reflects on "dumb teenagers." This is not to say that teenagers don't do stupid things-people of every age do stupid things-but to have an entire period of our lives and our entire beings be temporarily characterized as if we cannot and do not understand, as if we're inferior in our own world; it's incredibly disheartening and doesn't exactly make the youth want to grow up, knowing what world they're going to grow into. It's very important to me that we actively create safe spaces within our near and far communities, especially considering the world, in itself, will never be truly safe, and I'd like to think my work could be someone's haven-something I needed but never truly had.

Can you share a little of your current work with us?

Certainly. Across all my work, I specialize in subgenres of fiction (and nonfiction) detailing the integral topics of inclusivity and prejudice, abusive authority, estranged parents and children, the detriments of mental illness, and the triumph of family; as such, my upcoming work, Flowers for Papa, deeply reflects these topics simultaneously. One of my favorite excerpts is as follows:

"Nothing had made me sadder than imagining myself never seeing him again; and nothing had made me fall apart more than knowing he would be perfectly fine with that.
"It may have been Papa's blood coursing through my veins, but Dad and I always had one thing in common: We learned to say what we said but never what we meant."
-Flowers for Papa, page 117

Our parents are, inevitably, parts of us. One of the many central themes of the novel is the fate of human nature-the notion that we are simply the products of past loves and past crimes and past in its entirety-and human nurture-the faces of humans present, the ongoing and unfinished generation, and perhaps those who have yet to exist. One universal condition we all constantly grapple with is the knowledge that, while we are all our own people, we are also the miscellaneous pieces of every person we've ever met and every person we never will. We are the constructors and the demolishers of each other.

Who designed the covers?

I absolutely love to support talented and accessible freelancers who work independently in lieu of a corporation. Before I became a graphic design student, I was not competent in my ability to singlehandedly design and develop the cover designs I sought, which were of a highly professional and refined standard. I consulted an exceptional artist on Fiverr, Katarina Naskovski, and she conceptualized and coordinated the designs for both Flowers for Papa and its accompanying poetry collection, Seasons: August's Collection (Vanguard Press, 2024). I truly recommend her services and expertise, and heavily emphasize the support of independent artists. She can be found here.
https://www.fiverr.com/nskvsky?source=gig_page

Prior to my cultivation of the novel, my first publication was a collection of poetry titled inkwells., and I cobbled together its minimalistic cover design. The font was easy enough: I had largely incorporated the use of my genuine Remington typewriter for the photography element of the book, so I knew I wanted the font to resemble that of a typewriter. (I dabbled with attempting to create the cover by typing the title directly on my typewriter, but that never came to fruition.) I knew for a long time I wanted the scheme to be primarily black and white-very minimalistic, as I much prefer book covers to be-and ended up inserting the image of a whim because it was, simply, a very beautiful clip of a photograph I had taken for "it doesn't have to make sense," a poem in the collection. I put a monochromatic filter over the image, and it was very beautiful. With some slight adjustments made by my production team, the cover was finalized. I always intended the cover to be simple yet refined, and I believe it turned out very well.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

The best advice I could give is advice that was given to me in the form of a reading assignment for AP English Language & Composition in the eleventh grade. The book was On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser (HarperCollins, 2016), and I would refer to it as singularly the most fruitful nonfiction I've ever experienced. I read it all through the winter months and upon January second, my class was tasked with the assignment of dissecting out three primal quotes which we connected with in the text, and to analyze and expand upon them in our own writings. As a writer who specializes primarily in their area of optimal entertainment-romantic fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, just any fiction at all-I found myself at utter despair with having to read the devil of all book genres: the memoir (which is highly coincidental considering my first publication was nonfiction). Some of the most intimate sentiments have come from pure logic, and that pure logic has come from Zinsser: "I don't like to write; I like having written"; "I think they get that permission by being born"; "Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That's almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I've used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education." The narrative is composed on the entirety of making one feel less otherworldly, admitting the truths and realities of the completely condescending and mentally exhausting processes that is writing, and providing what could be largely considered as the Holy Bible of nonfiction writing: beneficial and substantial for any writer or reader across any genre. Even above that, Zinsser states and emphasizes the comprehensive lessons of a student bent to the mold of traditional educational algorithms: everybody loves to learn and create-but not for a grade or under a time limit or having to turn around and prove themselves to superiors. To students and anybody at all: You mustn't be reduced, and you don't have to prove yourself to anybody. And even more: just because you love your occupation, or profession does not mean you are immune to the stress or the treachery of it.

Do you write an outline before every book you write?

The simple answer is "no." I'd love to say I have an actual writing process I adhere to, but really, I'm a very disorganized person in general and I truly have no intentions of following any deliberate format. The truth of the matter is: I don't plot books. At all. I get a very abstract and completely detail-void idea, I write a rough narrative surrounding the vague premise, and then I occasionally dapple in miniature descriptions and try to word it as if I knew what I was doing all along. There's lots of frantic scribbling outside the margins of my journals with the new ideas I randomly get, and I try to make note of incorporating those details back into the narrative once I review and type up everything I've handwritten.

Basically, as I progress, I make more things up and get more ideas. And then I write those down. Nearly nothing is planned beforehand-I'm too eager and overly excited to write when I get a new idea that I bound in immediately-or the things I plan are very monumental and plot- altering events, and I get the vague impressions of things that I want to eventually happen somewhere down the line, but I have no details to patch the storyline together to effectively and realistically get to that point. This leads to me sitting on rather elementary plot points for weeks or sometimes months without writing anything; just purely speculating. But then, I'll listen to a song, I'll read a book, I'll watch a film-and I'm inspired again. It's a very unruly cycle, going through rapid writing sprees and then lying dormant for such extensive periods, but I've always been one to make things harder than they need to be.

There are some projects, also, where I must do more notetaking than usual because of the potential intricacies in addressing a side scheme. Any notes I make in the very beginning of the process are typically scraped or adjusted later when I figure out what I'm doing. This, consequently, leads me to rewriting entire sections-entire beginnings-once I get a better handle and understanding of my character's personalities and their ultimate aspirations or destinations. I sketch the initial beginning almost purely as a filler to build on the progress of and to motivate an early draft, and then once my understanding grows of what exactly is going on in my head, I get rid everything that doesn't align anymore or things that could be better or more vividly explained.

As you can see, it's a disaster.

And then there's the processes of poetry, which aren't necessarily processes either. When regarding the differences between writing poetry and writing prose, there's, first, the fact that you have total creative control in poetry: you don't have to use perfect punctuation or capitalization since poetry is more an art than a literature. All discrepancies are essentially excused, and you can format your stanzas and your lines however you please. Poetry, also, doesn't require as much substance-that is not to say, though, that poetry is lesser. Novels are an entirety; they are a comprehensive and hole-less architecture founded on complete and detailed narratives, the construction of entire personalities and their backstories, and the creation of sometimes multiple converging plotlines. Everything mentioned or foreshadowed must have a reason, and there is almost always something to be later uncovered. All of this must be thought through, which can be terribly distressing-or some things end up fitting together accidentally. In general, novels obtain a lot more requirements than poetry, and so they take more brain power and can be impenetrably exhausting. But I've always had a knack for having a lot to say.

What is your favorite theme/genre to write about?

As a humanitarian and a strong advocate for democracy and personal autonomy, I have a deep inclination towards writing within genres and themes that are tainted by preexisting notions and universal stigmas. For example, this novel could technically be categorized as a Young Adult Fiction, only I struggle with that label because it has somewhat of a negative connotation. YA novels are received as if they're only meant for kids, as if they have nothing truly important to deliver besides empty entertainment, and that they are incapable of broadening your perspective on certain issues and having some sort of development or impact to your person. One book that comes to mind for this example is Looking for Alaska by John Green (Dutton Juvenile, 2005). It is a truly phenomenal novel that reaches incredibly intimate and universal depths, yet it's restricted to the kids' section where not many adults would venture to. For one, I really love being able to bring a sentimentality and a depth to a uniformly juvenile genre, and I much enjoy the fact that Flowers for Papa is, on the whole, rather a compound of elements amalgamated to craft a well-rounded piece suitable for the Young Adult genre, but also containing the knowledge and lessons relevant to older adults or those struggling with mental health, self-harm, or suicidal tendencies. As a sufferer of those things myself, I strive always to make my message true and genuine, and especially when it comes to circumstances I closely identify with. When it comes to my aspirations, this novel confronts the great concepts of life-love, meaning, morality, family, death-and my intention for writing this novel is for my audience to reconnect with those uncomfortable yet inevitable elements-elements that are responsible for making life whole.

How can readers discover more about you, and you work?

My work and I can be found in lots of places, but we are best visited at margaretbeaverbooks.com. Flowers for Papa and Seasons: August's Collection are scheduled for publication on November 28, 2024, and are currently available for preorder from Pegasus Publishers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and other major retailers.
https://amzn.to/3NWVJMm
https://pegasuspublishers.com/authors/margaret-beaver
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Margaret%20Beaver%22?Ntk=P_key_Contributor_List&Ns=P_Sales_Rank&Ntx=mode+matchall
https://www.waterstones.com/author/margaret-beaver/5843916

Give a shout-out to a fellow author.

I'd love to shout-out an upcoming poet and acclaimed actress in the Southwest Texas area, Amelia Glazner. A woman of exceptional talent and her films earning several local accolades, I had the pleasure of designing the cover spread for her forthcoming collection, We're All Healing Here (Austin Macauley Publishers, TBA), from an original illustration she made. I also was given the honor of designing and developing her new website, which will be activated very soon. I wish her the greatest success and support during her publishing journey. A portfolio of my recent graphic/web design projects can be found here.
https://www.margaretbeaverbooks.com/portfolio

Connect with Margaret online on her website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
https://www.margaretbeaverbooks.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-beaver/
https://www.facebook.com/people/Margaret-Beaver/pfbid0VCu3C17Zs17jDnKq3tJsKcC4qzqswD7KYuEQXHgEDxxKt9Fat5Am6n4VUkfxcnD1l/
https://www.pinterest.com/margaretbeaver_/
https://www.instagram.com/_margaretbeaver_/

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This release was published on openPR.