In 2022, Emily J. Taylor’s darkly enchanting YA fantasy debut, Hotel Magnifique, became an instant bestseller. In her new YA fantasy, The Otherwhere Post, 12-year-old Maeve assumes an alias after her father is blamed for the destruction of the magical doors linking three worlds. With interworld communication now limited to enchanted correspondence delivered by the Otherwhere Post, it takes seven years for Maeve to receive an anonymous letter asserting her father’s innocence. Determined to identify the sender and uncover the truth, Maeve infiltrates the Post posing as an apprentice courier and starts digging. PW spoke with the Minneapolis-based author about her highly anticipated sophomore effort’s origins, how she came to writing, and how her background in art design informs her work.
What character or concept served as the initial seed for The Otherwhere Post?
It was during the pandemic. I had a newborn at the time, and we were quarantining to an extreme degree. I was walking to the mailbox, and I remember thinking that it almost felt like everybody I loved lived on another planet from me. I had been thinking through a few ideas, but then this idea of this postal service—this magical postal service, where couriers deliver to other worlds—kind of popped in my brain. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I had to figure out how it worked, and why they would deliver to other worlds. So, that was the initial seed.
The characters in this book practice scriptomancy—the art of using inked words to harness magic. What inspired this magical system?
When I start a story and create a magic system, I write down everything magical that I think I want to have happen in the book. I knew that I wanted to have these letters be enchanted, and have the story be really grounded in letters—what they mean to us and how they connect people. So, I thought, what better way to have that come across than to create this magic system around the actual act of writing?
You’ve done a lot of traveling. Is there a particular part of the world on which this book’s fictional universe is based?
It’s hard for me to start books until I have a clear view of what the setting is. Right after I came up with the idea, I was traveling in the U.K. When I got to Edinburgh, it struck me how unique it was—it felt like this place that was out of time. It was full of cobblestone streets, and it had this black sediment that was coming down the sides of the buildings from the extreme weather there, and I was like, “Oh, it almost feels ink-stained!”—like, the city itself. I had already been working on the magic system a little bit, and this place felt so connected to the idea that it inspired a city in the book called Gloam.
Different kinds of quills and inks feature prominently in the story. Are you a fountain pen afficionado?
Oh my gosh, I wish I was. I’m a whatever-I-can-find-in-the-moment person, and my handwriting looks like chicken scratch. But I am obsessed with researching history, so when I came up with this idea and figured out the setting and the time period that I wanted it to be inspired by, I did this deep dive into how people communicated and the tools that they used. I learned all about different nerdy things—what they would write with, and the types of feathers that they would use for different quills. There’s so much history there that was really fun to dig into. Some of it ended up in the book, some of it didn’t, but you can only put so much in before you bore someone.
Your background is in art direction. Why the pivot from visual storytelling to the written word?
It was when I had my first child. I was doing all sorts of shoots and was really busy with that, and I just felt like I needed an outlet that was outside of work and being a mother. We have this really cool institution in the Twin Cities called The Loft Literary Center, so I took classes there, and started writing stories. And I fell in love with it—I thought it was just such a fun thing to do. I always read a lot, but my sister was the writer, and I was always the artist. I never thought that I could be the writer until I started doing it, and I’m like, “Oh, I really love this.”
Do you think your art background informs the way you approach writing?
I think it definitely informs it. I’m a very visual person. I have a hard time doing anything until I can visualize everything, so I love to pull mood boards and scrap and create the vibe and feel of the story that I’m going to write.
Lush, intricate world building is your stock in trade. How much of that is there when you finish the first draft?
I’m a layerer. My first drafts are pretty bare bones and are more about just getting to the end of the story. Then I go through and ask “why?” quite a bit. So, for this book, why is there a magical postal service? Why would people receive letters from another world? How do they even know someone in another world? And then every question I answer makes more questions. I just keep digging and digging and digging until I have this really thoughtful world, and that usually comes with revisions.
What did it feel like to go from realizing other people’s visions to creating things for yourself, out of whole cloth?
That’s actually a huge reason I started writing. As an art director, you’re beholden to the client and you constantly have to create things based off of their brand. Now I can put everything that I love and have always wanted to talk about into these stories. I was never able to do that before, and I think that it’s made me push into myself a little bit more. It’s way more fun to write books than it is to realize someone else’s work.
What are you working on now?
It’s a secret, but I would say that it has everything that you’d expect from an Emily J. Taylor book. The idea itself came out of the magic system this time, so that was exciting. I’ve always engineered a magic system to fit the spark of the idea for the book, but this time the magic system is the idea.
What would you say makes a book an Emily J. Taylor book?
Lush worldbuilding, intricate magic, second-world fantasy, and romance. I love romance. It pulls me through a story, so it’s something that I will always put in my books.
The Otherwhere Post by Emily J. Taylor. Putnam, $20.99 Feb. 25 ISBN 978-1-933060-56-9
