Featured Attendee: Julie Gerstenblatt
Hello, Julie! We're so glad you'll be at TBR in January. It's so great to have this chance to ask you a few questions about your writing life and learn more about your books. Tell us about your most recent project. It's a new novel that comes out next year, right?
Hi! Thanks for inviting me to chat here. I love being a part of this nourishing, Boston-based writing community and I’m super excited for TBR.
Yes, my new novel THE STARGAZER OF NANTUCKET comes out on June 9, 2026. It’s an historical novel set in 1851 that follows the Starbucks, a husband-and-wife team of sea merchants, and their fearless, spunky 18-year-old stowaway daughter Winifred, on the journey of a lifetime around Cape Horn, to San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, and onto China, where calamity ensues. It’s an adventure on the high seas about a family that must confront their past in order to secure their future. Think of it like The Wager meets Tai-Pan meets Moana. (Although we did not pitch it to my editor at Park Row with the Disney comp included!)
All novels are a heady mix of research and imagination, but historical novels about real people take a special boldness. I know your first novel featured some real people and some fictional characters, all against the setting of the Nantucket Fire of 1846. How did you approach the challenge of blending fact and fiction?
What I like best about writing historical fiction is exactly that, the blend of the real and the imagined. When I stumbled upon the Great Fire, I discovered something that I’d never had before in one of my (previously unsold) novels: the beating heart of a plot. There was going to be a fire! That historical backdrop elevated my story automatically with action and drama. My plan was to populate the world surrounding the Great Fire with made-up characters, so that I’d be free to do whatever I wanted with them. But the more research I did, the more I realized that Maria Mitchell, America’s first professional female astronomer and first professional female librarian, would be just perfect as one of my main characters. Talk about your DAUGHTERS OF NANTUCKET – Maria certainly is one! Yet this felt risky – who was I to re-tell a person’s story? So, as I made decisions about my Maria, I tried to both honor the real person and write an interesting, compelling narrative. I filled in the spaces of what could have been along with what the history books tell us was. Wherever I really freaked out about this, my writing group reminded me that I was writing fiction, which gave me the courage to proceed.
It helped that a great deal of what we know from that time period about Maria Mitchell was lost, providing space for me to play. (The novel reveals why this occurred – and it’s not what you think!)
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
The first thing I’d say is related to my answer from above: don’t be afraid to follow where the story leads. Push yourself past the comfortable, take a narrative leap, try something that feels risky – both for yourself and for your characters. If you don’t like to make life hard for your characters, get over it. If you worry too much about following the exact history behind your tale, let that go. If you toss and turn at night thinking about what your grandmother might say about your book, be brave and write it anyway.
Secondly, and relatedly: you need to treat your writing with serious intent, obviously, but also, you need to be less precious about your work. If the only story you want to tell is that one you wrote five or ten years ago and you are just waiting for the right agent to come along and see what you see despite lots of rejection, write something else, something new. Get on with it. Get honest feedback from someone other than your life partner / mother / best friend. Writers have more than one book in them, and the ones with staying power keep at it – and sometimes even pivot several times during their career.
Which brings me to my last bit of advice: if you had told me ten years ago that I’d be writing historical novels, I would have laughed in your face. I know that doesn’t sound like advice, so let me explain. I had written several contemporary novels and had signed with two previous agents before I got the book deal for DAUGHTERS with agent #3. The key to that was to pivot from writing yet another novel in a genre that wasn’t selling for me to something historical that felt fun in a different way. It was not historical fiction that I wanted to write so much as this one, very specific story about a place that I love at an inflection point in its history. So I switched genres, and here we are. (And with book #3, I’m switching back to contemporary! So there!)
In addition to being a writer, you work part-time at a bookstore. How has that changed or expanded your view of books and writers?
Well, it’s gotten me out of my pajamas, for starters. Apparently, there’s a whole world out there beyond the one in my mind!
But seriously, working at Barrington Books, in Barrington, Rhode Island has been incredibly eye-opening in terms of the business of selling books. The bad news? Books get about 90 days of shelf-life in a store like ours. New titles come out every Tuesday, as you know. To create space for them, we pull the older books that aren’t selling well and send them back to the publisher. I feel really bad when I’m asked to do this, because I know how much time that author must have spent crafting the thing. But if it came out on July 1, chances are, it will be gone in October.
The good news? There are ways your book can, hopefully, possibly, stick around longer. Get on the staff pick’s list at my bookstore, and we will put that title into our computer system and always have a copy on hand. As soon as one is sold, the system automatically triggers us to order another. Independent bookstores have tremendous power in the market that way, because devoted readers come to us every day and ask us what to read. I literally hand sell my favorite titles all day long.
I have also learned that people are picky. They will say they don’t like epistolary novels until I force Virginia Evan’s The Correspondent on them with a “Trust me!” They will say that Stephen Rowley’s The Guncle seems too light because it has a cartoonish cover, so again, I say “Trust me!” – and they return for the sequel. Some refuse to read anything with a speculative twist and others skew towards mystery or romances as their go-to. It’s fun, and it’s a constant reminder that not every book is for every person. But if you can find your readers, they’ll tend to stick by you and champion your work.