Emma Tourtelot brings a rare mix of cultural fluency, emotional candor, and lived experience to her work. In this interview, Tourtelot reflects on motherhood as a creative throughline, her early-morning writing life, and the surprising rewards of seeing readers truly live inside her words, as she discusses her debut novel, No One You Know.
Emma Tourtelot’s debut novel, No One You Know, released January 20, 2026.
Q: What’s a memory of a story or book that made you realize you wanted to be a writer? A: I grew up one town over from Roald Dahl–in Buckinghamshire, England–so I got to meet him at our local library when I was a kid. He was just as weird and wonderful as his stories. And so tall! (I just looked it up: He was 6’6”.) I read his books over and over, and I loved hearing about his little writing shed in his back garden. That was the first time I really thought about who was behind the stories I loved. My favorite was always James and the Giant Peach.
A multi-genre author and poet, Cathrine Swift says her earliest memory of falling in love with reading involved a book called Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. The book features a young princess who runs away from marriage and castle life to live with dragons. Swift says, “My DNA was forever changed by it, and the rest of the series, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles. I saw (badass, femme) women (and gentle, loving men) doing badass things for the greater good, and my writing blueprint was created. Of course, I didn’t know or fully understand it at the time, but looking back now, the evidence is right there.”
The year is 1456: Queen Amelia has barely survived her first year of marriage to the wicked King Alaric. When she accepted his marriage proposal arranged by their fathers, she believed it her sole opportunity to fulfill her birthright as ruler of Dathoviel and protect her brother from the throne he feared. But she can no longer sit back and watch helplessly as her husband destroys her land and starves her people. She must find the strength to fight back.
Q: What has been the most unexpected lesson you’ve learned about yourself through writing? A: That your art isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay. My books are written for a specific group of people. It’s a broad group, to be sure, but we as authors have a target audience, and it’s a marketing term for sure, but at the end of the day it’s just about finding our people. The ones who are going to be touched by the themes and circumstances of our books. And the rest, the people who don’t get it…well, that just means that particularly story wasn’t meant for them. But it is meant for someone. For a lot of someones. So don’t give up, your people will find you, and your art will impact their lives—for the better.
Melissa R. Collings is the award-winning author of the bittersweet love story, The False Flat. Before Melissa started writing, she worked as a surgical physician associate in Nashville, where one of her favorite procedures was reconstructing a lower-lumbar tattoo after a back surgery. Her stories, like her, are always a mix: light and dark, laughter and tears, outlandish and grounded, beautiful and ugly, glitter and charcoal smears. Her interests are way too varied; her imagination never fails to get her into trouble; and she lives by her life philosophy: nothing is impossible, and everything is better with glitter—except surgical wounds.
Q: When did you first catch the writing bug? What drove you to persist? A: I’m originally a surgical Physician Associate (medical provider). I worked 50-60 hours per week doing spine surgery, rounding on hospital patients, and seeing patients in the clinic. I enjoyed my job, but when my husband and I were expecting our first child, I decided to take a long hiatus from medical work and stay home to raise our daughter. I’d worked since I was very young, so this was a steep adjustment for me. I needed something for myself, so I turned to a psychological suspense novel I’d started before college.
Back then, I’d been working as a receptionist and had a lot of down time. I had an idea for a book and started writing it to fill my time. I didn’t think anything would come of it. But when I was at home with a newborn, I picked that novel up again, and I discovered a whole new world.
Today’s writing blogger challenge prompt might be a hard one. I am sitting here racking my brain and not coming up with more than one or two. So, here’s what I’m going to do: Let it simmer. I am going to simply leave my Word doc open and run back to write these down as I think of them.
Hopefully I’ll have come up with ten by the time I need to post this. Otherwise, I may end up posting a partial list –OR- using the alternative prompt, which is to take a blogging break for the day. Nah, I’m not taking a day off!
Write on the World 