Q: Can you talk a little about your writing background and how your book came to be?

A: I’ve been working as a freelance business and technology writer since 2006. In 2012 I received an MFA in fiction from UMass Boston. That’s when I got involved in GrubStreet, teaching and taking classes, and where I joined a writing group called the Chunky Monkeys, which includes authors Celeste Ng and Whitney Scharer. I’m the least famous of the group. Celeste’s book, Little Fires Everywhere, has been turned into a Hulu series.

I knew I wanted to write a book-length project. I had family stuff I wanted to write about and parenting stuff, so I decided to take my son, Nile, on a road trip to my small Iowa hometown and use that as a narrative line to explore those too-big-to-chew questions.

Q: How did you approach turning that road trip into a memoir?

A: I took photos of everything and had a recorder in the car with me. That was the only way to capture the details of such a long trip. When we got home, I spent a lot of time transcribing my recordings. I gave myself a deadline: 14 months. I didn’t want to be working on a book about my 5-year-old son when he was 15. I emailed a 175-page outline to Celeste so she could hold me accountable to my schedule. I often wrote until 4 a.m. and then emailed my writing group, letting them know about the progress I was making.

Q: When did you decide to publish your book?

A: When I felt I wrote the book I wanted to write, I began looking for an agent in the summer of 2017. Summer is a notoriously slow season for publishing, and no one was getting back to me. Finally, an agent emailed me about 5 minutes after she got my query and asked for the first chapter. Then she asked for the first 100 pages. Then the entire manuscript. And then she said she wanted to represent me, so I signed on with her.

And then we struck out.

The book didn’t get any real interest from publishers. To make me feel better, my agent forwarded to me an email she received from an editor at a major publishing house, who said she loved my book. It made her laugh and cry. Unfortunately, she couldn’t get her marketing team behind it.

I licked my wounds for a few months and then decided to query small presses, which I hadn’t considered before because I thought they only published lyrical prose. I also started looking at contests.

The Pushcart Editor’s Award was one of them. Nominated manuscripts needed to be submitted by an editor at a big publishing house who wanted to publish the book but couldn’t. I sent that editor my agent told me about a very humble email about the contest. Eleven minutes later she said she’d love to nominate my book. Twelve days later Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Press, told me he wanted to publish it.

Q: Did you do any promotion before your book launched?

A: Pushcart distributes through W. W. Norton, a big 5 publisher, so I went to Norton’s annual sales meeting before the book launched to meet account representatives. Norton has hundreds of titles, so I wanted to put my face in front of the people in charge of selling my book. It’s good to make those relationships and get on people’s radars.

Also, Pushcart sent out 75 review copies to newspapers and magazines. That’s how it ended up on The Boston Globe’s and Amazon’s radars, and it snowballed from there.

Amazon named Once More to the Rodeo one of the Best 100 Books of the Year and chose it as Amazon’s debut spotlight for December 2019, which was a big surprise. The Washington Post put the book in their gift guide, calling it a “Must Read.” The book was a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick. The Boston Globe ran a cover story in its Sunday Magazine, and the book was included in the Massachusetts Book Awards Must Read Long Lists. The book got more attention than I expected coming out of the gate.