Interview with Notable Magazine Editor and Published Author, Emma Riva
Rian: Welcome to Papers Publishing Emma! We’re so excited to have you speak with our litmag today. You’re a self published author of the title Night Shift in Tamaqua, a story about two lonely individuals who chance upon the spark of a relationship while working nightshifts in a small town in Pennsylvania. A worthy read if I say so myself.
So I’m sure our readers are just as curious about you. Firstly, why did you decide to go with self- publishing? Did you look into traditional publishing beforehand?
Emma: My mind and process move very fast. I write about a book a year and tend to complete first drafts within a month, then I’m so excited about my ideas I just want to share them with everybody. Traditional publishing operates at a snail’s pace because of all the moving parts. It can take years just to get an agent to request a full manuscript, let alone be interested in it, let alone send it to a publisher. With Night Shift in Tamaqua, I had an opportunity to do a book launch at One Art Space in New York and I didn’t want to wait around for a publisher.
I’m also really self-directed, and that helps a lot with the initial stages of self-publishing. I’m currently searching for an agent or a small press for another project, but that’s really a long game. I don’t think I would self-publish again, because I don’t think it’s always sustainable for literary fiction. It’s a lot easier to do with genre-specific fiction, where there are niche markets, but literary is so broad and often requires more institutional backing. Since Night Shift in Tamaqua is illustrated and a little unconventional, I thought self-publishing might be easier, and I wanted creative control. In writing, as in relationships and many other parts of life, sometimes giving up control is where growth happens. So I would love to involve more people in my process in the future.
Regardless, I have a strong belief that we’re at a “something’s gotta give” moment in the publishing industry. This model doesn’t work. Everybody is losing money and the whole process is not author-focused. I don’t know if you’ve been following Chelsea Banning on Twitter, a self- published author who held an event nobody went to. She posted about it and got shout outs by the likes of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. She’s an extremely smart self-published author who really understands that it’s like owning a small business and managing a personal brand. Her tweet really showed people how lonely self-publishing can be sometimes. I’ve also done events nobody came to! It’s been an interesting journey for me, but I’m really excited for whatever the next step is.
Rian: We can always cross our fingers and hope you strike gold like Banning, get some shout out from King and Gaiman as well. As for the contents of the book, where did the inspiration for the two leads, Ellen & Lance’s story come from?
Emma: There’s a lot to talk about there. The story itself is the brainchild of both myself and illustrator Coyote Jacobs. I remember distinctly driving around in upstate New York on our way back from shopping at Target and talking about wanting to collaborate. We were roommates and the book is in some sense an ode to our friendship. It was a terrible time in both of our lives and we were able to be there for each other. I really owe CJ the world. Night Shift is different from what I typically tend to write in a lot of ways, since most of the seven other manuscripts I have laying around are a little darker and more complicated. But CJ and I wanted to do something that was a fun, interesting, feel-good love story about work and people’s relationships to work – something that was on my mind a lot at the time. I worked a minimum wage job during the pandemic and felt completely miserable, and I was rethinking what it means to be a productive member of society and what role your labor should play in your life.
Much of Ellen’s character arc draws from my own experience taking antidepressant medication and unpacking the cultural shame around that, particularly in immigrant communities. I think many people with immigration as part of their family story have the thought: My ancestors went through so much worse, why do I still feel sad? The tension between parents or grandparents and children about who had it “worse” is very interesting to me. The things Ellen deals with around femininity and her role in relationships are a theme in a lot of my work—this idea of feeling like social norms around womanhood don’t make sense and that by virtue of being a human and having human desires, you’re excluded from this object idea of being a woman. Big Fannie’s, where Ellen works, is loosely based on an extremely gross but extremely fun twenty-four-hour diner called El Dorado II in Scarsdale, New York that I used to go to with an ex-boyfriend. We would get pancakes at three in the morning there and I distinctly remember one summer him saying that someone there offered him a job and he said something to the effect of “I would rather kill myself than work here.”
Lance’s storyline is interesting because in the original draft of the book, he wasn’t Jewish. I was struggling to make his story tie to Ellen’s and I didn’t feel as engaged with it. I was initially nervous about talking about my religion publicly, but when I wrote Judaism into the plot, the book blossomed. I was thinking about how in a lot of fiction, there’s this particular portrayal of Jewish men as very awkward and sexually inexperienced, and I wanted to write a Jewish romantic hero, a man who’s still sensitive but in touch with his desires and wants to have a deep, meaningful, passionate relationship. Like we all do! I wanted to speak to a particular modern relationship to Judaism a lot of us in our twenties have, too, where it’s not just the latkes and Woody Allen movies that non-Jews find accessible, but a deeper spiritual connection to specific traditions. Lance cares about his faith and his identity and that was important to me to convey.
Yom Kippur’s place in the story came from a conversation I had with a mentor of mine where she told me that teshuva was what I needed in order to forgive myself and stop feeling damaged from how the pandemic had affected my mental and physical health. I had never thought of teshuva as being related to healing and self-forgiveness, since this idea in English of “repentance” is very much about personal responsibility and accountability. But teshuva literally means return. The book is about returning to yourself.
Rian: There’s really so much that goes on within the pages of the book, it really doesn’t feel like you fit all that backstory in there! Yet, from reading it myself, I know it does. So with the book now published, how are you getting interest for it? Do you do any promotion for it, or did you just want the work out there anyway?
Emma: I live in a smaller city, so it’s much easier to promote the work in a smaller literary community. My friend joked that within living in Pittsburgh for six months, I had seven readings. I love doing public events. I went to Glasgow, Scotland, the summer of 2022 and brought a few copies of the book and read from it at an open mic. I called this my “European tour” but it was way less glamorous than that. Hopefully someone else will pay for me to actually have a book tour one of these days, since interacting face-to-face with people is one of my favorite ways to share my work. Another thing I’ve experienced is that sometimes a “reading” isn’t what’s most conducive to get people interested—I did an event at Red Hawk Coffee in Sharpsburg, PA, where I read a little bit, but we spent most of the conversation discussing the themes of the book just sitting around a table. Answering questions and having conversations about my book is invigorating to me. Another way to do that is having a table where people can come up and interact with you and get their book signed. I did an author signing table like that at Loganberry Books in Cleveland, OH, once individually in the store and once at their Author Alley event. That’s a crazy story. I had lost my wallet a few days before and had about $30 in cash as my net worth and no ID, literally only several copies of my book and a plastic box of rugelach to try to entice people to come to my table in a hiking backpack. I don’t own a car, so I took the Greyhound to and from Cleveland and my tagline was to tell people to buy the book because anything they didn’t buy was going to be dragged back to Pittsburgh on my back.
Whenever I do events, somebody from the Lehigh Valley, where the book is set, somehow shows up. People think it’s hilarious that there’s a book set in Tamaqua, a little town basically nobody has heard of. How I chose the setting is a whole other tangent you’ll have to have me back for a second interview to go into. But I always meet someone from there who gets really interested in the book. I suppose what I’m getting at is that promotion by word of mouth and community engagement is much easier for me than social media. I tried doing reels on Instagram, but it’s very unnatural. Marketing fiction is difficult because of how longform it is. I think I just have had to get into a groove with things and allow them to happen serendipitously. There are some self-published authors who really know how to game the system of marketing with buying ads, making TikTok content, et cetera, but I’m a little old-school in that I think my work will reach the right people for it regardless of what I do or don’t do.
Rian: It sounds like it is reaching at least some of the correct people, coming from a smaller town myself, it always feels like a personal acknowledgement when someone names us, you know? Now when you’re not writing one of your own works, you’re working as a managing editor at UP Mag - how is that going?
Emma: I sometimes tell people that my art writing career keeps me from completely losing my mind. I thought for most of my life that being a writer meant I was just going to be permanently investing time into a side gig to fund my creativity, but my work as an art writer and managing editor at UP (an international online and print magazine focusing on street art and graffiti) has become a lot of the foundation of my professional life. I feel incredibly blessed to have found a fulfilling and fast-paced career that nurtures both my creativity and my soul.
Of course, I’m still a fiction writer. But my approach to fiction has always been a bit different in that I’m very craft-focused and very vocational in the way I think about it. I get along a lot better with painters I’ve found. I also really strongly believe that you don’t need an education to write good fiction and often fiction just comes from people who have interesting lives and strong voices. Writing fiction is also a solitary thing, and I’m a very social person. Writing about art is a social activity where I just get paid to meet interesting people and have interesting conversations and tell interesting stories. I love to tell stories. Everything I do is a form of storytelling, from the way I make my coffee to the way I fall in love to the graphic design work I do to the essays I tutor middle schoolers for.
But if I hadn’t met T.K. Mills, my co-editor and professional partner, God knows what I would be doing right now. Night Shift in Tamaqua wouldn’t even exist in the first place, because One Art Space only offered me the book launch because I had an existing professional relationship through writing about exhibitions there. I met T.K. in 2020 through a mutual friend and found that I had a real connection with UP, and the rest is history. We’re currently working on Issue 6: Graffiti and Issue 7: Fashion with UP. A piece I’m proud of from my recent work is my profile on Venazir Martinez, a muralist from the Philippines whose work uplifts Filipino indigenous communities. And I recently interviewed Ish Muhammad, founder of Crazy Indiana Style Artists, a graffiti crew that kickstarted the movement in Gary, IN. That was a lot of fun.
Rian: That sounds like so much fun. We’ll be sure to keep our eyes open for the upcoming issues of UP Mag. Finally, I wanted to swing back to your book. According to your bio, you’re originally from NY and now live in PA, but Night Shift in Tamaqua was written while still in NY. What was this process like? Do you feel your writing career blossomed in one place compared to the other?
Emma: Yes, I’m originally from Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. I’m a bit of a cultural nomad in a lot of ways, which can be isolating, but growing up in New York meant I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of people and places and was independent at a very young age. I stayed in New York for college because I had the idea that whatever problems I had wouldn’t just magically go away if I moved, so I didn’t see the point. I also didn’t want a traditional campus experience, so I went to a weird little art school and lived at a YMCA, a hotel, and later a tiny apartment where I wrote most of Night Shift in Tamaqua. I mention this in the acknowledgments of the book, but I worked at a Chinese home goods store/grocery store and would get up and write around 7AM before going to work. I was depressed and disillusioned with my life. Night Shift is very earnest and not cynical for that reason. I needed something earnest and real and brimming with emotion because the world felt so stale to me.
The thing about New York is that you feel like there’s a barrier of entry for pretty much everything there. It’s easy to feel like there’s a big disconnect between the life you’re living and the life you want in a city like New York or Los Angeles. I moved to Pittsburgh, PA in 2021 with the guy I was dating at the time who had accepted an offer to attend school there. I ended that relationship in the coming years, but I fell in love with Pittsburgh. It’s there I’ve found that I really can live the life I want. Regardless of whether I live in Pittsburgh for the rest of my life, Pittsburgh really taught me that if I have a dream, I can just do it and it’s much easier than I thought. Living in Pittsburgh, I feel like I’m a part of a new creative movement. The Rust Belt is where shit is going down now. Everybody else has gotta get on it. I think there’s something to living in a place where historically things were made rather than consumed. I have so much to say about Pittsburgh. I tell people I want to outdo Michael Chabon for writing about Pittsburgh. I know so many amazing creative people in Pittsburgh. I’m so grateful to my community. I would definitely say I’ve blossomed here. A concept I learned from Ish Muhammad about talking about graffiti in the Rust Belt is that rather than “urban decay,” he sees it as “urban bloom.” I just loved that. That would be the title of my memoir. Urban Bloom. Writing and art bloom and blossom where other people might think there’s decay. I hope with my work I get that across.
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