Meet Katy L. Wood | Queer Author & Illustrator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Katy L. Wood and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Katy L., is there something you believe many others might not?
One thing that writers get told a lot is that you can only write in one genre, and if you try to branch out of that genre you’ll fail. Or, if you really want to do it, you’ll have to write under different pen names. I get where this comes from, but I’ve always found it obnoxious. Genre can be so arbitrary, and it’s just one marketing tool of many. I might write what I consider to be an Adventure/Survival novel, but my agent will pitch it to publishers as a Climate Thriller, and maybe a publisher will just push it as Contemporary. Maybe I write what I consider to be a Cozy Fantasy, but it ends up getting published as a High Fantasy because that’s what the market is trending with when it gets picked up. I do think authors should have a through line in their work to carry their readers from one work to the next, I just don’t think it HAS to be genre. For me it’s character driven adventure & survival stories centered around family both born and found. In one case that means a group of outlaws exploring mysterious, magical holes in the ground. In another case that means a group of counselors at an isolated summercamp trying to navigate a nuclear apocalypse. Vastly different genres, but very similar characters and themes.
 

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I am an author/illustrator, and I always have been. That’s a combo that can be quite rare, as compared to being just one or the other, but I have always been that way. To me the two are inextricably linked. I can’t write a story if I haven’t sketched out the characters, and I can’t do an illustration unless I’ve worked out at least a little bit of a story for it. There was never a time where I wasn’t doing both. One thing I have always been most fascinated by is the way people react when things go very, very wrong. I honestly don’t know where this fascination comes from, but I’ve had it ever since I was a kid. I very distinctly remember having a creative writing assignment back in Middle School where we had to write a short story on any topic we wanted, then when it came time to critique one another the teacher sorted us into groups based on similar story content. There was the group of people who wrote ghost stories, the group of people who wrote stories about pets, etc. etc. And then there was me. The lone student who had written a story about a tornado hitting the school and trapping all the students in the gym when the roof collapsed (but somehow none of the teachers). The teacher told me the story was good, but she had no idea what group to put me in. Later that day, I was standing in my garage and I very distinctly remember thinking that, when I grew up, I was going to be an author and I was going to write one book about each kind of disaster. Now, here I am almost two decades later and I’m doing exactly that. Sometimes the disasters are real, like wildfires, and sometimes they’re fantastical, like vengeful magic wreaking havoc, but they all have that element of pushing the characters to their limits to see what they will do when exposed to natural (or fantastical) forces far, far beyond their power to handle alone.
This has been an interesting path to take as an author, because there isn’t really a lot of disaster fiction out there. It can be a hard area to gain an audience, a hard area to get published at all. But one thing I hear over and over when people finish reading my stuff is “that wasn’t what I expected, and I loved it.” I think this is, in big part, because I focus on the realities of disasters, not the Hollywood/News Media versions where everyone instantly turns into looting savages when the lights go out. We have proven over and over and over in study after study that those things aren’t true. By and large people don’t panic during disasters, they don’t loot, they don’t turn into animals. They help. They put out charging stations for their neighbors who don’t have power, they sing songs to create connections between people who are scared, they gather their boats to pull people off of rooftops. Those are the stories I focus on, and I never just end with the rescue, or the end of the actual disaster, I follow through on what it’s like to survive those things, what it’s like to have to keep going when you’ve lost everything.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Well, I actually just moved from the Front Range, where I have lived most of my life, to Grand Junction to go back to college, so I don’t actually know the area too well myself just yet, haha! But so far I’ve really enjoyed visiting Colorado National Monument, Glade Park, and some areas along Divide Road.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
You know, I wish I had some sweet answer here about some mentor in my life or some family member who has been super encouraging or something, but I really don’t. I’m one of those people who has just always forged forward solo, and I think that’s an important thing to acknowledge. Not in the sense of “I’m a one man army who doesn’t need any help!!1!!11” but in the sense of “I had no support network, and it kinda sucks, but I made it work anyway.” My mother, at best, ignored most of my creative efforts, at worst tried to take advantage of them to get herself ahead. My father is a good guy, but not really the overly supportive type. I have a big extended family, but I’m not particularly close with any of them. My sister tends to get excited about some of my work, but we’re far enough apart in age that we’re not super close. There was never a teacher who tried to step in and really push me (usually because I seemed to already be doing well, so I don’t think they thought they needed to, even if that wasn’t always true), and my first time around through college was a total disaster. But you know, I’m still here. I’m still doing it. I’m still loving it. I don’t have some big, flashy thing I can point to as “yes, that person/place/group/thing played a huge role!,” but that’s okay, because there’s plenty of littler things that have added up over the years to get me where I’m at anyway.

Website: https://www.Katy-L-Wood.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katy-l-wood/

Other: Tumblr: https://katy-l-wood.tumblr.com/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@katy_l_wood