Unleash Lit: Interview with Maddie Lock, author of ILLEGITIMATE
Hello, Maddie! Thank you for answering a few questions for Unleash. To kick things off, tell our readers a little about how you came to be a writer across many genres. Congratulations on the newest release, Illegitimate, by the way (one I was honored to blurb).
In 2014 I was going through some old writing tablets—random snippets of stories I someday hoped to write—and found three pages about a dog that we lived next to in our first rental after my husband and I got married. She was always in the yard and had to amuse herself, while her family came and went, walking past her like she wasn’t there. My heart ached for her. So when I ran across the tablet I decided to finish her story and give it a happy ending. In my mind, it was perfect for a children’s book and would provide the message that all dogs need love and attention. That became Ethel the Backyard Dog, an early reader that I shared at schools and libraries. The next year I wrote about my rescue dog, Sammy the Lucky Dog. The rapt attention I saw in the children’s faces while I was reading was very fulfilling. Then, in 2016 I heard a long-held family secret of my German grandmother’s participation in a Nazi eugenics program and I felt strongly compelled to research and write about it. After a few twists and turns, it became a memoir. My interest and reading switched to creative nonfiction, and I fell in love with the essay format.