Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set in a bookstore and café where baristas, booksellers, and customers create a community through small, repeated encounters. What was the inspiration behind this collection of stories?

For years, I managed a bookstore café, and if you had asked me then whether I was collecting stories, I would have said no. I was making coffee, shelving books, helping customers, and trying to keep the day moving.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t remembering the busiest days. I was remembering the people who kept coming back.

There was the customer who always wandered the shelves before ordering. The bookseller who remembered what someone had enjoyed months earlier. The regular who glanced around the room before sitting down, hoping a familiar face was already there.

Over time, people who had arrived as strangers began expecting to see one another. If someone hadn’t been in for a week or two, someone else would ask about them.

It wasn’t a dramatic story. It was an ordinary one. But I came to realize that familiar places can change us simply by becoming part of our lives. That’s where Paperbacks & Baguettes began.

Many of the book’s most memorable moments come from small gestures rather than dramatic events. What attracts you to writing about those quiet, easily overlooked moments of everyday life?

I’m interested in the moment someone realizes they’ve been remembered.

A barista starts making a drink before the order is placed. A bookseller sets aside a novel because they think a frequent customer will enjoy it. Someone clears a chair because they know another regular usually sits there.

From the outside, those gestures don’t seem like much. But they say something we all hope to hear: I’m glad you’re here. I noticed you.

Those moments stay with me because they’re easy to overlook while they’re happening. Looking back, they’re often what we remember most clearly.

Recurring objects—books, coffee cups, umbrellas, playlists, and scarves—create a sense of continuity throughout the collection. How did you decide which details would reappear to tie the stories together?

I never made a list of things that should come back. They returned for the same reason they do in real life.

Spend enough time in a place and certain things become part of its rhythm. The mug someone always reaches for. Umbrellas gathering by the door when it rains. A scarf left over the back of a chair while someone wanders the shelves. The same song that somehow seems to find its way back every few weeks.

Those details reminded me that the café wasn’t starting over with each story. Life had been going on before the reader arrived, and it would keep going after the story ended.

I wanted the café to feel lived in, not simply described.

What do you hope readers carry with them after spending time in the world of Paperbacks & Baguettes?

I hope they think about the familiar places that have become part of their lives.

Maybe it’s a bookstore, a coffee shop, a library, or a neighborhood restaurant. Places where people begin to recognize one another, not because they’ve shared their life stories, but because they’ve shared enough ordinary days.

We’re often part of each other’s lives long before we have words for the relationship. We know someone’s usual table. We notice when they haven’t been around. We hope they’re doing well.

If the book does anything, I hope it’s simply this: that the next time readers walk into one of those familiar places, they notice the people who have quietly become part of their own story.

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