The Catchings Press follows a 15-year-old girl navigating race, integration, gender expectations, and the Vietnam War after her family moves to a small Texas town to run its newspaper. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

We’re still navigating the things that Annette Calvert was navigating more than 50 years ago. Racial justice, gender expectations, and war are national issues, but also local, and very personal. As the reviewer says, Annette’s fight is essentially about “who gets to make choices and who’s expected to obey.” We’re still deciding this today.

How did the idea of a family-owned newspaper shape the story?

My parents owned a newspaper when I was a child, so I saw what it was like to run a family business that’s enmeshed in the local community. People really do pull their ads because of a single story! A novel about a family trying to cover the news and still stay in business, not to mention keep the family from falling apart, seemed too good an idea to pass up. 

How did you develop Sam as both a father and newspaper publisher?

Let’s face it: At home, Sam is kind of a jerk! He [spoiler alert] tries to manipulate his wife with a “family vote,” and, when Danny gets bullied at school, tells his son to suck it up. But at work, he’s shrewd and smart and decent: He doesn’t hesitate to cover the school board’s shenanigans, and insists on publishing, against his staff’s objections, a wedding story about a local African-American girl, a decision that costs him a major advertiser. Eventually, Sam realizes that the issues facing the town and the nation are issues he and his family are facing, too. 

If Annette could see the world today, what do you think would surprise her most? 

I think what would surprise her most is not how much things have improved in the areas of racism, sexism, and bullying, but of how that progress is slowly being clawed back. But maybe I’m saying that because I’m writing this in 2026, in a world unravelling before our eyes. Near the end of the novel (don’t worry: no spoilers), Annette realizes “people are small, and narrow, and slow to change.” But I’d like to think she retains the optimism she had when she told Danny, in one of his darkest moments, “As long as people dream of a better world, the world has to get better.”  

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On a hot day in 1968, while lining up for the daily dress check at school, Annette Calvert yanks out her hem. The dress represents everything she’s been simmering about since her father, an ambitious journalist, bought the newspaper in Catchings, Texas: the rule-crazy high school; the powerful businessmen pulling their ads from her family’s paper; the war on TV.

Annette is tired of trying to obey an impossible rule. One week into her junior year, she gets hundreds of students to sign a petition against the dress code and presents it at a packed school board meeting that her father, afraid he’ll lose more ads, forbids her to attend.

Set against a backdrop of national turmoil not unlike that of today, The Catchings Press is about a young girl coming into her own, and a celebration of the small battles we wage in life that cause the world to change.