"I was basically weeping with my head on my desk for that final stage"

Bailey Seybolt on exploring the moral gray areas, keeping fiction rooted in fact, and her unputdownable debut, CORAM HOUSE

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Bailey’s haunting mystery, available now.

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Me: Bailey, hi!

Bailey: Got it! Well, that made me feel like a grandma.

haha, no worries!

tis an ancient technology

As someone who spent all of 6th grade on AIM I should remember.

what we really need is Away Messages

Anyway, congrats on Coram House! How are you feeling about everything?

Is all the emotions at once an option? So grateful for all the support from my publisher and authors and readers and booksellers and librarians. So blown away to see my book in bookstores. Also so glad that first post-pub month is done.

That sounds about right! We'll get into all of that, but first, can you share what your debut is about?

Of course! So Coram House is a mystery about a disgraced true crime writer who moves to Vermont to ghostwrite a book about an orphanage that closed back in the 70s. During her research she uncovers the murder of a young boy and becomes convinced it's tied to a woman's body that washes up in Lake Champlain. She has to untangle how all these deaths are connected to Coram House's dark past.

And on a deeper level it's about whose stories get told and who gets silenced and what that does to a community.

I loved it, as you know! Can you share the inspiration for the book?

So it's inspired by a real place and real events. When I first moved to Vermont, I used to walk by this big, brick building all the time. It looked abandoned but was quite beautiful, perched on a hill looking over Lake Champlain, near a cemetery. I got curious about its history and it turned out to be very dark.

For decades, it was a Catholic orphanage and thousands of children passed through the doors. Some pretty terrible things happened to those kids (as you can imagine if you've read similar histories).

I think that disconnect between this beautiful place and this terrible history right there in plain sight was what got me started.

I love that. How did you go about shaping a story around that real-life building and history?