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Young adult author Julie Anne Peters was shocked when her novel Luna (2004), a story about a transgender teen, was nominated for a National Book Award. “I just couldn’t believe it,” she says. A self-described reclusive writer who lives in Colorado with her partner of 31 years, Sherri Leggett, Peters had written nine children’s books before her editor suggested that she write a young adult lesbian love story. That suggestion turned into Keeping You a Secret (2003), and changed Peters’s choice of career into a calling: to tell more stories about LGBT teens.

Her latest novel, Far From Xanadu, which will be published in May, tells the story of butch lesbian teen Mike from small-town Coalton, Kansas. When Mike falls in love with the new girl at school, Xanadu, she can’t stop herself from pursuing her even though Xanadu is straight. I recently talked with Peters about Far From Xanadu, straight girls, and what it was like to be nominated for the nation’s most prestigious book award.

AfterEllen: Tell me a bit about your writing process.
JP: You know, I think every book has a different process. Just when I think I have it down, the next book comes in a different way and I feel like I have to start all over….

I write in scenes, and I’ll have all of these scenes that aren’t chronological at all and then I just transition them all together. I know they have to be someplace in the book but I’m not exactly sure where. There’s some instinct that kicks in, after you’ve done it for a long time, and you understand that story process. But I like the intellectual challenge of doing it different ways every time (laughing)….

If we’re talking about Far From Xanadu, that book began as this topic that I wanted to explore: lesbian dating. I was getting a lot of mail from young readers who were talking about how they were in love with their girlfriends, but their girlfriends were straight. Their girlfriends told them there was no possibility of a relationship and yet they would sort of give them signs that maybe there was something there…. They like the attention that you give them; they think that’s flattering. And everybody wants to be desired, of course, and we feed on that so much…. So I’m always telling these girls, “Run!” Just run as far as you can from these people. Because there’s just—there’s distance that can’t be crossed, and we need to come to that realization at some point.

And then I have this friend who’s been in love with a straight woman for like 20 years. It’s just this obsession and she cannot let it go. Finally this woman got married and I thought, all right, that’s the end of it.

AE: The straight woman got married?
JP: Yes, the straight woman got married. I thought, now my friend can relieve herself of this self-imposed bondage that she has and commit herself to somebody who can actually return her love. But it didn’t happen! The married woman was calling her and saying “Oh, I think I made a mistake, I never should have married a man and I really miss you.” …(Laughing) It’s so pathetic!

But I see this in so many of our relationships…. I thought, this would make a great topic for a young adult novel, because really that’s where it starts. So I made this really evil straight girl, Xanadu.

AE: You did make her a little despicable, didn’t you?
JP: Totally! (laughing) If there’s anything even a little likeable about her at all it’s because I was forced to put it in there.

AE: By who?
JP: By my editor. She said, “Can’t you make her a little bit empathetic to readers?” I said, “Why? I hate her!” She’s the evil straight girl.

But…it’s a larger story, of course, because it’s about manipulation, certainly, of this girl. People who prey on the innocence and vulnerability of others, especially of young girls who don’t have the knowledge of the world—and obviously with older women too, who just can’t let it go. And also about our yearnings and obsessions, because we do seem to hold on to hope too long the way Mike does. She just can’t seem to let go and move on. So that’s what I wanted to write about.

Then I sat down and…this first sentence spilled out, about “After my dad’s suicide, the town council decided to remove the bottom portion of the ladder from the Coalton water tower.” And I went, what? What does that have to do with lesbian dating? (laughing) What? Is this the same story that I’m working on? And where is this Coalton? And a father’s suicide—what does that have to do with anything?

So I do what I usually do, which is, I’ll write the last chapter first, just to see where this is going. That at least has stayed constant in my process. If I don’t do that I’ll start writing and writing and the characters take over and the story veers and I can never get it back to where I originally intended to take it. So I’ll write this last chapter and it kind of gives me direction and focus.

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