Caroline Bock is one of the culprits who turned me on to flash fiction years ago. She’s a great teacher! She’s also skilled at launching and managing all sorts of projects, as you’ll see in this interview. Her new novel, The Other Beautiful People (Regal House), will be released in June.
I appreciate Caroline sharing so much about her approach to autofiction, and the ups & downs of querying. The publishing process is brutal, but Caroline’s story is full of hope—and so is her writing!
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Myna: Tell us about The Other Beautiful People! Who are your characters, and what themes do you explore?
Caroline: The Other Beautiful People is a workplace love story.
I worked for two decades in the cable television industry, most notably at AMC, Bravo, IFC, and IFC Films in the mid-1980s through 2003. I was part of the executive team that launched IFC and IFC Films. My main character, Amy Greene, is (like I was), the head of marketing and public relations at the Cinema Channel, based in midtown Manhattan. She is torn between her work ‘family’ and her family. She loves her work, she loves her family. She even has a big secret. She leads a fast-paced, chaotic, and most of the time, joyful life—burying her childhood trauma inside her. And then—9/11. Then, the industry she has worked in for twenty years is upended. Amy Green has choices to make. So, a novel about choices that so many people, especially working women, need to make.
Myna: When a reader finishes the last word in The Other Beautiful People, what emotion will they be feeling?
Caroline: Longing.
Myna: If your book had a theme song, what would it be?
Caroline: Don McLean’s American Pie is played in one of the key bar scenes in the novel, and I think that might be the theme song. I was actually in a midtown Manhattan bar in 2001, jammed with off-duty New York City fire and police, and that song was played. When I think of that time, I think of that long song, so full of longing for me. However, the other theme song would be the classic 9 to 5 by one of my favorites, Dolly Parton, because The Other Beautiful People is at its heart a working girl’s story.
Myna: Did you find any surprises while writing or publishing this book?
Caroline: First, that I wrote another novel at all. I have two young adult novels – LIE and Before My Eyes (St. Martin’s Press) – and one very unwieldy unpublished dystopian-pandemic novel that I worked on for years, and I thought I was done with writing novels. Toward the end of the pandemic, I joined a Nancy Stohlman online flash class and started writing about 500–1000 words a day, to be in a community of writers. I had to convince myself that I wasn’t writing another novel, just flash fiction, and that was how I ‘tricked’ myself into writing The Other Beautiful People.
Myna: What was the publishing process like?
Caroline: I had a literary agent for my young adult novels, but she decided to step back from representing fiction at one point. I had discovered flash fiction by then, and I was writing longer stories as well (I studied writing with a master of the short story form – Raymond Carver at Syracuse University, so I was determined to write short). However, big surprise: I could not find representation for the short story collection, so I sent it into a contest at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, which publishes writers from DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and I won. This was 2018. The collection is Carry Her Home.
And then, The Other Beautiful People. I spent a year trying to get an agent, and I could not, though I got the loveliest and most heartbreaking of rejections.
So, in 2024, I decided to go the contest route again. I submitted to Regal House Publishing, a women-owned and run powerhouse of an independent publishing house. A writer friend of mine, Martha Anne Toll, had just won their contest for her wonderful lyrical literary novel: Duet for One.
I didn’t win.
I was ready to put The Other Beautiful People in the drawer next to the dystopian novel. I didn’t check my Submittable or email for a while. I didn’t write.
I missed that Regal House had sent me an email, and so it was a month before I opened it. They wanted to consider my contest-submitted novel for publication.
Two years later, and I have The Other Beautiful People being published on June 2! I would encourage all to check out Regal House Publishing for their contests and open submission periods (i.e., when you can submit without an agent). They publish not only literary novels but also memoirs, speculative/science fiction/fantasy, and young adult.
Myna: I’ve enjoyed your approach to autofiction in flash, as well as your recent short story collection, Carry Her Home. How do you find balance between your personal and fictional truth? Has your approach changed, from your early pieces to The Other Beautiful People?
Caroline: I admire Eudora Welty’s quote, “Write what you know about what you don’t know.” I know I am always drawing on my own life. I also am always pounding myself with questions such as: Am I immersing the character in their truth? Am I being true to the character’s wants and needs and desires and despair? I wrote about this and the challenge of writing close-to-the-bone autobiographical fiction, also called autofiction, in this essay for the Writer’s Center.
Myna: Has your family ever experienced discomfort or raised objections to any similarities that may have cropped up in your writing? How do you manage that?
Caroline: My Pop, now deceased (though an ever-present ghost in my life), always said I’d write about him.
My brother Mark, who’s a talented painter and sculptor, begrudgingly accepts that I always write about him, and often his dog.
My husband pretends that none of the husbands I write about is him.
My other brother, David, keeps asking when I’m going to write about him.
My son says he doesn’t read novels, so I can write anything I want.
So, I write and not worry too much about what my family might think. They know I’m a novelist.
Myna: I’d love to talk about the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, where you are co-president and prose editor. The press has a very cool history, and has launched so many fantastic new projects in the last few years. Tell us about the press, and how you got involved.
Caroline: The Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH) is a unique place to publish your work – it’s a cooperative (volunteer), nonprofit literary press, based in Washington, DC, since 1975, and now publishing writers from DC, Maryland, and Virginia. While it started as a poetry press, WWPH now publishes fiction, creative nonfiction, and works in translation via our annual manuscript contests.
When you win one of the prizes for the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, as I did – the WWPH Fiction Prize for Carry Her Home, you are asked to do two years of ‘service.’ Most writers will judge the contests. If you fall in love with the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, like me, you step forward to become co-president and prose editor, as I did in 2022. Jona Colson, a fabulous poet, is the other president and the poetry editor.
Right now, we are currently accepting full-length manuscripts. This cycle, we are seeking poetry, fiction (novel or short story collection), and literary nonfiction (memoir, essay, or hybrids). The deadline is June 30th. Every prize winner is awarded $1,500 in cash and all publication costs.
With our manuscripts, we have a $28.00 submission fee via Submittable, and we use it to offset the costs of publishing our books. However, we do offer fee waivers for those in financial need. Writers should read our books, our updated guidelines, and our FAQs, and then decide whether we are the place for them. If you win, and you are a fiction or nonfiction writer, you will be working closely with me.
We also have a new 2027 entry into our ‘Capital’ series of pocket-sized anthologies, Capital Translation, which opens for submissions of poetry and prose translated into English from any language on June 1st. Also, we are assuming responsibilities for the iconic Grace and Gravity anthology series, which focuses on women prose writers from the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia). I will be the series editor, and we will have guest editors for each issue. More details on Grace and Gravity forthcoming! So, yes, cool things going on! Find more info at www.washingtonwriters.org
Myna: You’ve also written several critically acclaimed YA novels, LIE and Before My Eyes. Tell us about them!
Caroline: LIE and Before My Eyes are both contemporary realistic fiction. I often wonder if I should have written about wizards or dragons, but I am very rooted in realism. LIE is about a hate crime, a murder, of one of two brothers on Long Island in New York, and Before My Eyes, also set on Long Island, is about a very long, sweltering Labor Day weekend centered on a crew at a beach shack and involving gun violence. These novels were both written before I moved to the Washington DC area. They were published in 2011 and 2015, respectively. What I find disconcerting is that these novels are even more relevant in 2026.
Myna: I love your flash and CNF. Do you have a personal favorite?
Caroline: Well, right now I am writing a series of linked micros, because, again, I can’t think of starting a novel! In the past year, I’ve written about 75 micros, all about 250 words. This work-in-progress is entitled, I Should Have Slept With Them All.
Here’s a sampling of the most recent:
Red Sauce and Notes from a Future Life
Myna: Tell us about a recent accomplishment or share some happy news with us!
Caroline: One of my micros was selected by one of my writing heroes, the poet Diane Seuss, for The Best of MicroFiction 2026. It’s the first time I’ve ever been selected for any ‘best of’!
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Caroline Bock’s first novel for adults is The Other Beautiful People. She is also the author of LIE and Before My Eyes, acclaimed young adult novels (St. Martin’s Press), and the award-winning short story collection Carry Her Home. She studied creative writing with Raymond Carver at Syracuse University and earned her MFA in Fiction from the City College of New York. Notably, she spent twenty years as a cable executive in marketing and public relations with AMC, Bravo, IFC, and IFC Films, which inspired The Other Beautiful People. She now lives in Maryland with her family and is the co-president at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House.
Myna Chang 