I’m thrilled to welcome Vermont College of Fine Arts faculty member and author Sara Ryan to Cynsations today. Their new book, Mountain Upside Down (Dutton, 2025) perfectly mixes the excitement of discovering one’s own identity, with the challenges of shifting family dynamics and outside forces beyond our control. Every note in this story rang true and I am delighted to delve into craft details with Sara.
Congratulations on Mountain Upside Down! A library, family secrets and a first kiss – your protagonist, Alex, has a lot going on and that makes her very feel real. She’s also thirteen – an age that often gets lost in novels for young readers. Can you tell us more about why and how you chose this age for her?
Thank you! I didn’t consciously consider the fact that there aren’t a lot of thirteen-year-old protagonists in books for young readers, that protagonists are usually older in YA and younger in middle grade. I just knew that thirteen felt right for Alex Eager. She’s on the edge between childhood and young adulthood; mature for her age in some ways and very much a kid in others. And I knew Alex would be struggling with her inability to solve the problems she sees as her job to solve.
There are certainly things she can do, but there are some things she can’t fix — alone, or at all. Thirteen felt like the right age for her to start coming to terms with that tough reality.
The local library is a key setting in Mountain Upside Down. Like many libraries today, it’s threatened—not by book banners, but by budget cuts. In light of a recent executive order, this feels very prescient. Are you psychic?
I live in Oregon, and while I invented the town of Failin, there are communities in Oregon where libraries and other public services were largely supported by timber industry funds, and some public libraries in those communities actually have closed.
Some, like the City of Roseburg Library (formerly part of the Douglas County system) have cobbled together new funding sources and reopened, but it’s increasingly, scarily clear that we can’t take the continued existence of public libraries for granted.
What are a few things concerned folks can do to support libraries?
- Use them!! Check out materials, come to library programs and events, take advantage of library resources — which might include makerspaces or Libraries of Things in addition to computers, free wifi, books, music, movies, etc.
- Fill out comment cards and write op-eds expressing your appreciation. (Sometimes people have fond memories of libraries, but haven’t visited one in a while.)
- EveryLibrary has an article with several recommended actions: How You Can Take Action To Support Your Library
- If your name has ever been printed in a book as a credit to its creators, you are welcome to join Authors Against Book Bans. We are looking for writers, illustrators, narrators, translators – all the people who create literature. We are completely genre-agnostic and are open to traditionally and independently published creators.
- And to keep up with book censorship and threats to libraries nationwide, subscribe to Kelly Jensen’s excellent newsletter, the aptly named Well Sourced.
Mountain Upside Down is set in the fictional town of Failin, Oregon, also the setting for your YA graphic novel, Bad Houses, illustrated by Carla Speed McNeil (Dark Horse, 2013). Are there any intersections of characters or storylines in the two books?
The biggest intersection is actually a building! In Mountain Upside Down, Alex and her best friend (and eventual girlfriend) PJ bond while working on a school project about “the Faithful Angus Antique Mall that had just opened. We thought it was interesting that the building had started out as one thing (a brewery) and became a different thing (an abandoned building that people graffitied and broke the windows of and I guess sometimes had parties in?) and was now a third thing.” (Mountain Upside Down, p. 6)
In Bad Houses, the Faithful Angus building is still in its abandoned brewery era, and main characters Lewis and Anne, among others, meet up there. When Alex visits Faithful Angus Antique Mall in Mountain Upside Down, Lewis is the guy behind the counter.
When you begin drafting a new story, do you know early on if it will be a graphic novel or text only, or does that evolve as you’re writing?
Sometimes I know, and sometimes it evolves. I originally envisioned Mountain Upside Down as a YA graphic novel, and it turned out to be middle-grade prose.
You also write short stories and essays. How do those works feed your creative spirit?
When you’re a slower writer of longer work, as I am, short stories can provide more frequent opportunities to get the satisfaction of finishing a project. And with essays, I can explore things I’m curious about, and curiosity is crucial to creativity.
Your previous books were written for the young adult age group. Do you have any strategies you can share to shift gears to write for a younger audience?
For me, writing for middle-grade readers involves similar strategies as writing for teens: deeply remembering my own experiences and feelings at that age, and connecting with kids who are that age now. And of course, reading widely in middle-grade is also critically important for understanding what’s happening in the age category and knowing the books your books will be in conversation with.
Your first book, Empress of the World, was published in 2001, and reissued in 2012. Since your debut, what are some of the stand-out changes in the world of children’s-YA writing, literature, and publishing? What do you think of them and why?
I’ll note two shifts that I strongly endorse: the rise of graphic novels and the invaluable work of We Need Diverse Books.
The graphic format lends itself to so many different types of storytelling: biography, memoir, nonfiction, historical, science fiction/fantasy/adventure, contemporary realism, formal experimentation, romance…there is no limit to the kinds of stories that can be told with words and pictures juxtaposed in deliberate sequence.
And relentless advocacy for diverse voices in every role in the publishing industry is essential.
How do your roles as author/teacher/librarian inform one another?
It’s sort of the psychological equivalent of always having multiple tabs open in your browser. Let’s say I’m responding to one of my students — I teach in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults — and I’ll recommend a book that I know about through my librarian work. Or I’ll be working a shift in the library makerspace and overhear an exchange between teenagers that sparks a story idea.
I’m moving away soon from full-time librarian work to focus more of my time on writing and teaching, but my training and experience as a librarian is always going to inform my writing and teaching, and I’m always going to be a library advocate.
What advice do you have for those in their writing apprenticeships, at the start of their writing journeys? What craft and career advice could you share?
Craft advice: read widely, both in your favorite age categories and forms and in work that’s outside your comfort zone. Get to know what you love and respond to as a reader, and analyze how that syncs up with what you want to express as a writer. Consider the topics and themes that intrigue you. What do you love? What do you find hilarious? What makes you sad? What makes you furious? All of this can fuel your work.
Career advice: eyes on your own paper. Don’t compare yourself to other writers. I know that’s hard; believe me, I have to remind myself on the regular! But as arts consultant Beth Pickens says: “Compare and despair, my friend! Comparing someone’s exterior to your interior will make you feel awful.”
And finally, life advice: find community! That could look like a critique group, scheduling regular writing dates with friends, participating in workshops and conferences, pursuing a writing degree, any and all of the above. Writing can be lonely and challenging, and having companions along the way makes a huge positive difference.
Can you tell us what we can look forward to next?
I’m working on a historical YA set in 1935 New York City, and the protagonist, Jacob Eager, is an ancestor of Alex Eager, my main character in Mountain Upside Down. Again a library will be an important element in the story, which is about finding community and hope in hard times. And there’s a very gay friend group that calls itself the Evil Companions!
Cynsations Notes
Sara Ryan (they/them) is the author of the middle-grade novel Mountain Upside Down, the graphic novel Bad Houses with art by Carla Speed McNeil, young adult novels The Rules for Hearts and Empress of the World, and various comics, short stories, and essays.
They are on the faculty of the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and an editor at Crucial Comix.
Gayleen Rabakukk holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently a student in the Library Science Master’s program at the University of North Texas. She also has an undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma. She has published numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and two regional interest books for adults. She is represented by Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management.
She is a member of Lago Vista’s Friends of the Library and also leads a book club for young readers at the library. She teaches creative writing workshops and is a bookseller at Paper Bark Birch Books in Cedar Park, Texas. She loves inspiring curiosity in young readers through stories of hope and adventure. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.