It was Valentine’s Day this weekend, and I don’t want to miss the opportunity to get romantic about the people who sit at their computers at least once a week and write with me in little Zoom windows.

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Content note: This conversation about preserving books and archival material includes discussions of historical racism.

I am so excited for another installment of my series interviewing booksellers. Typically, I’d hate to schedule an interview with someone whose store I hadn’t personally visited already, but I was eager to talk to the people behind Rare Books L.A., the semiannual festival of antique and unusual book finds that’s coming to Pasadena on February 21 and 22.

Brad and Jen Johnson are also the owners of Johnson Rare Books & Archives with a brick and mortar location at The Book Shop in Covina, California.

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TL;DR… scroll down for links to subscribe to this newsletter on your fave podcast app

Too many newsletters piling up in your inbox, and not enough time to read them? Audio voiceovers are included in this one every week! So if it’s easier to listen in your regular podcast rotation, you can subscribe to this feed in your podcast app. Most of my posts are free, and their audio is available to everyone. For paid posts, though the text’s paywall isn’t until about halfway through, the entire audio episode is for subscribers only.

▶️ If you’re a Pocket Casts user: click the 🔍 “Discover” icon in the app and paste this RSS feed URL into the search: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/3051358.rss…then hit “follow”!

▶️ If you’re an Apple Podcasts user: click here and hit “follow”!

▶️ If you’re a Spotify user: click here and hit “follow”!

Most article voiceovers are quick listens, about ten to fifteen minutes each. But for interviews (with booksellers, writers, creatives, and more), you get a full-length conversation. There’s an hourlong one coming next week with such cool, interesting guests; I couldn’t believe the places our discussion went! These voiceovers aren’t heavily produced like regular podcast episodes, but I think you’ll enjoy them, especially to hear the interviewees’ actual voices.

~OKAY THANKS FOR READING (or listening to) THIS SELF-PROMOTIONAL POST!

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Since I started this newsletter six weeks ago with a look back at 2025, I figured I’d close out January with a look ahead to the literary adaptations I’m excited to see in 2026.

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As I sat down to churn out some thoughts about how frustrated I've been, I realized that I have an embarrassing amount of “inspirational” artwork strewn throughout my apartment, which I’ve been apparently turning a blind eye to while sighing and “woe is me”-ing about this whole writer’s block thing.

Would you like to take a tour of the collection of cringe?

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This week I’m launching one of the features I was most excited about including in my newsletter: interviews with the people behind the counters at the bookstores I’ve always loved spending time in. For the first conversation in the series, I spoke with Rachel Manija Brown, who owns Paper & Clay Bookshop in Crestline, California.

Our conversation went to unexpected places, and is a must-read for anyone who’s ever harbored the daydream of running a bookstore.

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Because I’m annoying proud of keeping the writing group going almost every single weekend for nearly two years, and especially proud of the progress and achievements of all who’ve been coming, I made everyone at the table share something positive about their writing over the past year. It can be easy to forget to take stock of the great things we’ve ticked off our lists, even if they’re as simple as, “I made time to write nearly every week.”

It filled me up to hear what people shared, and served as a good reminder that the writing life contains multitudes. For the last couple of months, I’ve been pretty creatively frustrated. Drafting book two while fielding rejections on book one has made the writing so much harder. A couple of weeks ago, at another writing group I’ve newly joined, we were asked to share some short-term goals. I said I wanted to muscle through the draft that’s been stalled at 32K words and get it to 50K over the course of my two weeks off work.

Then I got so sick with my seasonal cold that I haven’t been able to sit at my computer, knit, or even read a book, for over a week. Finally, at the last session of the year for my writing group, I was able to clear through some of the mental and digital cobwebs. I’m working on a new way of thinking about what I’m writing, that I hope will start the year off a little stronger than the way this one has finished.

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In a never-ending and ever-changing effort to add structure into my writing life, I’m starting a Substack. You can listen to it right now as an audio newsletter!

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