Growing up on a farm in Cardington, which she described as beautiful and idyllic, author Mindy McGinnis felt safe from life's dangers and uncertainties.
It was here in the safety of her childhood in rural Ohio that her fascination with darker themes and deeper questions began.
Now an Edgar Award-winning author who just saw her eleventh novel, "The Last Laugh," published Tuesday, the Morrow County native shared her realization that it was both this curiosity toward danger and the lack of young adult literature to meet her interest that inspired her to become an author.
She now writes young adult fiction and short stories with strong female main characters, diving into darker topics and gaining inspiration from mystery novels, horror stories and the dark poetry by Edgar Allan Poe.
"I write very dark, very gritty. I’m very honest about the human condition. When I was growing up as a kid in the 80s and the 90s, most if not all of the books that were available to us were very clean, very antiseptic, usually didactic, and those weren’t my tendencies," she said.
"Even from a young age, I was interested in darker things and darker themes."
Being so intrigued with darker themes, McGinnis was reading Stephen King novels in the 6th grade, even though they weren't conventionally age-appropriate for a 12-year-old to be exploring.
As she got older she realized she wanted to fill in the gaps in literature, and her career in writing was born.
Still, it took her 10 years of pitching her stories to agents before landing a publishing deal. In the meantime, she worked as a library aide within Cardington-Lincoln Schools, where she shared her love of reading with students for 14 years.
It turns out, she explained, that her work with teenagers in the school library at Cardington-Lincoln High School, where she herself graduated in 1997, has helped to drive her career as a young adult author, writing small-town Ohio and its unique challenges of rural poverty and assumptions made about individuals based on family ties into her work.
"I grew up in Morrow County. I’ve always lived here. I still live here, and I just always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know how that happened," she said.
"I assumed that someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, ‘You. You get to be a writer,’ Right, and it doesn’t work that way. Any type of creative industry, it’s an odd path and usually a different path for everyone."
Since selling her first book came out in 2013, McGinnis has been publishing consistently.
Beyond getting to live her dream career and experience literary success, she said her favorite part of her job is seeing the way her words and stories deeply impact her fans, many of which reach out to her after events via email.
“I always get emails after I get school visits and they’re just like, ‘This happened to me. This is a thing that I went through,’ and there’s one thing about how brave and courageous these girls are, but also sad they feel they need to speak to a complete stranger about it because maybe other people in their lives won’t listen or they’ve tried to speak up and weren’t heard,” she explained.
In her work, McGinnis focuses on highlighting female strength, whether physical strength or deeper, emotional strength like resolve, empathy and seeing girls use their voices.
"I’m all for literal female strength, absolutely, I am, but female strength can also be compassion and empathy, also like speaking up, being courageous and being brave and standing up and making your voice heard," she said.
This, she said, is the crux of why she writes: to allow girls going through tough experiences to meet themselves in her pages and see there’s hope and recovery on the other side of whatever they're facing.
An example she offered is a young woman from Missouri who attended a book signing event and asked for two copies of McGinnis' Heroine, a story about the opioid crisis.
The girl wanted to bring one of the copies to her mother, who was at the time incarcerated for drug-use. She wanted to attempt to rebuild their mother-daughter relationship with Mindy's work of fiction that so closely related to their lives.
McGinnis said she was honored to give the young woman two signed copies right away.
“I’ve had teens reach out and say, ‘You helped me understand my mom, my dad, my sister.’ If I can actually have an effect on other people’s lives with my words through the story I’ve made up in my head, that is profound,” she said.
As McGinnis celebrates the release of her latest book this past week, "The Last Laugh," the second installment following her previous release, "The Initial Insult," which is a modern retelling of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," she is preparing for a tour of events across the Midwest, including one at the Cardington-Lincoln Public Library Saturday.
Though the pandemic changed many aspects of the publishing industry, she said, she is looking forward to traveling and getting to engage with students across the Midwest in-person once again.
“I’m so grateful I get to do this for a living. It’s wonderful. Yeah, it’s just amazing to be able to do the thing that you love and achieve the thing that you’ve always wanted and to be able to succeed at it," McGinnis said.