The Library of Lost Dollhouses by Elise Hooper

Elize Hooper joins Jane Healey on the podcast again to discuss her latest novel. The Library of Lost Dollhouses is dual-timeline historical fiction about a mysterious collection of dollhouses that reveal the secrets of the women who once owned them. Spanning the course of a century, The Library of Lost Dollhouses is a warm, bright, and captivating story of secrets and love that embraces the importance of illuminating overlooked women.

Transcript

Jane: 0:03

Welcome everyone to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I'm your host, Jane Healey, and in today's episode, we welcome acclaimed author Elise Hooper to discuss her latest novel, her delightful new novel, the Library of Lost Dollhouses, which we were just talking about at Elise's. This coming Tuesday, April 1st, and it has been called a beautiful Paige Turner and an absolute gem and I agree. Welcome Elise. Thanks for coming on.

Elise: 0:29

Thank you. Thank you so much, Jane. It's great to see you.

Jane: 0:31

You too. It's so nice. Like I've been doing this long enough now that I'm starting to have like people come on second time and that's great. Oh, I love it.

Elise: 0:38

I know you're such a pro. You've had some really great authors. I've enjoyed like Kristen, Hannah, and it's been really exciting to see this take off for you. Well done.

Jane: 0:45

Thank you. And thank you for reaching out with your latest'cause. I'm really excited to talk about it. So I'm gonna do an intro on you and then we'll jump into questions. So

Elise: 0:53

Sounds

Jane: 0:53

great. Thank you. All right. A native New Englander, which I always forget. Elise Hooper spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting a master's in teaching high school literature and history. Her debut novel, the Other Alcott, was a nominee for the 2017 Washington Book Award. Three more novels learning to see. Fast girls and angels of the Pacific followed all centered on the lives of extraordinary, but overlooked historical women. Her next book, which will the li, is the Library of Lost All Houses, which releases on Tuesday. Elise lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters again, welcome. I do. And a dog who's

Elise: 1:30

pound, like wandering around behind me somewhere.

Jane: 1:33

So funny. Okay, so let's dive in. We, this is exciting'cause I don't think we ever had like much of a, like a show and tell. Type of show. I know. So cool. This doll was inspired by an old family dollhouse and talk about the inspiration for the story and how you came to, to write this novel.

Elise: 1:52

Yes. Thank you Jane. I did bring a show and tell item today. This is my great-grandmother's dollhouse. We believe it was built in about 1895. It has been passed down through the generations my girls played with it. It's been played with by five different generations. I, consider it really the place I learned to be creative. I used to sit in front of the dollhouse for hours telling myself little stories, moving things around. I learned to sew, to knit, to build things all in service of this dollhouse. So in fall of 2020, when I'd finished writing my last book, angels of the Pacific I truly remember the moment I had sent everything off to my editor. I was looking around my trash office. Jane, I don't know if you're like this, but when you finish a book, it's just like an explosion. You look around and you're like, oh my God, I've neglected everything for weeks time to pick up. And as I was picking up my eye, my gaze rested on this dollhouse because at that point it was sitting on my floor of my office serving as a bookshelf. It was filled with like peeling old water stained wallpaper walls. Wallpaper I had drawn on as a little kid. I remember drawing like a fireplace on it at one point. It was a real wreck, and I looked at it and I thought it's fall of 2020. I can't really go anywhere. So time to get creative and turn inward, I knew I wanted to go back to where it all began with the Dollhouse. So I started researching dollhouses, looked into the history of Dollhouse, was surprised to learn. They really weren't toys until about World War ii when mass production took off. Before that, they were status symbols really, for women. And I at the same time landed on this one miniature named Francis Lesner Lee, who was this woman in Chicago who had two very. Very unique interests. One was dollhouses and the other, and miniatures, and the other was forensics. And she combined that to create all these dioramas of little crime scenes. They're called the nutshells of unexplained Death. And they were used by law enforcement to train on to look,'cause all the clues to solve the crime all reside in each diorama. I'm not a crime person, so that idea scared me. But I loved the idea of mysteries being solved through dollhouses. So I turned to what I tend, the theme that kind of holds all my writing together, which is women who have been overlooked by history. And I thought, what if women were hiding their secret? Interesting, fascinating lives. In their dollhouses to be found by future generations. So that was the idea I ran with and I started writing and it took me in a lot of different sort of twists and turns and was so much fun.

Jane: 4:19

Yeah. Yeah. You can tell and. It's so fun to read. This is, you cover like a, basically a hundred years started in 19, early 19 hundreds to 2024. And it's so fun to read about I knew nothing about dollhouses and I am the opposite of crafty. So I just have to like, before we delve into like character and inspiration, i, so Elise has this Instagram account. It's at Elise Hooper. And you said your mother, your grandmother is very artistic and a collector and maker of miniatures. But so are you you're amazing at this, like you do, she does these posts with like little books of people's books coming out. Yeah. It's so amazing. About this passion basket of

Elise: 5:01

books. Yeah. I have an art degree. I actually majored in History and Art, which was a lot of art history, but it was also studio art. And really for decades now, I've neglected it. I used to teach high school English and history and I was, qualified. I had the credentials to teach high school art. I never did. I wish I had because I do love painting. I love textiles. I worked as a seamstress in college in our college theater department. So I have all these skills that have been dormant for a long time, and. When I decided to start working on this book, a big part of my research was actually learning how to build a dollhouse in miniatures because there's all this stuff to consider, and so I really went kind of Daniel Day Lewis method, like the actor, and dove right in and started. I restored this dollhouse. I learned to make all these things and miniatures so that I could really learn. How adult maker, how a UR thinks. And it really did guide a lot of my stories. I got so many ideas for how the plot could twist and turn through hands-on research. It has been really fun. I, I love doing it and this has become a real sort of fun thing for me. Writing novels takes so long, it takes years. So being able to sit down and build something in the course of a few hours a day, a weekend. It's so satisfying. So it really scratches an itch I didn't know I had. And it's fun to finally use that art degree. And I'm actually going to casting Maine this summer, which is right on the coast of Maine, up by the Canadian border to attend the International Guild of Miniature Artisans Guild School. Like where I'll be making miniatures for the week with real artists. I'm gonna be a hack amidst all these people, but it's, I am, I can't wait. It's gonna be so fun.

Jane: 6:43

Oh my God. Who knew there was even anything like that? That's amazing. Who

Elise: 6:46

knew? I know. It's it's such a fun world and it's such a joyful world and I think that's also, not only is there the satisfaction of starting and finishing something, but I. People who do this are so filled with sort of passion for their work. They're so cooperative. I can send people messages, ask them how they did something, they always reply back and give me answers. And it's just a really friendly, fun place to be these days.

Jane: 7:12

Yeah, absolutely. I wanna talk more about your research'cause so you said it was very hands-on and sounds like it was really fun. So what. What did you learn? What surprised you? Did you what resources did you rely on? I don't even know where to begin with, where, yeah.

Elise: 7:29

One of the first places I landed on in this, I read, I noticed someone in the comments wrote, they they had recently read the 18 Tiny Deaths. I read that too. So I had done some historical research. I knew all about the Queen Mary's Dollhouse, these sort of famous, the thorn rooms in Chicago. I knew about all these big dollhouse or well known Dollhouse, but I really needed to know how you do this. So I Googled as we all do, and one of the first things that came up was this New York Times article. I think it was from 2020, and it was all about the modern day dollhouse of Instagram. And lo and behold, there was this whole world on Instagram of all these dollhouses. All these dollhouse makers, miniaturists and they are using, old techniques. Some are using very, basic tools. Some are using 3D printers and glow forges and everything. So all of a sudden I was able to see such range and learn from people on the fly making things in real time so that the amount of modern. Minia is happening, and I think the pandemic really contributed to this because so many people were stuck in their homes. Suddenly they were turning to new interests. So I think it was just a lot of things. I also found in my research that people tend to turn to miniatures during difficult times. So like Queen Mary's Dollhouse, for example, was built in the wake of World War I when England had lost so much of its male population. All these young men the royal family decided we need something to cheer up the nation. Let's commission a grand dollhouse. So they put all of England's sort of top artisans, top craftspeople companies to work, miniaturizing all these products that English people were so proud of and love. And the result was this grand dollhouse that over like a million and a half people turned out to see when it went on display. So I think that we and also the 1930s were big time for miniatures, and that's when. Narcissa Thorn built the thorn rooms. And I think that people like that sense of control that miniatures can bring to life. And so that's not, when suddenly I found in 2020 people were getting into this, it fit right into this historical trend.

Jane: 9:33

Yeah. That's so interesting too. I had no idea, but it totally makes sense. It's like an escapism type of thing, yeah. Yeah. I wanna talk, so this is a dual timeline. One is starts in the early 19 hundreds. The other starts in 2024, and they merge together towards the end. No spoilers. But the, in the 2024 setting it, it takes place in a library, a li, almost library slash museum called the Bellava. Curtis Lafarge Library in San Francisco and you in your author's notes, which of course I read it was inspired by the Morgan Library in New York City and one of my favorite museums in the world, Isabella Stewart Gardner. Why these two places and how did these places inform the setting that, that you created? I grew

Elise: 10:19

up loving the gardener. Grew up, outside of Boston, attending that. All through my youth into my adulthood. I love that place. So when we think back to 2020 here, I was stuck in my house and I thought, what are some of my favorite things? And I literally was like the Gardener Museum, San Francisco Dollhouse Paris. What's my favorite era in Paris, probably Bella Pop, Paris. I literally went through my favorite things and thought. These are the ingredients of this novel I'm gonna write. So I was imagining, rather than Isabella Stewart Gardner, I moved her to San Francisco. I made her sort of an Aris coming from the Transcontinental Railroad lineage. And I imagined that she in the twenties built this grand ole has in the. Vein of Andrew Carnegie was doing similar thing around that time. She would build this grand sorry, I said Dollhouse Grand Library in San Francisco that would build, bring her community together and inform and do all these things. So that was my setting and I could imagine it so vividly. I actually drew up a press release'cause I could imagine it modern day too, and made letterhead and all this stuff. And I used actually some of the gardener's press releases as my models. And I wrote a whole press release about a co of this collection of Dollhouse being found in the library. And the library was trying to figure out what do these doll houses represent, who made them? And I sent it off to my literary agent. I was like, I. And I just didn't say anything and she emailed me right back and said, what is this? Is this happening? This is so interesting. Where is this place? I've never heard of it. And I was like, aha. And she and I explained to her what I had done. She said, that's your story, start writing. So I did. Oh, great. It just took off on me.

Jane: 12:00

That's amazing. Yeah, the setting is very rich and Veva. Curtis Lafarge is one of the, like I said, she's one of the characters in the early 19 hundreds, wealthy Eris. You said she's also inspired by Isabella Stewart Garner herself, which I could totally see. And so talk about Veva and how you how you came up with her as a character.

Elise: 12:21

Yeah, so I did some research. I have always been interested in the sort of the gilded age and especially the women who are known as dollar Aris as dollar bride who these were these American young sort of daughters, often of these industrialists who had these fortunes, but they wanted a title too, a European title. So these American women often married into the European aristocracy. If you've watched Down Abbey, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And so I pictured at Bel as one of those women this young woman who had grown up in San Francisco and travels to Europe in search of her husband, marries someone who turns out not to be a great husband, and she is overseeing this boarding house in Paris, which I also modeled on a few real life places. The American Women's Club Girls Club in in Paris. That was. Really geared at artists. I broadened it to all American women who were interested in academics or the arts. It gave them a place to live and study. And so I pictured Veva overseeing this, having built it. Her father, grandfather founded it. And then the story, then my dollhouse maker arrives and she gets a room in this place and they forge a friendship. And it's really through that friendship that. Cora, my dollhouse maker's name, Cora Hale, the decides let me build a portrait of you that is unlike what you've ever seen before. Not a painting, but let's make it a dollhouse and let's see how your home can reflect who you are.

Jane: 13:49

Yes. Amazing. And that, so that's a perfect segue into my next question. The other main character in the historic timeline is Cora Hale. We first meet her in Paris in the early 19 hundreds. She's an artist, but she's a woman and she's an American. So she ends up in Paris instead of New York, where she was because of a scandal that I won't reveal, but. And so Cora is also inspired by, I had to look her up a set designer, Carrie Heimer. Yes. And she created a pretty famous dollhouse, the Heimer Dollhouse, which now next time I'm in, in New York, I'm gonna go see at the Museum of the City of New York. So talk about Carrie as the inspiration for Cora. And how you developed her as a character. Yes. Because she was a very interesting, like the center of the story. So yes.

Elise: 14:32

I'm so glad you brought up Carrie Stet Heimer. So if anything, Carrie almost served as a proof of concept because I knew I wanted a dollhouse maker creating dollhouses that would reveal the secrets of her client. And I actually spoke with, one of my really important sources in my research was Aul historian, known as Bill Robertson. He is on Instagram. He. Creates miniatures. He's amazing. He museums like the Smithsonian hires him to do work for him. He's amazing. And I was look, this is what I'm picturing. I want a dollhouse maker, a young woman. How could this. Happen. How could she exist? And he is I have some thoughts. And sure enough, he was like, her father could be a cabinet maker. And he launched me down all these paths. He said, at the Opera Museum in Paris, they have these tiny sets. Maybe she sees those. And I was I was taking notes. I still have my notes. He was such an amazing help for me. So that kind of set me in motion on this. Then when I found Carrie Stet Heimer in my dollhouse research, she was oh look, someone was doing this right around the same time. So it helped me. It confirmed that I was on the right path. And Carrie was really interesting. She was this Bohemian woman. She lived with her two sisters, one a novelist, one a painter, and she set about creating, she was from a wealthy family. Recreating her family's Tarrytown Estate, which is just north of New York, recreating and miniature. And she also enlisted the help of some of her very famous artist friends to create miniature pieces of art. So that also gave me some ideas of she had oh gosh, now the name is, I'm spacing on the name, but she had some of her. Artist friends create all, oh, Duchamp. He created a beautiful tiny piece for her. She, so that kind of set well, like maybe cor hail, my dollhouse maker isn't the only one contributing to this dollhouse. Maybe she's getting help from other artists when she ends up in England because of world developments. She then is getting help from all these World War I veterans who have come back from the front in shell shock and it turns out. That men were being very much steeled in, steered into embroidery and knitting all these, what we would consider quiet, maybe even feminine activities to help calm them. I thought to myself what if making miniatures, I mean making miniatures would fall into that category. So I had all these men helping her in this workshop, and then eventually I even found a dollhouse on Google. That a bunch of World War I veterans had made in England at this time. So again, proof of concept. Okay, this is happening. So it's a really fun sort of process of me allowing things to start heading down certain paths and then finding, oh, lo and behold, history is validating my choices.

Jane: 17:09

Amazing. That's amazing. So I, there's a modern day storyline as well, and it centers around Tilde Barrows, who's the head or not the head. But one of the managers of the Bel Curtis Lafarge Library, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting what her title was, but it's a long name on purpose. Okay. So she ends up discovering these secret dollhouses in a hidden room in the library. And there's a mysterious personal connection to them. How did you come up? This is very different. I was thinking when I was reading it, it's very different than your other novel novels'cause there's like mysteries and secrets and how did you come up with tilde at Barrows and her storyline?

Elise: 17:47

Yeah, so I knew I needed a modern day librarian to be unraveling this the secrets in the Dollhouse. And I also knew this was gonna be a woman, to model a little of what would have been, what was happening, what she was actually looking at. I wanted her life to be small. So I have several things that have led her to really, her life has shrunk down because of grief, losing parents a pandemic, all these things have made it so really work is her life. She leads a very narrow existence. And these dollhouse, the discovery of these dollhouse in the library. Allows her, it gives her sort of the root to open up her life again. And she sees that because she actually wants to open up her life again. She just doesn't really know how she's fallen into so many sort of habits, and some would say ruts that the dollhouse, she needs to travel a little bit for them. She hasn't traveled a long time. She needs to meet new people. She then uncovers. Perhaps a path a, A path, like a connection to her own past and that draws her in even more. So I had to unspool things a little bit gradually, but I knew I needed her life to go from miniature to wider. And ironically, it would be small things that would make this big difference in her life and open up the world to her.

Jane: 18:58

Yes, exactly. I didn't even think about that when I was reading it, but that, yeah. That's amazing. Very well done. I have more questions. These are writing related. Some of them I asked everyone, a couple, some of them are specific to you.'cause like I said so you wrote Angel of the Pacific was your last novel?

Elise: 19:13

Yes. Like

Jane: 19:13

pretty heavy. That was a. Topic Right. Was about nurses in the Philippines. Yeah. And I know you did a ton of research, you traveled to the Philippines for that. That was an unbelievable amount of research. So this is a really big departure current day timeline. Yeah. Dollhouses secrets and family. What was different about writing this book and the process than writing your other book?

Elise: 19:36

Yeah, so I knew I wanted to do something different. As I said, it was 2020. I really couldn't go anywhere. I couldn't rely on all the usual things I do to help me build a story. I couldn't travel. I couldn't really go meet people. I couldn't go to museums or libraries. I did find I could do a lot of these things digitally, but I also really wanted a mood change from Angels of the Pacific, this heavy World War II novel. I wanted to write something joyful. I wanted to write something really that celebrated art and that I wanted a world in which art could save the day. So I said about building that. So it really was the pandemic forced me into innovating on my own work, really. I'm like, how can I I knew I wanted to use my own imagination. I didn't wanna be hemmed in by real life people and events. I wanted to just go to town. And so this book is like a real glimpse into how I wish the world was. Quite honestly. I just noticed someone had written in a review on Good Reads, I wish this was real life. And I was like, me too. And that's what I wrote this. So I, it felt very exciting to see that someone else wished that real world, the real world was like this too. Nice. I think we all want that really.

Jane: 20:47

We do, and I have to say like the reviews on net gall are really great too. I'm sure. I don't know if you read drone reviews. I couldn't. I try not to.

Elise: 20:54

I try not to. Yeah. But that's great because I haven't looked on net gall in ages.

Jane: 20:58

Yeah. Yeah. I know. I try to, not to either, but but they're great. So the dual, so dual timeline. What, in terms of the actual process of writing? Yeah. Did you write one timeline and then the other timeline? Did you, are you a plotter? The, did you plot things out?'cause this, I was thinking too, this had some like mystery threads that you had to like seed, you had to plant curiosity seeds as they call them. And so how did you do, did you work on structure first? I'm curious about your whole writing process. This one was my

Elise: 21:27

messiest process by far. And I think the dual timeline contributed to that a little bit. Although in Fast Girls, my book about the three women, Olympians, I have three storylines running in that they're all happening at the same time. So I'm able to braid them together that way. But this one was, I really. Knew Cora's story. I knew my dollhouse maker. That one was actually very easy. I was able to spool that historical story out very smoothly. It was the peeling layers back and getting things to happen at the right time. There was a lot, and I knew who Tilde was. It was just really getting the plotting to work out. So I have a wall in my office that is covered with note cards that I was moving around all the time. Color coding things I like threads. I was practically like the serial killer board where reds conducting things. It felt, I felt like a lunatic there for a while. But it finally, through sort of perseverance and thinking about it endlessly it came together, but it was not a super efficient process. I will be the first to say that. I probably have been a more of a plotter in the past, partly also because my novels have been biographical fiction and kind of based on real people. I knew where they were going. This was one where I just embraced that. I knew my final scene, I knew my opening scene, but I had a lot of work to do to get those middle sections to come together. But it was also really fun because. This was all so vivid in my head. I could really imagine these people in places and I was having so much fun. I didn't really wanna let go of it, so I might have made work more difficult for myself just so I could stay in it longer.

Jane: 23:02

Nice. That's a good problem to have though. Okay. Couple more writing questions. And then we have some questions in the chat. If anyone has questions for Elise, just put'em in the chat or the q and a. You've taught writing and literature. What advice do you have to aspiring writers about writing and getting published? I always ask this.

Elise: 23:20

Yeah. And I always say that writing is rewriting. There is no, I always tell my students in that first class I have with'em. Yeah, there's no hack. Maybe now AI is presenting a little bit of a hack, but I don't use that. It really is putting yourself in a seat and just starting to write and then rewriting that and rewriting it again. It really is living in this story, thinking about it for so long so that it really can feel as vivid to your readers as it does for you. Yeah.

Jane: 23:51

Excellent advice. What, are you ready to talk about what you're working on next?

Elise: 23:55

Are you Yeah, so I'm in the very early stages of a new book. It's set in the 1950s here in Seattle. And so it's been really fun to do all this local research that, that's new for me. I've never written a book where I live before. So it's been really fun to get to know Middle of the Century Seattle. And it's about. It's about, I think it's about at this point a couple of women who are connected by friendship and McCarthyism will challenge everything they know they work for and they hold dear. That's all I can say at this point. Nice.

Jane: 24:28

I look forward to it. And that's probably 20 26, 20 27. At this point, you're thinking who knows. Who

Elise: 24:33

knows? Yeah. Probably more realistic. Yeah, I know how that.

Jane: 24:39

And how I, I mentioned your Instagram at Elise Cooper. How is that the best way that readers can stay in touch with you?

Elise: 24:45

Yeah I'm on Instagram every day. You can see me posting all kinds of miniature stuff. And I, I have a website, elise cooper.com. People can send me emails through that. So I'm pretty accessible. I.

Jane: 24:56

Yeah, definitely. I do

Elise: 24:57

a lot of book clubs so people can always reach out through Instagram or through email, through my website to ask me to join their book club or whatever. Oh, I

Jane: 25:04

usually ask that too. You do virtual book clubs? Oh, I do a

Elise: 25:06

lot of them, yes. Yeah. Awesome.

Jane: 25:07

Okay, good to know. Okay. For questions and there's lots of lovely comments in the chat too, so you'll have to read some of these. Thank you. Let's see. Oh, Courtney Rogers asked, have you ever seen the Colleen Moore Dollhouse in Chicago's Museum of Industry? I

Elise: 25:21

have not, but I'm actually going to Chicago on my way to miniature school in Maine this summer. I'm definitely hoping to see the thorn rooms. I'd like to go see that one too. I've read about it, so at this point I feel like I know all about it. I've seen pictures. I would love to see that.

Jane: 25:36

Very cool. Oh, and this is from Christine. This Christine Mot this is a good question. Was like, what was there something about building make, was there a particular miniature that was really difficult for, or challenging for you? Like in are they all, I couldn't even attempt, so I, they are

Elise: 25:50

all challenging. I have a bit of an unsteady hand, so I do a fair amount of ah. As I am, things are wobbling around, I'm knocking things around. So really small stuff is the death of me. What I've become really I love doing are these dollhouses within dollhouses. So that was a challenge for me'cause I had to learn some modern technology. I went to my local libraries makerspace and learned how to use the glow forge so that I could cut out the wood through a laser. So that was really great. And challenging for me, but really fun. I also took a woodworking class and used all kinds of much bigger power tools to learn really, truly how to make things out of big wooden pieces, how to mill wood, all that stuff. So that was all challenging and took me a little bit outta my comfort zone, but was really fun.

Jane: 26:36

So cool. And there is, there's a couple questions about the Dollhouse behind you. So Sharon person asked, how does your dollhouse look like the, what your orig original one looked like or did? How did you decide to decorate it? Take us through a little bit of the dollhouse. Let's do that, shall we?

Elise: 26:50

So the dollhouse is structurally the same as it was all of this. These rooms are just exactly how they were, what was different. And actually even this dark wood along here on is all the same. What was a wreck? A paint. I repainted the, this is a what we would call a more rustic dollhouse in the sense that it's not like one of these elaborate Victorians. The outside is very boring. It's just white with green trim. So all the rooms I had to strip out all this old nasty wallpaper through I heated it. I had to use like vinegar and water. It was a hassle. I learned a lot through that. And then I reaped everything I used actually because it's pretty heavy, because it is old wood. It's not just lightweight base wood or anything. I tried to lighten things up a little by using a lot of printables. So some of the wood you can't really see maybe here, but I'll put some pictures on Instagram or there are pictures on Instagram I use just like printable wood. So I've been really in touch with my local printer because my printer here isn't so great and I go through toners so fast. So I've used my local printer for a lot of printing things out. I have used everything from, this is wrap wrapping paper in what I call the Lady Saloon. Because I have a boozy dollhouse. There's a whole bar back here that yeah I will put some pictures in my Instagram stories for better looks. But yeah, I used wrapping paper for the, for some of the wallpaper, everything. Basically, something I found so fun about this project is I now look at the world through the lens of how could I repurpose that for something miniature? So everything I don't see one right here, but I have, I collect now like chapstick lids because I use those as little planters. The little lids that you tear off your coffee or your creamer, your dairy creamer and milk. I use those now. I like cut off the little thing and use them as plates. I decoupage anything on top. So it's really fun. It really stirs a lot of the creative juices and I love,

Jane: 28:41

yeah. Absolutely. I wanna talk too, I don't know if any of the rugs in there are, there's a, you have an Instagram that went viral and your grandmothers made these, hand stitched these rugs. Look at,

Elise: 28:54

even the back is so neat and beautiful. Yes, this is the smallest one, but I have about four or five of them in here. Four of them beautiful. They're just beautiful. She was a master seamstress and embroider. I've had actually all these expert embroidery people reach out to me because of that post and offer advice of what they think the materials were. Someone wants me, actually, I need to do this, photograph the patterns so that they can recreate them. They're beautiful. These are really treasured possessions now of mine. I just, they're so unique. Obviously they could be in the museum at this point. They're really beautiful, so I feel really lucky. Lucky to have them. These are what kind of. Started the journey. My grandmother, as I was growing up, had these dire, these what they call room boxes in her upstairs hallway, and they were, I think about four of them that hung along the wall and they could light up and she had some of these bits of furniture in them. Looking totally different, but they hadn't really aged well. A lot of them, the fabric was really nasty and needed to be redone. So I have restored a lot of them and made them look a little more modern and fun. It's been, I love both transforming old pieces into kind of new fun. This was, this is a good example. This was this old chair that was so gross. It had like gross stains all over it. But I painted it and then de kage is this is fabric all over it. And I just, every time I look at this chair, it makes me smile. Honestly, I wish I had it in full size. I love transforming old pieces and I also like building new ones. That's really fun and satisfying too.

Jane: 30:24

Yeah so cool. Susie Baldwin says, your dollhouse and the contents are a gorgeous work of art and Yeah. They really and I didn't really understand the whole how, before reading this book, how there some of them are like true artwork and, it's a whole different world, which has really been fun to read about too. Yeah. Oh good. Yeah.

Elise: 30:41

Thank you. I know I have learned. So much about writing through writing this book. It's been really fun. And then of course, I'll get to meet all these real artists this summer, and I am really excited about that too.

Jane: 30:51

So exciting. This has been delightful. Thank you so much for coming on again. It's so nice to have a, have you on for a second time. I, the library of Lost El House is, it comes out Tuesday available for pre-order now. I know you have your tour dates on on Instagram and are you on Facebook as well? I think I, I'm on

Elise: 31:08

Facebook. I'm not as active on Facebook, but I am on Facebook. I'm on every no, I'm not quite on everything, but yeah, Facebook and Instagram. I can be found I will be around the Seattle area. I will be coming east in June. I'm doing a couple events, one in Rhode Island, one in Connecticut. But yeah, I really just thank you so much for having me on. I just, I think right before we went live with this, I was telling you that people are starting to get their copies of this book already, so it is coming out into the world. I can't believe it after all these years of imagining it. I'm really hopeful people have as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Jane, thank you so much.

Jane: 31:43

I have no doubt they will. And if you wanna come to Boston, I have a couple local indie bookstores that would love to have you. So just, let me know if you're gonna be in Rhode Island anyway. Yeah. Yes,

Elise: 31:51

I We'll be in touch then for sure.

Jane: 31:53

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you again Elise, and best of luck. And that's a wrap everyone. Thank you for coming on tonight. Next up Natasha Lester on April 9th. Remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow the pod, my podcast, and and my novel comes out. August 1st, women of Arlington Hall cold War novel, a available for pre-order wherever you order books. All right, I'll be in touch. Elise. Thank you again and good luck next week. Congratulations.

Elise: 32:18

Thank you so much. Thanks everyone. Pleasure to good.