Meet Kate Maruyama of Glendale

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kate Maruyama

Hi Kate, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’ve been writing in one form or another my whole life. I moved out here to write screenplays in the 90s, and learned a great deal about structure and rewriting while working as a development exec in the industry. But one story wouldn’t work in screen form and that’s when I wrote my first novel. I went to grad school at Antioch University Los Angeles where I met so many writer friends and I wrote my second novel that was published shortly thereafter…a horror novel called HARROWGATE (47North 2013). It did quite well and introduced me to a whole bunch of amazing writers here in LA and from around the world. Horror writers are the friendliest, loveliest people. I guess we get out the bad stuff in our work! But I write all kinds of stories, science fiction, horror, and realism. I wrote ALTERATIONS, (a realist multigenerational family drama that takes place in 1930s and 40s Hollywood) after Harrowgate, and it went out in New York with an agent. It wasn’t selling and the answers why were kind of all over the place. Usually when a book isn’t selling there’s an identifiable reason. My agent thought it was because it has a cishet love story in it as well as a gay love story and they couldn’t figure out who they were selling it to! It seems so silly. If you have a family you have queer relatives. You just do. And shoving stories about gay people on its own shelf as if it’s not for everyone is not good for literature.

I had a big dry spell and my heart was broken at the time because I really love this book.

I wrote a horror novel that didn’t sell at the time.

About six years later I quit my agent and I started getting traction again in horror writing and published a novella called FAMILY SOLSTICE with Kate Jonez’s company Omnium Gatherum–it was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine! That press folded and Raw Dog Screaming Press picked it up and rereleased it with another novella called “Safer” in a book called BLEAK HOUSES.

I couldn’t let ALTERATIONS go, and fortunately my dear writer friend, Toni Ann Johnson who loved the book (and helped me with two sets of notes) kept nudging me to send it out to small presses. It got picked up in 2022 and we were so very thrilled. In the meantime Writ Large Press published my second horror novel THE COLLECTIVE, which was so lovely.

ALTERATIONS just came out March 11, 2025 and it was a dream come true, a book launch at Chevalier’s, LA’s oldest independent bookstore, filled with friends from all walks of the LA writer world. Toni Ann was my interviewer, it was a beautiful event.

THE COLLECTIVE comes out in physical copy (it’s available digitally now) at the end of this month.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Well it’s all there in the prior question, but I do want to reiterate that dry spell was rough (dry for publishing, not for writing). I was still writing, I wrote another novel (realism) also and published a few short stories but there was a lot more writing than publishing. What was so nice during that dry spell was the fact that I was surrounded by writers in this awesome writing city. I could celebrate friends’ victories and publications and they kept me submitting, particularly in the group I belong to Women Who Submit which is an enormous support system for women identifying and nonbinary writers. I went to horror conventions and enjoyed my horror friends, and to science fiction conventions where I enjoyed those friends…there are a lot of crossovers. I was reading a lot. I was a judge for the Bram Stoker Awards for one year and the Shirley Jackson Awards for two years. I read SO MUCH good writing, which helps with the writing.

And I taught, my day job is teaching, and teaching writing makes me better at it. I’m an adjunct at Cal State LA in fiction and at Antioch University Los Angeles in the Undergraduate Studies Program.

As far as challenges go, life has taught me that nothing happens quite when you want it to or quite in the way you imagine it happening (see above). But as long as you keep writing, good things follow, and sometimes they are cooler than you can imagine.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m known for writing horror novels simply because that is where I am most published. I’m cross-genred, going from science fiction stories to horror stories, to magic realism or urban fantasy (Los Angeles, but slightly magical). But each new book or story tells me what it is as I’m writing it. I can’t quite sit down and choose, my characters choose.

I’m most proud of the LA writing community, really. I love helping new writers, putting writers who should know each other or editors together. Most of my joy comes from listening to other writers read and share ideas, and letting them blow my mind. There are larger literary conversations going on here all the time. My novel ALTERATIONS wouldn’t be here without Toni Ann Johnson. I just sold a short story to “Analog Science Fiction & Fact” that was prompted by a poem of Chiwan Choi’s from his collection. I see writers’ fingerprints all over each other’s work in this town, bouncing off each other, creating new energy and it’s beautiful.

So as far as “setting apart from others,” that’s a hard phrase to reckon when we all need each other so much! I couldn’t have done anything I’ve done without my writer friends and their inspiration.

I am very proud of ALTERATIONS, though, It took three years to write it (and two to rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite), I wove three characters in a family and their storylines into a tight novel that makes people cry at the end (in a good way). I can’t wait for more folks to read it!

This is the description:

Adriana gets a job sewing for Edith Head at Paramount’s costume department in the early 1940s. Adriana falls in love with a bit player named Rose and the two move in together. Living with a woman goes unnoticed as most people presume they are only roommates. But as Adriana’s career blossoms, society and life start to interfere and Adriana makes decisions that affect three generations of her family.

1998: Adriana’s granddaughter Laura has left LA on the heels of a failed relationship and a subsequently failed career in film development. She moves in with her grandmother in Baltimore to find some time and space to think. The problem is she always spent time here with her dearest friend and cousin Becca, who died suddenly in a car crash, leaving her 13-year-old daughter, Lizzie.

Adriana, in her eighties and wrestling with the past is now suddenly responsible for Laura and Lizzie. Lizzie tries to find her way without parents while living with these two women who cannot find their way in their own lives.

You can’t choose your family, but you can’t escape them either. Three lives twine together in the past and the present to take a closer look at how family, wanted or not, makes up who we are.

What matters most to you? Why?
The arts community and that we continue to be there for each other as things get tougher in the coming years. Writ Large Press had a beautiful series of events called 90x90LA they held in the summer of 2017, the first summer of that guy’s first presidency. They held cultural and literary events all over the city in conversation with what was going on. The Muslim Ban brought on a beautiful Eid reading of poetry, gentrification brought on conversation and support, it seemed like for any bad thing that happened there was an artistic or conversational answer and it sustained us that summer. We all need to remember to show up for each other in art spaces, to push back as we feel increasingly helpless.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://katemaruyama.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katemaruyama/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kate.maruyama
• Twitter: https://bookshop.org/p/books/alterations-kate-maruyama/21591024?ean=9781960018755
• Youtube: https://www.writlargeprojects.com/shop/p/the-collective-digital
• Other: @katemaru.bsky.social

Image Credits
all photos taken by me or family so no credit needed.