Weird, Random Shit About Me

Calling Debut Authors! We Are Accepting Applications for the 2018 Debutante Ball!

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Calling Debut Authors! Now Accepting Applications for the 2018 Debutante Ball!

Our topic this week is to discuss some weird, surprising things people may not know about this year’s Debs!
  1. I met James Taylor when I was around 17 years old. This picture was taken at a Litchfield County fair, circa 1983. Louisa, my buddy and roommate from prep school, is in the middle, and I’m the one on the right. This encounter was not particularly weird, but check out the plaid, ruffle’y shirt I’m wearing.

2. I speak German really badly. I lived in Berlin for a spell and learned to get by, sort of, but I can destroy a sentence in German, just by trying to conjugate a verb or, God forbid, use a pronoun. My husband works and lives in Frankfurt part of the year, and I go there whenever I can, although my shitty German may at some point get me banned from the country. I have actually been known to offend people, once asking a women “Are those onions?” when I meant to ask if her children were twins. (Zwilling vs. Zwiebeln – It was an honest mistake.) Ooops.

3. (Excuse the double negative, but) I have never in my life not had a pet.

Before:

After:

4. I am and have always been a theater/movie/television enthusiast. I was an actress for about five years in the nineties (think big hair and bigger shoulder pads), and my best year career-wise was the year I played a young yuppie in a Polaroid commercial, a young mom in a Brooks Pharmacy ad, and a young wife in a terrible episode of America’s Most Wanted. To this day, I love watching and reading plays.

My next novel LIMELIGHT is about Broadway. Here’s an article I wrote recently for the Writers In The Storm blog on what novelists can learn from playwrights about dialogue. Read it here!

5. I have zero musical skill of any kind – I can’t read music, can’t play an instrument, and can barely hear the difference between Bach and Bono. But by some freak, genetic accident, I have three kids who are all musically inclined: one graduated from Berklee College of Music, one plays drums, guitar, and piano, and one is an aspiring classical composer. How weird is that?

Artwork by Felice Kaufmann

Author: Amy Poeppel

Amy Poeppel grew up in Dallas, Texas and left the south to attend Wellesley College. Since then, she has worked as an actor, a high school English teacher, and most recently as the Assistant Director of Admissions at a school in New York City. Her three fabulous boys are all off in Boston attending school, and she and her husband now split their time between New York and Frankfurt, Germany. A theatrical version of SMALL ADMISSIONS was workshopped at the Actors Studio Playwrights/Directors Unit. She later expanded it into her first novel.

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