Milwaukee author Andrea Bartz’s new thriller, The Last Ferry Out, follows Abby on an adventure to find out the truth of her fiance’s death. By befriending a group of expats, she’s slowly able to start piecing the story together, when the one who claims to know the truth disappears. We asked Bartz about her writing process, representation in her characters and more ahead of the book’s release on May 20.
In the last six years, you’ve had five books come out. Averaging about a book a year is super impressive. Can you tell us what got you into writing and what your process is?
I studied journalism in college, and then I moved out to New York to work in magazines. And so I, as a journalist, definitely got into the practice of writing under deadline of understanding how to tell a great story in as few words as possible and draw the reader in.
While I was working in magazines, I started working on a manuscript just in my free time, just a fun side project. And once I finished the whole manuscript, I was like, “let’s see if I can get an agent and actually sell this book.”
That became my debut thriller, which came out in 2019, The Lost Night. Since then, I have written four more books with The Last Ferry Out hitting shelves very soon.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
I start with a hook for the book. I start with sort of a big idea of what I want the book to explore and what’s going to happen at the beginning to kick off the action. That’s all I know when I start writing. So, I basically write the novel or work on the novel every day to figure out what the story is. I have daily word count goals when I’m in writing mode and keep track of how many words I’m adding onto that manuscript every day.
And generally by the time I get to the end, months and months later, I have figured out what the story is and then I have to immediately go back to the beginning and reshape everything before it because of course it’s changed in my mind as I’ve been writing.
How do you drum up inspiration for your novels and what draws you to the thriller genre?
I always loved reading thrillers. So when I wanted to write a book of my own, I wanted to write the kind of book I loved reading.
When I was a kid growing up in Brookfield, Wisconsin, I think my childhood was pretty boring, but I loved dark, scary books maybe because things were a little bit calm and bucolic in the suburbs.
So even as a kid I loved reading Goosebumps, and Fear Street, and Lois Duncan, and Christopher Pike and all those books that were so popular when I was a kid. I think because I’m a pretty nice person from a pretty nice background and all those things, I love exploring the dark side of things in both the pop culture that I consume and the books that I write.
I always have this sort of dark question running in the back of my mind. I’ll be in a perfectly normal situation and I’m the one who is like, “hey, what would happen if X, Y, Z actually went very wrong and this happened?”
My brain is always just conjuring up these scenarios, which I think can frighten my friends a little bit. I’m always thinking about all the different ways that something could go wrong. Maybe out of some self-protective attempt to be prepared for all scenarios, but it’s useful when that overactive imagination leads to coming up with these different story ideas that I actually spend years of my life exploring and writing about and spinning into stories that are hopefully really entertaining to read.
You took a trip to Mexico which in turn gave you the idea for this book. What about that trip inspired you?
I took a trip to Mexico by myself. I traveled around Mexico for about a month right before the pandemic in February of 2020. And when you’re traveling solo, you end up chatting with a bunch of people, and I don’t speak fluent Spanish.
Everywhere I went I was meeting expats, and there were these really friendly expat communities everywhere I went. They were interested, and curious and happy to let me into their little communities while I was there.
I found all these people very charming, but also sort of enigmatic and mysterious because these were people who had chosen to parachute out of their lives, the lives they had been born into. They were choosing to sort of forsake their upbringing, their friends and family, everything they’d known in order to live in another country.
Many of them didn’t even speak Spanish and they were somewhere new and it felt like they were all either seeking something or sort of getting away from something. They had these really tight knit communities. They were very good friends, but everyone in them was so different. They were these motley crews, and I wondered, “would these people ever be friends if they all lived in an English speaking country? Is there any other circumstance where these people would hang out?
What is bringing them together? The fact that they all speak English and they all are sort of outsiders here. And so I just thought there was something about the social dynamics of those little cliques and I was like, what if I threw a dead body into one of those social milieus? What would happen then? That sort of gave me the idea for the entire book.
The Last Ferry Outs protagonist, Abby, is a queer woman in STEM. What compelled you to highlight diverse representation in your characters?
I wanted to have a queer main character because I am queer myself, and I think it’s important to have stories about authentic representation of queer characters that aren’t just about their coming out stories or about their trauma around their queerness.
This is a story that I think would work pretty much just as well if everyone was straight, but I wanted that character to reflect this part of my own identity and I wanted to write a character who was in a STEM field.
She’s a data scientist for a few reasons. One is that I felt like that informed her personality and her coping mechanisms. She’s wracked with grief from the beginning of the book, as anyone would be if they had someone die unexpectedly, and she deals with it in this very analytical way.
She’s seeking answers. She’s kind of thinking about life in these black and white terms. My girlfriend is a data scientist herself and we think very differently. I’m in a creative field, she’s in a stem field, and I just find it interesting how she spends all day working on these algorithms where you put in information and it runs through an algorithm and comes out with some sort of answer. To her, it’s very black and white and I tend to occupy that squishy space of being an artist.
Everything is not black and white, it’s gray. So I wanted to write a main character who reflected this other way of seeing the world, especially because she’s interacting with these sort of freewheeling and kind of bohemian expats on this island in Mexico.
Are you taking a break after this novel, or do you already have another project lined up?
Actually, I just sold my next book to my publisher. I’m lucky to be continuing to work with the same editor, and so I’m just starting to write it. Basically right now I am just diving into the story with a general sense of what I want to explore, but no idea where the story is going to end.
I’m excited because the next one is different. It’s sort of a horror and thriller hybrid instead of a straight thriller like [The Last Ferry Out]. So I’m going to have some fun playing with some other spooky elements that perhaps delve into the supernatural.
Do you think Abby and Ezther would like Wisconsin cheese curds?
There’s a scene where they eat fried cheese curds, so we know this is a yes. I love putting my characters in Wisconsin. It’s so fun for me to give nods to up north, and to Milwaukee and to great places around Madison. Lake Mendota makes a few appearances in this book. So cheese curds are definitely on the menu for these two.
So I guess we can assume they would like Culver’s and KwikTrip, too?
There is no question. These are true Wisconsin girls, so they’d be eating it all.
