Wine People with Michelle Wildgen

This week we are celebrating a Happy Pub Day! with the amazing author of four books, Michelle Wildgen. Michelle’s latest book, Wine People, which is out today is about ambition, friendship, and of course wine, and when they work together and when they work against each other. The book includes two of our Michelle’s favorites things, wine and people, and although you don’t have to drink wine, or know all about wine to enjoy it, our sources say that should you like wine you should have a glass and raise a toast to Michelle in celebration of her book being out today. Cheers friends!

In This Episode, Michelle Talks About

The research behind Wine People
Michelle’s background and how she got into writing
What Michelle’s writing ritual looks like

The research behind Wine People

Michelle tells us all about the research that she had to do to write her book, Wine People, and spoiler alert, drinking wine was involved. She began working for a restaurant in Wisconsin, because she wanted to learn all about food, wine, and the industry, without having to travel the world. Later, when she returned to writing the book, she reached out to someone who had worked for that same restaurant and later worked for the wine importer and started asking questions about her life and what the daily job looked like. She reached out to everyone she could think of and said if you work in wine, I want to talk to you! And unfortunately, the research process involved drinking wine in Italy. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it!

Michelle’s background and how she got into writing

Michelle shares with us the story of how her mom sent her to a writing camp because she knew that it was something she was interested in, and Michelle tells us that it blew her mind! She fell in love with writing and from then on knew that this was something that she was going to make happen. She then started reading everything she found on food to learn all she could. In particular, she was inspired by M.F.K. Fisher and how she used food as a way to tell stories. She ended up working for a magazine called Tin House and stayed there for 18 years as an editor which opened her eyes to what the path to being a writer looked like. After that she had her plan, and the rest is history.

What Michelle’s writing ritual looks like

We love learning about authors and their writing rituals and Michelle tells us how her ritual involves writing several mornings a week. She gets up, runs on the treadmill, grabs her coffee, and starts by reading a few pages of a book that she loves. She talks about how there are some books that just make you want to write, and that tends to be a very specific group of books for most people. This process gets her brain in that writing space and gets her inspired to start writing.