[Interview] With Ty Landers by Betty-Jo Tilley

Baby Queen, by Ty Landers, goes deep into the secrets of three generations of women and their once-prosperous, now-failing honeybee farm in rural Alabama. Its ninety-year-old founder, Lana Link, tends to wander off during apparent lapses into dementia. Natalie “Nat” Link, abandoned at infancy by her mother, Vivien, aspires to transition the family business to her honey-based skin care line. When her father, Tom Rath, missing for thirty years, is found perfectly preserved in a Link Honey Farm barrel, the situation gets sticky very fast. Faced with hillbilly gangsters of the most mercenary kind, Nat soon realizes she’s inheriting a bigger mess than a derelict farm. The mother she’s never known returns home, and a washed-up police detective focused on redemption sets out to prove Lana is more capable, and treacherous, than anyone knew. It’s a rare debut novel that causes a Hollywood bidding war and ends up in television development before readers even have their hands on it. Fiction legends Dennis Lehane, Robert Crais, Tod Goldberg, and Stephen Graham Jones are applauding it. To hear Landers, you’d think he was just sitting around waiting for his wife to give him a bright idea. In fact, he was a songwriter who loved poetry long before he wrote crime and suspense, and more importantly, he knew how to find people who believed in him, and how to follow good advice when he heard it. Whether that comes from his close relationship with his grandmother or from being married to a rock of a woman, Ty Landers is on the brink of literary stardom.

Once you finish Baby Queen, you’ll want to see the TV show, and you’ll be hoping it won’t take long for his second novel to get into your hands and onto the screen.Betty-Jo Tilley sat down with Landers and talked about the people who most influenced him and how he went from not knowing what he was doing to finding himself in a ten-way bidding war over the book he wrote in grad school.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KELP JOURNAL: What was your inspiration for Baby Queen?

TY LANDERS: This isn’t a story about my family, but it’s very much inspired by the capable women in my family. I’m lucky to have been surrounded by strong matriarchal women. We are a women-at-the-top-of-the-food-chain family, and that stems back to my grandmother. My grandfather was a two-bit hillbilly gangster who followed a couple of guys he was in a feud with into a grocery store, went in, blazed down on them, and they drew on him. And he died in that gunfight. My grandmother had four kids under the age of twelve, my mom being the youngest at eight months old. My grandmother had never driven a car. She’d never been off of one of three or four mountains and valleys in the general area. And she had to escape these people that were a terrible influence on her older brothers, especially my oldest uncle, James, who was twelve. He ran around in my grandfather’s gang, carried a gun, fought, drank, played cards, the whole nine yards. It was like anybody can pick up a gun and get killed in the grocery store. But my grandmother, to start her life over from scratch at thirty, take terrible jobs and then produce kids who got college degrees—that’s where the real gangster comes in.When she started suffering from dementia, which also plays into the book, you could get her to talk about some of it, like, I want to tell you this so you know what’s in the family tree, so if you start to see this manifest in your life, you’ll know you have wild DNA to watch out for. Especially since you’re one of our men. They don’t live long, they do crazy stuff, they flame out. Our women live to be a hundred, a hundred and three; they get dementia when they’re ninety. They’re like oak trees.I’ve never had a woman in my life that didn’t have a plan, and a backup plan, and a plan C, and then wasn’t ready to pull a nuclear option if any of those didn’t work. Nobody asked any of our men, what do you think? What are we gonna do? It was easy to write because it was just, like, write what you know. And luckily for me, it was badass women.

KJ: At what stage in your life did you start writing?

TL: It was something I always wanted to do. I think it’s important for writers to understand so much of writing is the stuff you do when you’re not at a keyboard. It’s analyzing What do these people actually want? I made my own comic books from an early age. And Shel Silverstein was important to me, because I was like, this is not for kids. It’s in my elementary school library, but something subversive snuck in, you know? It was funny, but also dark, and sad. That got me into the love of poetry, and that was good for me in my early teens. And when I was fifteen, I got a guitar and started writing songs. I wrote hundreds of songs and played in bands, and that’s what got me to Nashville. Songwriting was so formative because you’re in this little box. It’s got to be two and a half minutes. It’s got to rhyme, got to have two verses, then a chorus, then a bridge. There’s all these rules to songs.

KJ: Interesting that your love of poetry led you to songwriting.

TL: Each one is like a breadcrumb. I was stifled writing songs in my twenties; I couldn’t do the things that were in my head. There’s not enough space to tell stories in tight little boxes. So, the short story became freeing, because it was like a song, but you can do it any way you want. And the novel is a further progression of that. There’s almost too much space, so it’s being able to rein it in and find a thing that will connect back to someone. And editing is the real trick to making it something that somebody wants.KJ: Why University of California, Riverside, grad school? And how much of Baby Queen existed when you applied?

TL: I love talking about this because when I went out to UCR, it changed my life. I read The Low Desert by Tod Goldberg, and I was absolutely blown away by it. And then, of course, you flip to the back, and I was like, who the hell is this guy? And then I saw he was the director of an MFA program. I was like, whoa, that’s cool. I thought it was not something I would be able to do, because you hear horror stories about how selective it is. I had two kids, and we were trying for a third, so I didn’t know if I’d have enough time to cram in an MFA. But during the pandemic, one of my craziest, most eccentric uncles on my mom’s side died and left me enough cash that I was like, wow, I can do this without having to take any kinds of loans out. So, you know what? It’s that whole get busy living or get busy dying thing, right? The first time I told anybody about Baby Queen was Tod on the call where he was like, your short stories are pretty good. What do you want to do? And I was like, well, I want to learn from you guys, and I want to write a crime novel. He’s like, what’s it gonna be about? I told him, I’ve got this thing about bees, and this girl comes home, they find her father’s body, and hillbilly hijinks ensue after that. And he was like, you’re going to be working with Mark Haskell Smith. And then, in that first quarter, you don’t know what you’re doing or if you’re any good. It’s terrifying having outstanding people reading your stuff. I sent Mark my first twenty pages, and he was like, this is cool, I really dig the voice that you’re doing this in. And I was like, okay, that’s all the confidence I need. Even now, I’ll write a line and I’ll hear Mark Haskell Smith in my head go, Really? You don’t have to do that. Don’t be so much of a writer, or get off the stage and out of the spotlight. This isn’t about you, it’s about the story. Just tell me the story. You don’t have to try to show off here. And then I worked with Tod, and having a master like that show me these tweaks—how human interactions need to exist on the page—completely changed the way I will always think about how a crime novel is done.

KJ: In the first pages, a character is found perfectly entombed in a cocoon of honey. You’re Southern, so you know about kudzu and tar, and quicksand, and gators. Why honey?

TL: That’s a great question. The honey thing started with my wife. She was like, did you know that the bees are dying, and they’re gonna die, and then we’re gonna die? And I was like, wait, what? And that’s who my wife is, right? We can’t just stand around. We gotta save this planet. That goes back to the women with a plan thing, right? I’m just sitting around with my shovel waiting to do some work. She sends me this article, and as a writer, you can get sucked into a rabbit hole of information on something very niche. I got really badly sucked into the world of bees. I came across incredible stories about honey as a preservative. Alexander the Great dies in India, so they encase him in this tomb of honey so his body won’t rot in the two years it’s going to take them to walk it back to Mesopotamia. And tomb raiders breaking into pyramids and British Egyptologists cracking open honey pots that have been in the ground since the pharaohs, and that just blew my mind that these little insects make this substance that never goes bad if you put a little heat on it. And it’s a great skin care product, and it sucks the moisture out of bacteria. It was just fascinating. Everybody seems to like bee and honeycomb imagery, and there’s something very warm and inviting about it. But people are also terrified and will crash their car trying to get one out because they don’t want it to sting them. And I was like, what a great place to hide drugs. [shakes his head] I’m always thinking about where to hide my drugs. [laughs]KJ: Did you also do a lot of research into guns? I imagine you may have grown up knowing about guns, but not to the extent it shows in the book.

TL: So, the gun thing, that’s another by-product of living in rural Alabama. My family was not a gun family. We had a gun, but just for protection. Almost everybody I know in Alabama is a gun person. I don’t consider myself a gun person, but I can load it, shoot it, do just about anything with it, just being in this community where everybody had a gun. Here, hold my gun. I don’t want it to fall out of my pants while I’m jumping over this fence. You learn how to hold it and where to put it. It’s a different world.

KJ: I might know how to cook frog legs and catfish just from reading Baby Queen.

TL: You gotta do that! That frog leg scene came straight out of my cousin Robert in East Tennessee. He took me to hunt frogs, and in the middle of the night, we were in some snake-infested pond catching giant frogs. He took them straight to his house and showed me how to fry them. You got to have buttermilk, flour; it’s got to be at this temperature. I was probably ten and I still remember it. That’s another great thing about being a writer. You just say, oh, that actually happened to me, so I’m just going to let it happen to him.

KJ: Your trajectory is an MFA candidate’s dream come true. Tell us about it.

TL: Yeah, that was really crazy. A great thing about our MFA program is that they bring in people who are doing it for a living to give you feedback. I wanted my manuscript done and in really good shape when they started bringing in agents and editors. I’m not the most extroverted person, and I was raised like, You’re talking about yourself. That’s rude. Don’t do that. I had to step out of my comfort zone. And the way I found my agent was I read a lot of trade magazines to see what was going on, and in Publishers Marketplace, I saw an editor for twenty years transitioning to agenting. And in my lizard brain, I was like, wow, I bet he doesn’t have a huge client list yet! I reached out to him; he read the pages and laid out his plan for the book. I felt like I was talking to a financial adviser. He just felt like my guy very early on. In that first conversation, he was like, I want to see this as TV, and I was like, from your lips to God’s ears. That’s exactly what I want.

 So, my agent took the manuscript out to Los Angeles and showed it to the person who is now my film and TV agent, and she was like, I know some folks that are looking for something like this. And I ended up meeting with about twelve or thirteen groups of people with about two days of bids that came in. I didn’t know what I was doing, and my agent was like, okay, so you know what you’re doing? And I was like, yeah, it’s like a job interview. And he’s like, no, you just listen, get a vibe and a feel, ask questions, and tell them how involved you want to be. You start to see you’re getting good advice, and having somebody who believes in the book the way my agent did, makes you feel comfortable. It could be everybody’s got something similar right now, and this one just misses. And then we pivot, and we go to your next book. He was always talking to me about my career. I was like, my career? What? He was thinking about the long game, throwing down one brick at a time, as opposed to being like, you got to build a house right now or you’re done for.

KJ:  You and your wife have big personal lives. How do you separate your fiction from your real life?

TL: Well, we’ve got three boys: ten, seven, and three. A lot of times, our house feels like you’ve stepped in an ant hill, and it’s like, whoa, they’re everywhere. And my wife is one in a million. She supports women going through miscarriage or pregnancy loss or infertility, so she has her hands full. I was lucky to find her and steal her from her boyfriend when I did. You know, you got to do that kind of stuff. You find a good one, you got to take them. It was important to me that she didn’t read anything about Baby Queen until I could put something tactile in her hands. Here’s my book, you’re going to hold it. And when I describe someone beautiful, for my wife to see that it’s me seeing her and the little idiosyncrasies that she does—a hair flick or the way she stands in the kitchen and puts one leg up on her other leg, like she rests like a flamingo—that’s been one of the coolest things. She sees our life in a way nobody else will, because she’s the closest to the source material. She was like, oh, we did that, or this is us, or that’s me. Like in the book when Nat test-drives a kind of car my wife always loved. Somebody who doesn’t know, they feel you just concocted this stuff out of nothing. But there’s all these little homages and love letters to her in the same way there are to my mom or my grandmother. KJ: Do you have a specific process and a finish line goal for your next novel?

TL: Yeah, I really like to outline. I’m not a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type because wherever I am kind of tilted into the autism or the ADHD spectrum; I can go off on a tangent if I don’t have a map.

I have a document like a spreadsheet that breaks it out. I need about ten to fourteen pages in a chapter to make it work, so I extrapolate that number out. In publishing, a debut novelist in the crime space gets 80,000 words. That’s the investment we’re willing to put into you, how much paper you’re worth. And that makes sense to me because it goes back to songwriting.

KJ: Sure, and poetry.

TL: Yeah, a structure I can work inside. It means I can do about thirty-five, forty chapters. It’s mathematic. I like my beginning and my ending to be about the same length, and my middle to be about twice as long. I like tentpoles for something really big to happen in the middle. Then I build that structure, and what’s the coolest way I can get to this point and to that point? Then I cut the strings and they say, I saw a puppet show, but I couldn’t see the strings, right? My outline is kind of zero draft. It’s me telling myself the story as quickly and as rough as possible without writing it. Then when I’m actually writing my first draft, I’m already editing. And you start to learn more about your character and say, oh, she would need to accomplish that same goal within her actual skill set, which requires a different choice. I like to have a first draft in six months, a really messy 70,000 words that I can cut 10 percent of, then build to 80,000 words, and then give to my agent, who can then say no. And then you’re in those edits, where the real writing happens.

KJ: How does writing your second novel differ from your first?

TL: With your first, there’s so much pressure to pick the right idea and execute it right, and that it can get to the market and resonate with people. If you make the wrong choice, it’s not like you wasted time because you’ve done it, and your next novel is going to be better. That should be the reward, right? That I created this piece of art, and if nobody sees it, it’s enough that I created it, and I’m proud of it. But there’s an interesting thing that happens when you give your agent four or five ideas for the second novel, and he helps you decide what the next best step would be. This is something that in our MFA program, I sat down with Mark Haskell Smith, and he was like, okay, the choices you make about where the story goes decide if you sit at this table where it’s more literary crime, or over here where it’s more thriller and commercial, or over here where there’s a horror element, and are you gonna write Silence of the Lambs, or are you gonna try to be Dennis Lehane? I might have a great idea, but my agent might be like, that might be too much, or that’s too close to horror. Let’s stay in our lane for a little while and establish who we are. That was really good advice for me, because hopefully somebody reads Baby Queen and likes it. It’s a lot to ask somebody to give you twenty dollars right now. Hopefully, it makes them happy. And you also want to make them happy the next time. You want to be a guy they can trust with their twenty dollars.

Ty Landers was born and raised in Alabama, spent more than twenty years in Nashville, Tennessee, and lives with his wife and three sons in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, at Palm Desert low-residency program.Betty-Jo Tilley is a Los Angeles–based writer of fiction published in Villain Era Lit, Scavengers Literary Magazine, and Lit Angels. A thirty-eight-year real estate veteran, she is nomadic between Atwater Village, Brooklyn, and other countries since losing her home in the January 2025 Pacific Palisades Wildfires. Her related essays were published in The Keepthings and Opposite of Nihilism. A graduate of UCR’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program, her creative nonfiction has appeared in Eclectica Magazine. The Coachella Review has featured her critical work and author interviews, which she also contributes regularly to Kelp, including of Flynn Berry, Alex Espinoza, Ivy Pochoda, Nicholas Belardes, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Elizabeth Crane, and Gina Frangello. After reading Baby Queen, she’s had a hankering to slip into a pair of short shorts, kick back a Dark and Stormy or two, and see if she could prance around her living room without a pistol falling out of her panties.