LDK S5 E8 - Writing Through Grief with Mary Schlegel
Release Date: 10/01/2025
Mary Schlegel grew up in the American Midwest, spending as much time outdoors as indoors, acting out imaginary adventures with her dog and horse, fancying herself a Medieval princess, and devouring literary fiction. She is now a full-time mom, homemaker, author, and artist. She writes fantasy and science fiction that are heavily inspired by her love of nature, science, and history, and her style is influenced by the literary fiction she loves to this day.
Mary is an unashamed tea fanatic, and was formerly a professional tea taster and brewer. She also has an unusual superpower for finding four-leafed clovers everywhere she goes, including foreign countries. She considers free-climbing a two-hundred-foot cliff on the coast of Northern Ireland, and working on a dinosaur excavation in Colorado to be among her more remarkable accomplishments. She, her husband, and their children live in a quiet village in the south of Ireland, where she enjoys working in their orchard and hunting for sea glass on the beach.
We talk about Mary's project for her Princess & the Pea retelling. We go down a rabbit trail about tea right off the bat. But we get back on track and have a lengthy discussion about skinwalkers and how they figure into her current project.
We also discuss losing her husband, Aaron Schlegel, in 2022, and everything that happened in its aftermath. Aaron was also an author, and we discuss the various aspects of dealing with another author's body of work after their death.
Mary spills the tea about her remarriage and the lengths her church went to put her and her second husband together, and moving to Ireland earlier this year.
Be sure to check Mary out on Substack!
Substack.com/@MarySchlegelAuthor
The Victorian City by Judith Flanders