Author Talk: Clare Beams

The Writing of The Garden

Author Clare Beams will share what it was like to write her new novel, The Garden, a book about pregnancy as a haunted house. The Garden, named a most-anticipated book of the year by LA Times and Lit Hub, is set at an isolated late 1940s country-house-turned-hospital where a husband-and-wife doctor team is experimenting with a cure for repeated miscarriage—and where Irene Willard, their most difficult patient, discovers a walled garden with mysterious powers and tries to harness those powers for herself. Clare will discuss the first seeds of inspiration for the book, the drafting process, and the stages of editing and revision.

Clare Beams is the author of the novel The Illness Lesson, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, MacDowell, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Randolph College MFA program.