SLA Buff: Shana Youngdahl

The Saint Louis Author (SLA) Buff blog highlights the unique and surprising work of authors who live and write in Mound City.

St. Louisan Shana Youngdahl's 2025 second novel, A Catalog of Burnt Objects, appeared in bookstores this past Spring and earlier this week made the St. Louis Magazine A-List Editors’ Choice Award for new fiction. This thoughtful and bracing YA family saga juxtaposes the challenges of family for young people and the 2018 wildfire disaster that faced and still faces the town of Paradise, California. I spoke with Shana about what brought her to town and how she finds it as a place to live and work.

Shana Youngdahl, YA author and 2025 St. Louis Magazine A-List Editors’ Choice Award winner

I consider you to be a St. Louis writer, but I'm guessing you spend most of your time in St. Charles. Do you consider yourself a St. Louis writer?

My realtor told me that everyone calls the entire metro "St. Louis," maybe she was wrong? I know there are differences, but I don't feel a particular affinity for being from St. Charles. So I will say yes, I do. I have moved enough that being "from," any one place is rather complicated for me. My hometown is still the most formative place I have lived, and I still have very strong ties to Maine where I spent a decade. But to get back to the point I wouldn't have even applied to my job if it weren't in the Saint Louis metro so I hope the St. Louis writers will claim me.

What brought you to St. Louis and how do you find the area as a place to work, write, live?

I moved to St. Louis from Maine with my family in 2021 to take a job in the MFA program at Lindenwood University in St. Charles. A bookseller friend of mine in Maine suggested I look up Main Street Books in Historic St. Charles when I got here, which I did. He knows the owner, Emily Hall Schroen, and when I went into the store for the first time and introduced myself as the new writing professor, she said, "Kenny told me to watch out for you." This greeting immediately put me at ease and made me feel welcome. A writing colleague also sent introductory emails on my behalf to introduce me to the writing community at large. It's been an easy community to come into. The people are very friendly.  I am thankful for all of the writing networks here.

I love the sense of place created in A Catalog of Burnt Objects in the opening paragraphs. As the reader finds out, the fictional town of Sierra is central to the novel, a main character--what techniques do you use to write to about place to bring the reader there?

If you look at Sierra on a map, you'll see it's shaped like an obtuse scaling triangle. You won't see all the backyard bee keepers, grow operations and do it yourself houses. Flatten our town out like that, and it will look ordered, contained. But Siera is part of a wild, that rolls down off the mountains, that reaches between the houses, cabins, trailers, a wild that creeps out in the shape of foxes, deer and mountain lions. Wild is still there prowling.  (Shana Youngdahl, A Catalog of Burnt Objects, Dial Books, 2025)

Two things make that happen. First, it's based on my home town, the place I have lived longer than anywhere else. It contains the landscape of my dreams, of my childhood. I still did a ton of research--names of the plants, details related to the fire, what type of trees exploded. What birds live there? What are the flowers, and when do they bloom? Then, thinking about the town as a character, in what ways, even though Sierra is based on Paradise, it is not really Paradise. It's a fictional town, so I could make changes to the fictional town so the story worked better. I looked at how Sierra the character was impacted by the story and what it's narrative arc should consist of.

I love Caprice's app project and the references to writing computer code with the words "If" and "Then" in the narrative and how she uses it as a technique to manage the trauma of the fire itself. How do you stay current on what young adults do--like coding-- to create a narrative that will engage them?

Good question. On one hand, until moving to St. Louis, I was spending most of my time teaching 18 year olds. On the other, my oldest kid turned 13 when I moved here. I have teenagers around me all the time and I have for a years. Also I don't think it matters that much if the reader is into coding, as long as I have effectively sold that this character is into it. I got a Masters in Educational Technology and have been involved with teaching girls how to code and as a parent advisor. That work ended up being part of my research for Caprice's app. I hope that reader's believe she's into it. She's such a planner, and for someone who plans things it's especially hard to face the uncertainty caused by the wildfire.

Novelists have to create disasters--it's required for people to want to read it. I read that you chose to rename Paradise to Sierra to provide yourself with some emotional space from the very real Paradise tragedy and to avoid making the story a historical reference to it. What other strategies do you use to write fiction when the disaster was real and affected you deeply?

There are a couple of layers to this. As a novelist, you are making a decision that you're writing fiction. The minute you decide to write fiction, you have decided that the story you need to tell will be told more authentically through emotional rather than literal truth. When operating from the emotional truth, the core is the emotional experience. From that you can derive infinite plot lines, images, stories, arcs. It just becomes a matter of how you're going to take that emotional story and craft it into the world. How one does that isn't easy. I struggled with the project because it was so personal, also since I wasn't physically in Paradise, I really wanted to get it right. Many friends who I loved were there, and it mattered to me that I honored them. That helped hold me to a standard.

One small is example is daffodils, they have become a symbol of Paradise and their return is mentioned in the book. Daffodils live deep enough under the ground to survive the fire and return the following Spring. This is symbolic of how in spite of the tragedy, they were waiting underground and would bloom again. I wanted to address the important challenge that, as people, we need to be thinking as scientists are about reforesting, and looking to find acorns from already dryer regions, genetic predispositions of certain plants to survive dryer, hotter temperatures. I hope that the story will introduce ideas about how to address the problems we're facing with climate change. 

I’m a fan of your substack “Their Will Be Typos.” Great title! Where did it come from?

I’m sure the title makes some people laugh and others want to claw their eyes out. It started because I was afraid to write a newsletter in part because I knew it would have typos! This was me battling the perfectionism monster again, and I realized that I should probably face it the same way I faced making spelling errors on the board in my classroom, and that is I made it a game. I learned that when I admitted to my students that I was a very talented poor speller, but that I had learned to use dictionaries and spell check, that students related to me more, so I told them if they caught a spelling error they would win a prize. So, with my newsletter the first person to catch a typo also gets a prize. The prize varies each month, sometimes it is a postcard, sometimes a book. Maybe I'll give out flower seeds or something in the spring. It really depends.

As I was starting the project I realized that the title would also give me a theme for the newsletter--that is in order to live a creative life you have to embrace the process and the mess of it. That isn't easy. So, the title was a way for me to go out on a limb and have a theme. Since my newsletter started out as a project that I did alongside my students in one of my Lindenwood classes, it made sense that this would be the focus. [Blogger note: subscribe to There Will be Typos substack and newsletter.]

In your substack you mention a London Fog coffee drink. Where do you go in St. Louis/St. Charles to write and drink fancy coffee? 

We have some wonderful cafes! I love Pipers Tea & Coffee, Upshot, Kaldi's, and Picassos. Protagonist Cafe is great, but I don't get out there too often and I'm excited to try Antagonist Cafe soon. 

How does teaching writing impact your own writing?

If I'm teaching writing, I have to be actively writing or else I'm not a good teacher. I have to be a regular practitioner so I can be accountable. Writing is being in conversation with yourself. Teaching writing helps people to be in conversation with themselves.