Photos and interview by Stacie Joy
Maureen Johnson has lived in the East Village since 2009, long enough to notice the neighborhood rhythms that can be easy to overlook — the smell of pizza on a cold day, bodega cats, disappearing businesses and, lately, an abundance of vintage shops.
Those details turn up in "The Velvet Knife," the bestselling young adult author's latest Stevie Bell mystery, out today.
Parts of the book are set in the East Village and even include Boris & Horton on Avenue A — where Johnson worked on edits and adopted her dog, Dexy.
We recently met Johnson at Boris & Horton — at the same table where she adopted Dexy — to talk about writing her own neighborhood, cults, dogs and the state of reading in the age of screens.
How does living in the East Village shape the specific sights, smells and spots that made it into "The Velvet Knife"?
I’ve only written about New York twice before, and this is, I think, my 20th book.
Usually I research a place, go around, and come in as an outsider. As an outsider, you notice the smells, the feel, the weather, the patterns. But this is writing about a place I'm very familiar with.
And you risk not registering the things around you: the permeating smell of garbage in the summer. The fact that there will be a certain number of rats. The fact that every time you turn a corner, you'll be like, 'Oh, that business wasn't there two days ago. Oh, look, we have three new vintage shops. Oh look, that's a new coffee place. Or, that place shut down. That's something new.' Or just people, and activities. The barber shop down the street has Frenchie puppies lining the doorway. The fact that the bodegas have cats, the weed stores have cats. And they love to sleep on the warm counters.
The smell of pizza! Especially on a cold winter's day. If I ever made a scented candle, it would smell like a New York pizzeria on a cold winter's day. It's the best smell that has ever existed. And it's intoxicating. It's magical. And it's very specific. And I think it needs to be cold for the smell to filter correctly.
Given that you adopted Dexy at Boris & Horton, right here at this specific table, and edited the book here, how naturally did the cafe and its dogs work their way into the narrative?
I don't usually include real places, but that's not entirely true. I sometimes include real places when I visit them. But I wouldn't have thought, when I started this, that I would include real places. But I'm such a dog person that it felt natural to maybe tell people there was a place you could go to hang out with your dog.
And especially with the times being what they are and everybody feeling kind of rough, you come here and a dog comes up to you, and they just have a way of reminding you and helping you regulate.
Like, 'Hey, I'm here! Let's go play. Let's just be together.' And that's a very good energy in this place. When it closed down temporarily, I was so sad. And then it came back alive, and I was so happy for it.
Have you always edited in public?
I usually work out of my home office. I was part of a group of writers that used to meet every single day at a cafe and work. It was John Green, Emily Jenkins (who writes under the name E. Lockhart), and me.
John Green also started one of the most famous YouTube channels of all time. He brought in his camera one day. He's like, 'I'm going to start making these videos every day.' And I was thinking, 'OK. Seems dumb, but OK.' But he's a really famous guy now. He did "The Fault in Our Stars."
We would just meet every day at work. And then there was a bigger group of us. We used to meet at Dean & DeLuca. We met at wichcraft. We met kind of all over the place. But we did it for a long time. I'm one of the few still in New York permanently. Some people move to Los Angeles, but I'm still here.
How do you tune out the people and the dogs to focus?
I don't tune out dogs. Ever. I've never tuned out a dog in my life. Headphones, though…
What drew you to cult dynamics and high-charisma figures as the engine to this mystery?
I worked on the bigger arc of all these mysteries in advance. I'm very planned with them. But partly because when I was young, there were a lot of things on the news and in after-school specials about cults. The impression you got was that one was gonna get you, because there were so many.
I think a lot of people are interested for one core reason: You want to know why. Why would people who seem like they're quote-unquote normal and fine get involved with something where you follow this little dirty dweeb who tells you that you're going to live in a hole in the desert and you have to commit a bunch of murders?
How does that happen? How do you get involved with that little thumb of a man, Keith Raniere, and then suddenly he's controlling your life and starving you to death and branding you? He claimed to be the smartest man in the world and ran business seminars out of Holiday Inns. How does that happen?
The conditioning involved, that’s pretty standard. But cults, and I know it's a debated term, these high-control groups that have a charismatic leader, the steps are pretty well known. They always start with love, and there's a lot of rhetorical conditioning.
And right now, if there was ever a time to think about rhetorical conditioning and conditioning a large group of people to do and believe things that make no sense… If you want to look back at Jim Jones, sitting in self-imposed exile in Guyana, in Jonestown, popping speed and ranting into a microphone all day about how everyone has to obey him, how people are betraying him, how he's paranoid, and then annihilating everything when it all goes wrong.
If that's not something to think about right now, then I don't know what it is.
Young adult readers are constantly pulled toward screens. What do you think that "The Velvet Knife" offers them that a phone screen can't?
I don't necessarily think that they are. Young adult readers do a lot of reading on a screen, to be fair. One of the best, the New York Public Library, uses Libby. And Libby is really good on an iPhone, or any kind of phone screen.
I do commit the sin of reading on my phone a lot because Libby runs well on it. But it's a two-fold thing. A lot of people say, "Oh, reading's going down in some places, but certainly not in others."
The reading community is strong for many young people who are doing screen-free time on their own, trying to detox, or are really committed to reading on their own.
And now we have this new book bar literally on the corner over here? The first day I walked into Rabbit Books and Bar, it was full of people in the book community and writers, and there are silent reading groups that hundreds of people turn up to just to be together and read in silence.
The reading community is strong. If anything, they're getting stronger and louder.
Also, I am one of the New York leads on Authors Against Book Bans. And we're working to get freedom-to-read legislation passed here in New York. It is actually something to be aware of. The act is sitting on Gov. Hochul's desk unsigned. She could sign it at any time, and we would have basic freedom-to-read provisions in New York, because we don't have them now. It passed the Assembly and the Senate, and it is only waiting for her signature. It's pretty non-controversial stuff, but she hasn't signed it yet.
Anyway, I've been doing a lot of Zoom and remote interviews all week. So doing one in person near home, at my favorite place, isn't a hardship!
