May 2023 | Logan Steiner JD ‘09

by Laura Frustaci

Logan Steiner JD ‘09 is a lawyer by day and a writer by baby bedtime. Her writing explores motherhood and the creative life—two things she once thought could never happily coexist. Logan also writes a Substack newsletter called The Motherhood Question. After graduating from Pomona College and Harvard Law School, Logan clerked for three federal judges, spent six years in Big Law, and served for three years as an Assistant United States Attorney. She now specializes in brief writing at a boutique law firm. Logan lives in Denver with her husband, daughter, and the cranky old man of the house, a Russian Blue cat named Taggart. Her debut novel After Anne will be published by William Morrow on May 30th

Logan Steiner JD ‘09
always knew that she wanted to write. But her journey to becoming a published author wasn’t as direct as some might expect. After getting her undergrad degree in English at Pomona College, Logan attended Harvard Law School. Currently, Logan is a litigator who specializes in brief writing at a boutique law firm. So, where did she get the inspiration (and the time) to write After Anne: A Novel of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Life?

“I wanted to write from a really young age,” Logan explains, “and I love Anne of Green Gables; it was one of the most influential books I read when I was young. The series is near and dear to my heart.” Logan recalls. “I got really good advice from trusted professors...I was debating the English PhD route, and they said that’s a very narrow and very long path, so if there’s something else you’re interested in, try that first. Law was interesting to me, so I went to law school with the aim of writing but not putting pressure on my creative dreams to support me.” Logan feels that this distinction was very beneficial to her creative process. 

From a young age, Logan’s artist mother instilled in her the idea of not relying on art to make a living. Logan’s mom taught her to have something steady to pay the bills. For Logan, this was law. “I continue to appreciate the flexibility of a law career,” Logan begins. “Fast forward several years after graduating from law school, I had clerked for judges and worked at a Big Law firm. I was getting good experience and had great opportunities, but I had lost focus on my creative dreams.” Then, unexpectedly, Logan experienced a tragic family event that she said served as her wakeup call: the death of her younger brother. “Losing my younger brother unexpectedly was such a shock to my system and to my family,” Logan explains. “It woke me up to the fact that life is finite, and I didn’t want to put off doing the thing I had always wanted to do for any longer. I took a six month unpaid leave of absence from my law firm and started researching and writing After Anne.” 

Logan was set on her genre of choice before she even began brainstorming. “I knew I wanted to write historical fiction about the life of a creative person. I’ve always been interested in the story within the story—the story of the person who wrote the books that I love,” Logan says. “I went on a hunt for writers whose work had stuck with me over the years, and Anne of Green Gables was such an early influence for me… I read about Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life and had this immediate response of wanting to tell her story.”

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Lucy Maud Montgomery (who went by Maud), the prolific and talented author of Anne of Green Gables and over 20 other novels, as well as 530 short stories and 500 poems, compelled Logan. “She had an incredible life documented in public journals, and in a wonderful biography written of her, but there was a lot of mystery. Her granddaughter revealed that she committed suicide in 2008, generations after the fact. The fact that Maud committed suicide but wrote such life-affirming characters opened up so many questions for me.” So, Logan got to work exploring these questions. It was a long journey of research and writing. Logan went back to her law job full time and continued writing on the side. Once she had a completed draft, it was another long and winding path to finding an agent and a publisher. “That took time and resilience in the face of rejection,” Logan smiles. “Learning about Maud’s own resilience was helpful to keep myself going.” 

One major challenge of writing historical fiction is drawing the line between sensationalizing and reporting. Logan’s process was to first scour historical research and scholarly literature written about Maud, including the biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio. “One of my goals was to be a complement to, and not compete with, the biographical account, while getting to the emotional realities and undercurrents,” Logan notes. “ A couple of early readers wanted the book to be more sensationalized. I wasn’t willing to do that. I was committed to keeping it authentic. Maud was a complex woman, so it took a lot of drafts to get things right.” 

However, there were several places where the historical record leaves gaps, and where Logan was excited to extrapolate on Maud’s story. “She left a note beside her bed when she died that read like a suicide note, but it  had the page number ‘176’ at the bottom that looked just like the page numbers in Maud’s journal notes,” Logan explains.  “The first 175 pages—which were likely journal notes from the last three years of Maud’s life—have never been found. There are many different things that could have happened to those 175 pages, but I wrote about the one I think is most likely based on what I’ve come to know of Maud: that she burned those pages so there wouldn’t be a detailed record of her last few, painful years.  Maud was fascinated with fire from a young age, and she was committed to editing and curating [her] story. She edited her own journals for eventual publication and had bonfires burning papers at the end of her life. So I imagined my best guess of what happened to those 175 pages into the novel.” Examples like these demonstrate the balance Logan struck between her own creative voice and Maud’s recorded reality.

Another challenge Logan found in writing a novel was stopping her own harsh self-editing. “Drilled into me from school and my legal career is a very loud internal editor,” Logan laughs, “so getting words on the page was the biggest challenge for me sometimes, just writing without editing.” This connects to Logan’s advice for any aspiring future author: keep going. “Really remind yourself why you’re doing it,” Logan states. “Which ultimately, for me, wasn’t about getting published or about other people’s opinions, but about my own experience of writing. There was so much depth to Maud’s story that added to my experience of living my own life—that was a big part of the ‘why’ for me.” Also, be intentional with selecting your agent. “So much of this is luck and happenstance, but who your agent is matters a lot. I saw my agent speak at a conference, and I really connected with her. My connection with her has been one of the most rewarding parts of my author journey. So, being thoughtful about the agent and looking for an agent who understands your work and is a good long term career fit is really important, even if it takes more time to get there.” Logan concludes. 

Although Anne of Green Gables is a book from over a century ago, it endures as a timeless classic and is reimagined and reinvigorated by Logan’s contribution to Lucy Maud Montgomery’s canon. “Anne’s endurance has been about her unfiltered, exuberant spirit: people read about her and remember they have that same freedom,” Logan offers. “Anne’s early dreams were about going beyond what was expected of her as a young girl in a rural town. Reading about her inspires people to break free.” In After Anne, Logan reminds us that the story of a character’s creator can be as interesting and inspiring as the character she creates. 

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