Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast. Moms don't have time to read books. And speaking of books, I have two of my own books coming out this spring and summer. Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19th. And Bookends, a memoir of love, loss, and literature comes out on July 1st, and it is truly a labor of love. I hope you'll pre-order, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country.

You can find out more at zibbyowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com.

And you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens because I always post about everything. Enjoy the show.

Christy Matheson is the author of Shelter. She's also the author of five award-winning picture books,

including Tap the Magic Tree and Plant the Tiny Seed. This is her first novel. Christy lives in

San Francisco with her family. Welcome, Christy.

Thanks for coming on moms. Don't have time to read books to discuss shelter and all of your other

amazing work. Thank you so much for having me. I am so happy to be here, Zibi. This is such a treat. Thank you.

Oh, well, Elisa Stras, of course, told me about you. I have had her on this podcast about her cookbooks, which you wrote and helped her with and did everything, the confetti cakes. Tell me first about that, and then I want to go into your middle grade. And I know you've done so much other stuff. Yeah. So that's right. I love that we both know Elisa. It's so much fun. She's just, you know, happiness and joy,

personified, basically. So, yeah, we first met, Elisa and I first met in 2004. And she needed a writer

to work on her cookbook. And at the time, I was living in Boston. And I was a writer for Boston Magazine, and I did a lot of food writing.

And so my literary agent, my new then literary agent said, I have this person who has this

amazing cake business. And I said, yes, yes. She was thinking about doing a book. And I went to New York.

I had to be in New York for something else, and we met. And I just fell in love with her. And we made two cake cookbooks, confetti cakes and confetti cakes for kids. Yay. And they're so great, too. I mean, we have them like right in our kitchen down low. So the kids pull them off. And like we sit and, you know you know go through them often so my kids do the same

thing and they always say did you make this can you make this again and i said no that i wrote it

i did not make it yeah they're like let's try this fun i'm like no i don't think we're not going to try

that but let's look at the picture again yeah exactly let's talk about shelter i This is so good. This book was so good. I'm like,

I can't believe I'm sitting here, like, on my weekend reading a full-on, like, middle grade book and

loving every second. But it's so good. And it also, it like really put me in the frame of mind of what it's

like to be in a homeless shelter, to have such

food instability, to be, you know, maybe I shouldn't jump in. Why don't you tell everybody what

what shelter is about? And especially how you decided to structure it over the course of a day,

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