Zibby Owens: Forging Community Through a Shared Love of Literature

Zibby Owens’s robust community of mothers and readers, united by a myriad of creative media centering around their shared passions and struggles, all started with a Google search for the best app for recording podcasts in her bedroom. Since the inception of her literary podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time To Read Books” in 2018, the ambitious, New York-dwelling mother of four has assumed the titles of podcast host, author, publisher, and CEO. From her podcast episodes to her curated essay anthologies, Owens has created spaces for her listeners and readers to find each other and connect over their shared experiences of readership and motherhood. 

Owens launched her inaugural podcast, “Moms Don’t Have Time To Read Books,” in April 2018. In each episode, Owens interviews an author and has interviewed over 2,500 authors, including celebrities, politicians, chefs, athletes, business leaders, physicians, poets, novelists, memoirists, and New York Times bestselling authors and debut authors alike. The podcast has garnered Owens industry prestige, earning her the distinction of “New York’s Most Powerful Book-fluencer” according to Vulture

The podcast, along with Owens’s background as an essayist with dozens of publications in Seventeen, Good Morning America, Huffington Post, Medium, and more, led Owens to compile and edit an anthology of essays written by over 60 podcast contributors in 2021. The anthology is titled “Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology” and features essays inspired by activities moms don’t have time to do, such as eat, breathe, work out, read, and have sex. Owens went on to compile and edit a second anthology along the same vein entitled “Mom’s Don’t Have Time To Have Kids.” In 2021, Owens also launched a new podcast with Tracey Cox entitled “SexTok with Zibby and Tracey,” which features conversations surrounding relationships and sexuality. She also hosted a podcast entitled “Moms Don’t Have Time To Lose Weight for a year.”

In 2022, Owens launched ZCast, a company to help creators launch their own podcasts and gain traction, and Zibby Books, her very own publishing company. This year, Owens also ventured into the world of children’s fiction writing, publishing the picture book “Princess Charming” that follows a resilient young female character in search of her talent.

Owens’s memoir, “Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature” is set to be released on July 1. The memoir chronicles her experiences with losing loved ones, falling in love, rediscovering her voice, and finding solace in books. Owens will be holding signings this summer throughout the Hamptons. Her signings will take place at the Sag Harbor Books on Wednesday, July 6, Children’s Museum of the East End on Tuesday, July 13, Bridgehampton Library on Friday, August 12, and Authors’ Night for the East Hampton Public Library on Saturday, August 13. 

We caught up with Owens to discuss the origin of her brand, her multitude of inspired projects, and the distinct experience of being a mom creator. 

The brand you’ve built around being a mom and a reader all started with your podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time To Read Books.” Why did you choose the medium of a podcast over a blog or a social media account to launch your brand?

It was actually the advice of a new friend of mine at the time, Sarah Mlynowski, who’s a bestselling middle grade author. We had kids at the same school back then. I had spoken in a school assembly about how I had found my voice as a writer to try to encourage students who were shy, like I had been, to start writing. I made a joke in my speech about how I didn’t have an agent so if anyone knew one… (laughs). So after the assembly, Sarah came up to me and said, “you do have an agent, right?” and I said, “well, actually, not right now.” And Sarah said, “we need to talk.” We got coffee the next week and I pitched her this idea I had about a book called “Moms Don’t Have Time To Read Books,” a collection of parenting essays. She said “no, I don’t think that’s a good idea, but let me think about what you should do.” [Two days later,] I was leaving school while Sarah was walking in and she called out to me over the crowd, “you should start a podcast!” I was like, “a WHAT? What’s a podcast?” I went home that morning and tried to find the podcast [app] on my phone to even start researching podcasts since I had literally never listened to one. I was like, okay, I guess I can use the title “Moms Don’t Have Time To Read Books”and [make] it a podcast. I Googled “easiest podcast recording app on your phone” because I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing! And that’s how I did it. 

Even before your podcast, you wrote and published essays. What drew you to writing in this particular medium?

[I’ve been writing essays] my entire life. My first published essay came out when I was 16-years-old, which I had written when I was 14. It was in Seventeen Magazine and it was about gaining weight after my parents had gotten divorced and the impact I felt it had on how people treated me with an extra 20 pounds on me. It’s just a form that is second nature to me. It doesn’t take a lot of time or work. I have this essay that is coming out soon and it’s about these napkin holders that my mother always used for summer dinner parties when I was a little kid and now here I am a mom… and I read it out loud to my brother and he was like, “wow, how long did that take you?” And I was like, “I don’t know, like, an hour?” And he was like, “WHAT? That seems like it would have taken a long time.” For me, I sort of think in essay form, so personal essays have just always been a very easy medium for me. 

How was the idea for your picture book, “Princess Charming,” born?

It was inspired by my own daughter, who had a hard time finding the thing that she’s best at but is the most persistent girl ever, and that is going to take her farther than the people to which things come more easily. One day I told her, “you don’t need to find your thing. Your thing is you don’t give up. You just keep trying harder.” That ended up becoming this children’s book. An author from my podcast was friends with the editor of a new press starting called Flamingo, an [imprint] of Penguin Random House, and she asked me if I would consider writing a book because her friend was looking for great writers and I was like, “yes!” So we had lunch and the editor, Margaret, showed me a picture of an illustrated girl and said, “well, if her name was Princess Charming, what would the book be about?” I said, “sure, I’ll take a stab at it,” and a few minutes later I was like “okay, here’s what I would do” and Margaret loved it. On my way to pick up the kids later that day I thought of the ending and it became the book.

Photo by Catherine Talese

You now run Zibby Owens Media, encompassing your podcasts, books, and even your own publishing company, Zibby Books, that will publish a book a month starting January 2023. Can you tell me about how this idea was born and what voices/types of books you will be publishing?  

We will be publishing all women and lots of diverse voices. We’re trying to have a lot of different viewpoints across gender, sexuality, race, religion. But what they all have in common is that they’re fabulous writers with a strong sense of voice and a strong sense of place in their stories. [We’ll be publishing] fiction and memoir. I did not have any dreams ever of running a publishing company, and, by the way, it is really hard! But after so much time had gone by, after interviewing author after author after author, there were so many similar thoughts about the publishing industry today and what the issues really were on the author side of things. I had become friends with authors and I started publishing my own books. I had two anthologies come out, and at that point, my children’s book and my memoir were already in contract so I had been working with multiple houses myself and I just was like, who is going to come in and fix these problems? I don’t see how this is all going to be resolved. I was finally like, could I be the one to fix this? Could I fixing it and doing it a different way? Those conversations in my head went on for about a year and I had one false start where I almost tried it as an imprint under another publisher but then I realized that wouldn’t be good enough, I wouldn’t be able to start from scratch. I just reached a point last summer where I was like, you know what, I have to do this, because there are all these authors with great stories but maybe not enough of a platform and there are these amazing authors who aren’t getting enough attention in their houses or they aren’t at the center of everything. I know exactly how I would want it to be done for me and so I wanted to create that for other people. And that’s what I did. It’s really neat to be on the other side of things. When we reject a book, it doesn’t mean the writer is a bad writer, it just means it’s not for us, but as a writer, when I’ve been rejected, it goes deep into my soul, so it’s really taught me a lot and I love to learn. It’s been a huge, huge challenge, one that I am attacking with gusto.

An essential part of your brand is community, as your creative output has brought together moms and book lovers who share passions along with struggles. Can you speak about the significance of having a community as a mom and your favorite aspects of the community space you’ve created?

I love the community space I‘ve created! We’ve been doing a few more in-person events lately and it’s just beyond exciting to see people who I’ve only known on Zoom for two years in the flesh and I can hug them. It’s really been wonderful. The thing about having a community of book loving women is it immediately gives a common ground to all discussions. There’s a common sensibility for people who love spending hours and hours in someone else’s mind and in what fiction and memoir and all books give us. This [community] is not a precious literary crowd, it’s book lovers across the board who love great writing and want to be a part of something within their lives. As for the mom part, I have four kids and you don’t always necessarily find your people where you live. I think there’s this notion that I’d heard so many times as a mom-to-be: wait until your kids go to school, you’re going to meet your best friends for life. That doesn’t always happen. I really love a lot of the moms [of my kids’ peers] but what we have in common is our kids, we don’t necessarily have much in common as people. A lot of your identity as a thinking, working person gets put on the back-burner when all you’re talking about is play dates and pick ups and drop offs, but those other parts of us are huge parts of us. I wanted to celebrate those parts too and remind moms that being a mom is a piece of who you are, a piece that is super important, but it’s not the full picture. The thinking, breathing, analyzing, feeling part of you is just as important. The community I’ve created is not just moms of young kids, it includes slightly older moms, grandmothers, moms who are empty nesters, moms of teenagers, moms of kids of all ages, and also people who are not moms and just love to read. I like to unite people by connecting through stories and I think books connect us to each other more than anything else. 

Your community endured during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were physically disconnected from each other and connection seemed more important than ever. Can you tell me about the daily and weekly Instagram Lives you held during the pandemic for your community?

I have a lot of people who email me often and say that those Instagram Lives are what got them through when there was no structure to our days and the world was so uncertain. When the pandemic hit and we relocated outside of New York City to Water Mill for months, I was outside literally on the trampoline with my kids and I was like, I have to do something for the authors. And I was like, you know what, I’ll just start this Instagram Live show, I’ll start it tomorrow. I literally started it the next day because I had such a tiny team and I could pivot quickly. Unlike the podcast, where I spend a lot of time with curation, with the [Instagram Lives] I was like, “if you have a book coming out and you want to come on, tell me. I’ll give you the time and space.” So that’s what happened. I just did four to five interviews each day at 11 AM and I had this huge following of people. I [also] started a virtual book club. It used to be once a week, then it went to every other week, now it’s once a month. I have over 2,500 members of the book club. It gives people a space and a community to fall back on. 

You’ve written a memoir called “Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature” which is being released in early July. Can you tell me what we can expect from this memoir and what made you decide to write it?

I started writing this memoir in 2004. I had lost my best friend and college roommate, Stacy, on 9/11. She worked in one of the towers and after the attacks we never saw or heard from her again. She left no trace. This is someone I had lived with intimately in tiny dorm rooms at school and knew better than basically anyone in the world and she just vanished. It changed my life and quickly woke me up to the fact that the same thing could happen to me at any moment. Over the course of the next year while at business school, four other people who were close to me [passed away,] so I decided to take a year off after school and write a book because I just had to tell the story of what happened with Stacy. I just had to process it through writing about it over and over again, which I have continued to do. So my first attempt at it was then, but it was in a totally different time in my life and I ended up only trying to sell it as fiction because I didn’t feel comfortable writing a memoir and having it out in the world. The book didn’t sell, probably because it wasn’t that good but also people at the time said that it was too soon for fiction about 9/11. Then my life went along, I got married, I had four kids, I got divorced, and then after my divorce, I ended up having a lot more time when my kids would go to my ex’s house to both read and write and I went back to this idea. I talked to this one agent and I said “well, you know, what I really want to do is write a memoir about falling in love again at 40 called ‘40 Love’…my husband is a former tennis pro.” So I wrote that and then, again, I was like, this is too personal. I wrote it over again as fiction with a totally different set of characters and I tried to sell that right before the pandemic happened, but then I realized that also wasn’t right and I did want to tell my own story. I came up with this idea of using all the books in my life to tell my story. That proposal sold and I wrote the book. Essentially, it’s a deeply personal look at the unexpected plot twists of my own life. It involves a lot of loss and falling in love again and ultimately it is the journey to rediscovering my own voices in my 40s. 

Since launching and developing your brand and connecting with a myriad of moms and creators, what, if anything, have you yourself learned about being a mom? About being a creator? About being a hybrid of the two?

I’ve learned that there’s nothing I feel that is completely unique, in a good way. If I’m really struggling on an evening or an afternoon where one of my kids refuses to take a shower and I have to draw on every psychological tool in my tool box to try to make that happen, it makes me feel better knowing that this is happening to so many other people, the good and the bad. We’re all going through this craziness at the same time in this parenting journey and that takes some pressure off me to do things perfectly. It has helped me be more forgiving of myself. Not every day is perfect, it can’t be. Now I put less pressure on myself and, as a result, end up having a lot more fun with my kids. I’m much more present. [As for being a mom creator,] I think that I’ve learned that juggling is a misnomer. It is not a juggle, it’s more like a game of whack-a-mole, where things keep popping up and you have to deal with them and then you go on to the next thing quickly. You have to be able to shift gears really quickly, be very focused with how you’re spending your time, and do the best you can, especially when the kids are out of the house. It’s a challenge but it’s important. I think our kids really need to see us being role models like this. My kids see that I’m pulling this off: working from home, being with them, running into my office and doing a podcast, then coming back out and hanging out with them. And I think having something for myself as a mom is one of the best things I can do for the kids. I think hanging on to who you are at a time where everything else in the world seems up in the air is one of the only things you can do to maintain sanity… aside, of course, from reading. 

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