All Booked: Local Author Spotlight on Via Bleidner

Via Bleidner’s recently published selection of essays, If You Lived Here You’d Be Famous by Now, chronicles her experience growing up in Calabasas and transferring from a private Catholic school to a public high school. Her essays are funny and heartwarming and can now be found, printed and bound, at any bookstore near you. Bleidner currently lives in Isla Vista and is attending UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, where she studies writing and literature. Below are a few questions she recently answered for the Independent.

First of all, congratulations! It must be so exciting to see your work in published form. Can you tell us a little about how it feels and what it was like?

The entire publication timeline took a little over two years, but I started working on this book and pitching it a whole year before that process even began, back when I was 18. Now that it’s out, I’m relieved — but also, like, so nervous. It’s such a weird feeling. Select parts of the book were plucked from my diary, and now it’s on bookshelves. Sometimes I get anxious thinking about that, but overall, I’m pretty excited. And people have been so nice!