This year's Forsyth Reads Together selection is The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. In this episode, Liz Moore joined Ross to talk about the genesis of the book, how her camp experience as a child informed some of the scenes and settings, and what it's like to showrun a tv show.
Liz Moore will visit the Forsyth Conference Center on March 10 at 7:00 p.m. to discuss The God of the Woods. Please see our website for more information on how to attend.
Introduction:
Hello and welcome to Unreadable, the official Forsyth County Public Library Podcast for news, upcoming programs, and recommendations.
I’m your host, Ross Gericke, the branch manager at Hampton Park.
In this episode I speak with Liz Moore, author of this year’s Forsyth Reads Together selection, God of the Woods. Liz shares some interesting details about the creation of her novel along with a little information about the upcoming Netflix series. Liz will be visiting Forsyth County in person on Tuesday, March 10th from 7:00–9:00 p.m. at the Forsyth Conference Center, so make sure to visit our website to sign up for a reservation. Now on with the show.
Interview:
Ross Gericke: Hello, Liz, and welcome to the podcast.
Liz Moore: Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Ross Gericke: So, your novel God of the Woods begins in 1975 with the disappearance of Barbara Van Larr, a camper attending Camp Emerson in the Adirondack Mountains. It's quickly revealed that her younger brother Bear also disappeared from the same camp in 1961. I thought it was a great way to start the novel because I thought for sure this can't be a coincidence. But was that dual mystery kind of the genesis behind the novel's creation?
Liz Moore: Actually, no. My initial thought was um – All I knew is that Barbara would disappear. And so, the opening of the novel, with the counselor Louise walking out of the partition and into the main area of the camp [and] of the cabin and noticing that Barbara was gone, that's just about all I knew going in. Um, and that's typically how I work. I know kind of the place where a book is set, I know the main characters, and I know the first problem or the inciting incident.
But it really took getting into the history of the Van Larr family for me to understand why they were so mean and why they were so sad. And I thought, well, maybe they – maybe this is not the first child of theirs that has gone missing. Maybe they've experienced an earlier tragedy as well. And so that was the genesis of the dual mystery. But it came to me at least a third into the way, into the writing of the book. Uh, maybe, halfway in.
Ross Gericke: That's actually wild to me. Because I wanted to compliment you on the structure of this book. Um, because it has a ton of characters and it kind of moves back and forth through multiple time periods. But I never felt lost while reading it. And so I thought maybe that was the result of careful planning. But I'm hearing that this may have been a more organic sort of process.
Liz Moore: Definitely organic. Um it might take me less time to write books if I outlined, but I don't. And I think it lets me really learn my characters the way you would learn a person. You know, the way when you meet a person, you get an initial impression of what they look like and what they're wearing and sort of their attitude, their demeanor, but you don't really know why they are the way they are until you talk to them for a long time. And that's kind of how – I guess that's what my writing process is like as well.
I needed to know – I understood right away that Alice Van Larr, for example, the mother of the missing children, was very unlikable at the start and very, um, tough on her daughter and tough on her staff and just not a nice person. But I couldn't understand what had made her so. And it was really in writing more about her story that I came to have a lot more sympathy for her and also to understand a little bit more about, you know, what had happened to both children potentially, without spoiling anything.
Ross Gericke: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with the Alice experience. That's definitely the reader's end of it, too, where I did not care for her very much at the beginning, but uh – and she's still difficult throughout the course of the entire novel, but you're right, you gain a lot more sympathy. You understand where she's coming from better [Liz Moore: You understand, yeah.], by the time you get to the end.
Ross Gericke: Um, but your novel deals with duality a lot. And you have like the division between the wealthy as seen in the Van Larrs and other families that visit Self Reliance, and the working class who are employed by the camp or in the surrounding area. Um, tell us how those divisions matter in the unraveling of the mysteries in your book.
Liz Moore: Yeah, I love a good like upstairs downstairs story. Um, I was actually – as a child I watched the show Upstairs Downstairs with my parents. Um, and I was very into a lot of British literature of the 1700 and 1800s. Big fan of Austin and the Brontes. And anything that takes place in like a big Gothic house is uh my jam. And so I thought it would be fun to sort of write a modern version of that, where the staff knows a lot more than the family thinks they know. And in some cases is used as, you know, scapegoats by the family, or the family tries to, or – you know I love false accusations and real accusations, and you know, it was the duality of – you're right to use the word duality.
I talk about that a lot when I talk about this book, because you have two or three distinct worlds. You have the world of Self Reliance, the mansion or what's called a great camp in Adirondack parlance. And then you have Camp Emerson, the summer camp. And then you have the nearby town of Shattuck, which is a working-class town that provides all the staff for the house and some of the staff for the camp. And the class divisions foster a lot of tension between all three parties. Uh, it kind of functions as a little fiefdom that – with the family really providing a lot of employment for the town. And anytime you have a group of – a population that's dependent on another population, a lot of resentment can occur. And I thought that that would be interesting to play with as well.
Ross Gericke: I thought too the mystery genre, in particular, almost has a duality to it as well, where it's – it's popular fiction, right? But it's also – you bring a lot of literary qualities to it. So even while reading it, I kind of felt like, “Oh on this one side it's like The Great Gatsby, and on this other side, it's like Friday the 13th, because you have the Sluiter character who's kind of in the background, you know. [Liz Moore: Yeah.] Um, so I enjoyed that duality as well, you know, being interested in the literary qualities of the book, but it was also very exciting.
Liz Moore: I love blending genres. I talk a lot – I direct the MFA program in creative writing at Temple University, here in Philadelphia, and many of the students seek it out because they're kind of playing in different genres and they think that's something that they've seen the faculty do and so they're curious about doing it themselves or they're already doing it themselves. And I guess, you know, I started out – my earliest novels were marketed more as like literary fiction and yet each one of them contained within them what I would describe as a mystery. It just wasn't defined by the industry as a mystery. So, one of my books had a mystery of like paternity, and one of my books had a mystery of invented or false identity. Somebody had completely lied about their own identity, and his daughter had to figure out who he really was and why he lied.
But because there was no homicide or disappearance, I think those books weren't thought of as mysteries. And then it was only with a book of mine called Long Bright River where suddenly there was a missing person and some homicides that all of a sudden it was like, "Oh, put a mystery cover on it." And, you know, marketed this way. And I do have to say that that's the book of mine that really broke through. It was my fourth novel, but the first of mine to reach a pretty wide audience. And the same is true for The God of the Woods.
Ross Gericke: I have another publishing question for you. There is this great – this is more practical, I guess, but there's this great like little timeline bar at the top of the chapters of a lot of your books that kind of highlight what time frame it takes place in. Is that like a you decision or is that like a publishing decision? How does that work?
It was super useful, by the way.
Liz Moore: I – thank you. That was a compromise that I came to with my wonderful editor, who gently told me she was having a hard time following all the characters in the timelines. ‘Cause at first no such guide or key existed and I kind of resisted for a little while, but I did not want readers' primary emotion to be one of confusion as they read. And so, I was the one who came up with the idea of a kind of timeline with the date in bold, where we were, to give readers a sense of where we had come from and where we were going as well. So that when we skipped in time we could see, “Oh, we are now in 1961,” but the book continues all the way up to 1975. But it was at Sarah's urging that I come up with some consideration that would help the reader along.
Ross Gericke: Well, it worked.
So, I grew up a Boy Scout and attended a lot of camps and summer camps, so I enjoyed that aspect of the book on a personal level. But, do you have like a summer camp in your past that served as an inspiration?
Liz Moore: Yes, I went to an Adirondack summer camp for two summers. I've never fact checked myself on this, but I believe I was 11 and 13 or maybe 10 and 12. So, I went one summer, skipped the next one another. And so, anyway, I was right around the time that the girls were – the age that the girls were in the book. And I was much like Tracy in the sense that I arrived late and never really found my place in the group, because most of the campers had been going since they were eight or so. So it was not a wonderful experience for me to go to camp, and the camp was much different than Camp Emerson. I went to a YMCA camp that was, you know, for people of all incomes, not for the children of the wealthy. But what it did have in common is a further adventure into the wilderness for three days.
We went – in my case, we canoed out to an island and camped on the island. And so that was inspired pretty directly by – the survival trip in the book was inspired pretty directly by my experience at camp. Although we did not have any – you know, our counselors were there with us. They weren't off in the woods someplace pretending not to be there, as happens in the book.
Ross Gericke: Well, that's interesting. Yeah, because that was definitely a source of some tension in the book, that whole – the survival and the counselors leaving and all that. I'm glad you didn't get abandoned out in the woods as a kid. Uh, so I think that the title of the book, The God of the Woods, is an interesting choice, and you do directly reference it in the book. But I wanted to hear your thoughts. Why did you choose God of the Woods as the title?
Liz Moore: So the book was originally titled Self Reliance for a very long time. I got obsessed with Ralph Waldo Emerson. The transcendentalists play a role in the book. Obviously, there's a whole monologue that one character gives about how Thoreau in Walden was just kind of like playing at being poor, and he wasn't a real poor person, and therefore, he didn't have the real experience of being poor.
And then there's a whole other through line about how the family, the Van Larrs see themselves as very self-reliant, identify strongly with the transcendentalists, but they do that almost in a libertarian way of saying like every man for himself, don't help your neighbor, you know, it's not your job. We are wealthy because we deserve to be wealthy and we have built this empire through our labor. The tricky thing about that is that the community – to the community it's kind of like a laugh line, because the house itself, this mansion that they named Self Reliance, was built by the local community and the local community are the ones who farm the land and staff the house and cook for the family, and in every way the family is actually infant-like almost, infantile. They can't take care of themselves in any way. Everything is staged for them by working people.
And so I loved self-reliance as a theme in the book, and what is true self-reliance and what is sort of feigned self-reliance. But my editor, again, my wonderful editor Sarah, came to me and gently broke the news that nobody in the publishing house liked the title Self Reliance because they worried that it would just sound like a self-help book. Um, which is fair. And so they sent me back to the drawing board again, and I spent many weeks trying to figure out a title that I liked as much or better than Self Reliance.
When I'm looking for a title, I do a lot of research into contemporary texts and classical texts and poems. That's how I found the title I as well. It's from a Tennyson poem called, “The Lotus Eaters.” And in this case, I got very interested in the etymology of the word wood panic, which is a real phenomenon that occurs when a person is lost in the woods and all the trees start to look alike, and they become very disoriented and can often make really bad decisions. And I looked more closely at the word panic within that and and realized for the first time that panic is derived from the Greek god Pan, who is a god of the woods who's said to like tricking people, disorienting people, um, sort of playing games with or on people when they're in the woods.
And so then I started thinking about that phrase, god of the woods or the god of the woods, and realized it could apply across many axes to many of the characters in the book. I think it applies to the Van Larrs who perceive themselves kind of falsely as being gods of their domain. It applies to this, we haven't even talked about this, this serial killer who's kind of wandering around loose in the background, who to me functions more like a force of nature than a human man. He's sort of like a catastrophe waiting to happen or maybe it has happened already. He's sort of a god of the woods. And then I think there's a couple of other characters who are the real gods of the woods, but I don't want to say who I think they are because I think that would spoil things.
But um yeah, so I like a title that has multiple meanings in the context of a book. And I think that fits the bill.
Ross Gericke: Yeah, I liked it, because at first when I saw the title, I thought it implied – you know, God implies some sort of plan. So, you have these two missing children. You're like, ah, this is not a coincidence. These things are directly related. But then you bring up the idea of panic, and panic is the opposite of a plan, you know. So, it has that duality, too, where you're like, well, how are these things all connected together? Is there a master plan behind it or is it just sort of, you know, people panicking? Um, so I thought it was a cool title.
Liz Moore: Yeah, thank you so much.
Ross Gericke: And I hear that there is a Netflix show in the works. Is there anything that you can talk to us about that?
Liz Moore: Yeah, I'm actively working on it right now. I'm a co-showrunner with my partner Liz Hannah, who is the other creative – the co-showrunner on the show. It's the first time I've had the experience of showrunning. For those who are not super familiar with the TV industry, it sort of means that you are the headwriter and the liaison between set, like production, and the writing room. So you're on set pretty much the whole time traditionally and overseeing a lot of different things. I did work on Long Bright River, which was a series that aired on Peacock, and it was an adaptation of one of my books. I was a writer on that show but I was not the showrunner. So I gained a lot of experience on that show, and this is my first time, more in the driver's seat. And it's really really interesting as a process. I'm still learning a lot. I love the writers in the room. They're all brilliant and it's much more fun actually to collaborate with other writers than it is to write solo.
Uh, writing a novel solo exercises a particular part of my brain that I would never give up because I think fundamentally I identify as a writer of fiction more than a TV writer. But I do have to say it's just much more social. It's much more collegial when you're in a room full of other people's brains and we're all working together on a problem. So that's been very nice. But yeah, it should come out on Netflix. We don't have a release date yet, but look for it.
Ross Gericke: Well, I'm excited about it. I'll definitely check it out when it comes out.
Liz Moore: Thank you.
Ross Gericke: Liz, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Liz Moore: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure, and I'll see everyone soon.
Outro:
Thank you for listening to the March 2026 episode of Unreadable.
Please subscribe to our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Contact the podcast directly with any comments by email at Unreadable@ForsythPL.org
Keep up with all the excitement happening each month on our interactive calendar available on our website, www.ForsythPL.org. You can also stay connected with the library through Facebook and Instagram @FoCoLibrary.
Our theme music is “Open Those Bright Eyes” composed by Kevin MacLeod. This and other compositions by Kevin MacLeod are available at Incompetech.com.
I’m Ross Gericke, and this podcast has been Unreadable.
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