Jeannie Chin is the author of the small town romance, Blue Cedar Falls, delivering a diverse small town romance readers can feel at home in. She generously shared her time to discuss her writing, the small town romance genre and more.

1. What role has writing been in your life?

I’ve been writing for as long as I remember. As a child and as a teen, I wrote for fun all the time. I drifted away from it as a hobby during early adulthood, then discovered it again at a difficult time in my life. It became a hugely important creative outlet that I’ve been so happy and proud to expand into a professional endeavor.

2. How did you manage the switch from high school science teacher to writer?

My time as a teacher is the difficult period in my life I alluded to above! While I enjoyed teaching, I found it massively stressful and draining, and I was working in an under resourced school with more than its fair share of challenges. I got very burned out and lost while I was there.

Tapping into my creative writer brain helped me reconnect with myself, and before I knew it, the writing bug took over my life. While it doesn’t seem like a natural career change, I think my skills explaining things to people and analyzing problems logically has been a huge help as I’ve honed my craft as a story teller.

3. What draws you to small town romance?

I find small town romances to be so cozy and comforting. Getting to really dig in and build a world around a small town setting was and continues to be a fun and satisfying challenge.

4. How did you seek to make Blue Cedar Falls different from others?

Part of the fun of writing romance novels is both following the formula and putting a unique twist on it. I think Blue Cedar Falls stands out for mixing the classic, idyllic small town romance vibe with a bit more realism than is usually found in the genre. I’m also proud to prominently feature characters of Asian descent, as well as a well-rounded, diverse ensemble cast.

5. I found your series to be unique in showing the pros (community, caring neighborhoods) and cons (nosy, closed off from “intruders”) of small town; why did you choose to add realism instead of the wish fulfillment of an ideal small town?

While I love a perfect, problem-free small town story, I think in the world as it stands right now, my true wish fulfillment comes in the form of writing about good people tackling problems head-on and solving them through the magic of love and friendship.

Not everything is completely perfect in any small town, especially for people of diverse backgrounds, and I loved crafting stories where my characters got to fight for their place in the world and to help make their town a better place for everyone to live.

6. Diving into feeling outcast from the community, you injected your own experiences as a biracial Asian American, how did you balance the personal with the fictional?

While all of the particulars of the plot and characters were fictional, I do think that having experienced feeling like an outcast gave me emotional insight that I was able to use to enrich the story.

7. Return to Cherry Blossom Way was particularly powerful with depicting how annihilated May felt and how high school bullying still affected her years later. Why do you think it’s important to address diversity in contemporary romance?

Writing May’s story was such a cathartic experience. Microaggressions against people of color are hard to explain sometimes, but they leave their marks. I think it’s important to address diversity in contemporary romance because our readers come from all backgrounds. Everyone deserves to see themselves in the pages of their favorite book.

Telling stories about people from different backgrounds adds to the richness of the world we find in fiction, and it helps so show that despite our differences, there’s universality to the themes of finding love and belonging. I hope that an expanded canon of diverse popular fiction will help us all build more empathy for those around us.

8. Favorite romance tropes you liked to write (or want to write)?

Friends to lovers, which was so much fun to explore in The House On Mulberry Street. I also love forced proximity. Sticking together two characters who would otherwise bounce off of each other, and giving them a chance to get to know each other and form a bond is a really attractive challenge.

9. You’ve also written under an pseudonym-what were those and how they differ from your Blue Cedar series?

I wrote erotic romances as Jeanette Grey for the better part of a decade. While I loved these stories, I wanted to write books with less focus on the bedroom and more focus on world-building and character relationships, and it’s been such a rewarding change of pace.

10. Any news on your upcoming books?

I have a bunch of things in the works, but nothing official that I can share specifics about yet. Hopefully I’ll have more to share soon!

You can contact or learn more about Jeannie Chin on her website: https://www.jeanniechin.com/

and all relevant social media.