Writer Andrea Pyros grew up a NYC girl, but fell in love with Rhinebeck during her college days at Vassar and finally moved here in 2004. Since then, she’s worked as a freelance writer for a variety of publications (including Rural Intelligence). Now, with inspiration from professors, friends and her daughter’s food allergies, she’s branched out into YA literature with her first book, My Year of Epic Rock. Oblong Books & Music will hold a book launch party for the novel as part of its League of Extraordinary Readers series on Sunday, September 7 at 4 p.m. I was born and raised on the Upper West Side, where I lived with my mother, and spent school breaks and summer vacations in Tarpon Springs, Florida with my father. After college at Vassar, I moved back to NYC and worked as a television production assistant, then went to graduate school at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. I began working in publishing and my friends and I launched a website called Girls on Film (tagline: “Chicks. Flicks. Politics.") which ultimately got sold to Oxygen Media. I also had jobs at a few teen publications, including YM and Twist. When I was a senior at Vassar, I interned at Upstate Films and got to know Rhinebeck. Years later, I started dating Leonard Nevarez — a professor at Vassar — and when we got engaged, we decided that we’d make our home there. The Hudson Valley is like something I’d read about in a book as a kid and thought, “Wow, how lucky that people actually get to live like that." I like being outdoors with my kids, how much there is to do culturally, and the kid-friendly events like parades, the town pool and Sinterklaas. I have “my" bookstore (Oblong) and “my" movie theater (Upstate). I like three out of our four seasons, but I admit I don’t like the winters. I’ve been told that if I learn to ski that will help, so, maybe that’s next on the agenda.
I started working on my YA novel because I found out my daughter had multiple food allergies and I was freaked out. She was a baby, but I wondered how she’d feel as she got older and had to manage her condition, so I made my main character a seventh grader dealing with food allergies and feeling left out because of them. The more I wrote, though, the more My Year of Epic Rock became about how hard it is to stand out during middle school, and less about food allergies specifically. I tend to get embarrassed easily, so I’m interested in stories that deal with shame and mortification — I guess some of us never totally outgrow that! I took a fabulous writing class taught by former Bard professor and novelist Edie Meidav and it got me excited about focusing on fiction after years doing editorial. After it ended, a few other local writers and I formed a writing group which helped me immensely, both because they gave excellent notes and because the peer pressure forced me to send in work or else look like a slob. Right now I’m working on a second middle grade novel about a girl whose mother gets breast cancer. My mother got cancer when I was 11 and I wish I’d had a book then that dealt with it in a real way, so hopefully this book will be that for other kids.
