Ginny Myers Sain comes from a family of writers.
Her mother is famed young adult (YA) novelist and former Chandler teacher Anna Myers. Her father was a poet. Her younger brother Ben, who still lives in Chandler, was the poet laureate of the state of Oklahoma.
So, it was only natural that Sain decided to go into theater.
“Probably because my whole family were writers, I was pretty determined to do something different. And theater was always my art form and what I gravitated toward,” she quipped.
But life has a funny way of working out. After building a career in theater as a director and acting coach in Arkansas, primarily working with junior high and high school students, Sain, a Chandler alum, found herself getting serious about writing when COVID hit.
Today, Ginny Myers Sain is a New York Times bestselling author of two YA thrillers (“Dark & Shallow Lies,” “Secrets So Deep”). Her third novel, “One Last Breath,” was released on March 5 and follows the story of teenager Tru, who is drawn into solving a cold-case double murder that hangs over the town of Mount Orange, Florida, by a strange newcomer named Rio.
Sain said that she’s always loved anything “spooky and creepy,” which had her gravitating towards the thriller genre. It was her work with theater students that drew her to writing YA.
“When I started to write, I knew that those were the voices I heard in my head… That’s the age group I knew and had just fallen in love with,” she said. “I felt like I really got to know those kids, and I knew how their minds worked and how their hearts worked and what they were focused on.”
With “One Last Breath” - and all her books, really - Sain is influenced by place. Her first book (“Dark & Shallow Lies”) is set in the Lousiana Bayou, which she loves and has spent a lot of time in. Her second (“Secrets So Deep”) is set at a theater program on the Connecticut coast - Sain worked at such a camp for eight summers.
“I knew all along, once I started writing, that I would want to tell a story set in the freshwater springs of central Florida, which is a place I’d fallen in love with decades ago. Long before I moved here,” Sain said. The book was written while she was still living in Tulsa near her mother and sister.
Her lifelong fascination with the Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders also led to the many true crime elements in the book. However, the story is about more than just that.
“I usually have a seed of an idea that I start with, and for this one, it was kind of that question of, how do you explain it when you meet someone that you feel so instantly connected to and so instantly drawn to?” Sain said. “And where does that kind of intense, instant connection come from? Why do you feel it with some people and not with others?”
Sain said all of her books have common threads of the supernatural or magic, though they are definitely not fantasy.
“They’re all sort of dark and twisty stories. They’re a little bit scary, but they’re all at heart, stories that are coming-of-age or stories about grief or stories about loss,” she said. “There’s a lot more to them than just that thriller element, which I think is something that people are surprised by sometimes.”
“One Last Breath,” published by Penguin Random House, is now available in bookstores.