An Interview with Sera Maddox Drake
Sera Maddox Drake is an independent, self-published author with a BA in English who writes weird literary fiction that refuses to pick a lane and stay in it. Their work has a special focus on the viewpoints of neurodiverse, queer characters. They live in a generic Midwestern American city with their husband, cats, and four children, on a small lot they are slowly converting to permaculture. They believe that cheese curls should be neither seen nor heard, also that words are power, and that only love will save the day.
Their debut novel, Ancilla, has won multiple awards since its launch, including the 2026 Passionate Plume for Erotic Literature, two Global Book Awards, three Firebird Awards, and a Pencraft, and was listed as a finalist for the 2026 Hawthorne Prize, the 2026 Penmasters Global Award (Magical Realism category), and the 2026 Readers’ Favorite Awards (Visionary Fiction category).
Their other publications include a collection of eros-themed short stories, Morsels: Tales of Love and Passion, and a collection of poems, Excavations. They also make digital decoupage art, which can be found on their Pinterest and Instagram pages.
Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?
I’ve always been a writer, just like I’ve always been a reader. I got my first library card at the age of four, just after my birthday, and was so proud of it that I practically glowed. I wrote stories to pass the time when I ran out of things to read. I wrote my first novel in high school. Epic fantasy: a boy and a girl got magically transported to another world and had to save it from an evil wizard … It wasn’t very good, but it was good experience.
What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?
I’ve spent most of my life doing inside sales of some kind—arts fundraising and subscription sales, mortgage origination, insurance sales—although I’ve had some interesting part-time side quests as well, including exotic dancing, performing in a Renaissance festival as a peasant and gate guard, and working as a teachers’ aide in a preschool. Right now, my full-time day job happens to be tech support and customer service for a home improvement company. Have to finance my writing habit somehow, after all.
Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?
It wasn’t easy to settle on Ancilla, but it didn’t take forever, either. I conceived of the book as being part of a trilogy, with each section being named after a phase of my protagonist’s life. The first book focuses on her youth, when she has apprenticed herself to a mentor to learn magic, sex, and sex magick from him. The two of them give each other labels—“ancilla,” for servant/assistant/sidekick, and “Magister,” for teacher, so calling the first book Ancilla followed from that. It didn’t hurt that Heloise, in her letters to Peter Abelard, called herself his “ancilla,” since the love affair of Abelard and Heloise was part of what inspired Ancilla.
(I have somewhat amended the definition of “ancilla.” In Roman times, it meant “female slave to the lady of the house.” Medieval religious orders used it to refer to nuns, who were considered the “handmaids” of God. The word appears in other contexts today, though, often in adjectival form. Something “ancillary” is supplemental. It is adjunct. In a sense, you could see “ancilla” as a sort of adjunct research assistant to “Magister,” especially if you frame him as a don or professor. The tutorials he gives “ancilla” are shaped by my memories of the weekly tutorials I had with my professors when I was doing graduate study at Oxford. Read a massive stack of literary criticism books plus the original material, write an essay, show up for your weekly meeting with your professor, read your essay out loud, have it politely ripped to shreds, repeat …)
What part of publishing your book made it feel real for the first time?
Seeing the print copy that I’d ordered on Amazon arrive, holding it in my hands, reading it through. There is something about seeing your work in print, fully formatted, that makes it solidify. It’s not just a manuscript—it’s a book now. You can put your face against the paper and smell the ink if you don’t believe it.
If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?
It actually does have a soundtrack, and I made the art for its soundtrack videos. It’s a little bit of everything, including classical: Mozart, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Brahms, Wagner.
What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?
Simply getting it done. It took me eleven years to write the first edition of Ancilla, and another two years to edit and revise it.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
My next book is another collection of short stories. What Is Told: A Conglomeration of Confabulations is scheduled to launch in late October of this year. The premise, and the structure, is that of a hack author and the ghost (or drunken dream) of Geoffrey Chaucer swapping fantasy stories back and forth, some of them reinterpretations of tales from The Decameron. Metafiction, magical realism, and dreampunk, oh my. And don’t die of shock, but this collection’s actually clean …
Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.
Atmosphere Press is a selective hybrid publisher founded in 2015 on the principles of Honesty, Transparency, Professionalism, Kindness, and Making Your Book Awesome. Our books have won dozens of awards and sold tens of thousands of copies. If you’re interested in learning more, or seeking publication for your own work, please explore the links below.