IN THE SPOTLIGHT: New mystery ‘Coram House’ just out

Bailey Seybolt

Author Bailey Seybolt was in Boca Grande with her kids just this past February on vacation; now she is in New York for the release of her debut novel with Simon and Schuster, “Coram House.”

“Coram House,” which came out in hardback on April 15, follows a crime writer investigating mysterious deaths at an old Vermont orphanage. 

“It’s my first book, which is really exciting,” Seybolt said. “It’s not the first book I’ve ever written, but it’s the first book I’ve sold.”

Seybolt grew up visiting Boca Grande for Spring Break every year. Her family would stay at The Gasparilla Inn. 

“I was old enough that I was riding a bicycle around, so I feel like I was maybe 10 or 11 when we started coming,” she said. “And I have two younger siblings, we would come and stay at The Gasparilla every year for like, a few years there, until we were teenagers and off doing stuff. And then my parents, a few years later, were sort of looking for a warm place to kind of semi-retire, so they started going back, which was really fun. Obviously, we had known the island as kids, so it’s fun to bring my own kids there.”

Her parents are Peggy and Crossan Seybolt. Crossan is chair of the board of the Barrier Island Parks society and was profiled by the Beacon in December 2024. 

Seybolt hasn’t always wanted to be a writer. She grew up in New York City and then went on to study literature at Brown University and creative writing at Concordia University. 

“When I was in high school and early college, I actually really wanted to be an actor,” she said. “I was really involved in theater, and then somewhere along the way, I just realized it wasn’t a great fit anymore. I think it wasn’t really until I was in my 20s that I started playing around with fiction, because I think it sort of satisfies some of those same impulses.”

Both expressions embody a character and tell a story, Seybolt said. “It’s funny, people don’t really think of them as connected, but I actually feel like my background in theater was incredibly helpful when I’m writing. I would say I always loved writing stories. I was always kind of involved in the arts, but theater had my heart for a really long time.”

“Coram House” is not actually the first book Seybolt has written; her first book was a middle-grade novel. 

“It was sort of a mystery, fantasy book, and this is totally different,” she said of her newly released book. “Obviously, it’s the first thing I’d ever tried writing for an adult, but the process wasn’t that different. And I think the wonderful thing about genre is you sort of have these constraints that you’re required to play inside, and I find myself most creative when I’m sort of given a sandbox to play in.”

Seybolt considers “Coram House” a literary mystery. “A lot of my favorite books have been ones that were those sorts of types,” she said, “like I loved Margaret Atwood, and growing up I loved Daphne du Maurier, sort of all those Gothic heroines. I have always really loved that area. So, in hindsight, it doesn’t surprise me, but it’s not necessarily what I set out to do.”

Between college and now, she had many different writing-related jobs all around the world. She did journalism for a while, and her first job out of college was travel writing at a newspaper in Vietnam. She was there for about three years doing various writing jobs before moving to Montreal.

“Montreal is great, but I don’t really speak French,” she said, “so like, what does an English-speaking writer do in Montreal? There’s a really big startup and tech scene there. So, I kind of pretended I knew marketing, and I worked in tech for a while, sort of in marketing and copywriting, and that was fun, too.”

After Montreal, Seybolt moved to San Francisco and worked in brand marketing and writing-adjacent jobs for startups. She began freelancing and moved to Vermont where she continued her work remotely. 

“I was like, ‘Look, I want to write books, but that doesn’t work out for most people,’” Seybolt acknowledged. “And even the people it does work out for, it usually doesn’t work out in a way where they’re fully supporting themselves, and that’s also a lot of pressure to put on any kind of art. So, I sort of did a lot of hedging where I was like, ‘All right, how can I use these skills in ways where I can have enough time to write and also make enough money to live?’”

She began writing “Coram House” in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I had a three-month-old and a three-year-old who were both home,” she said. “So, it was kind of an insane time to start a book. But also, you know, I think so many people were looking for something to do for themselves to kind of maintain their own sanity during that time. I was like, ‘I’m just going to sit down with a notebook for 20 minutes a day. I had this idea; I’m just going to see what happens.’ So, the first year was basically the equivalent of scribbling seeds on cocktail napkins.”

The idea for the book came from the true story of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Vermont. “When we first moved to Vermont, I lived near the original building, and it’s actually this really beautiful building … it was really arresting, and I drove by it almost every day.” Seybolt said. “It sat in my subconscious for a while, and then the idea sort of slowly came to me bit by bit. I had my main character, and I had my ending and beyond that, I’m not really much of a planner.”

It took her about two and half years to write “Coram House,” – “longer than I’ve spent writing anything,” she said. “Once I admitted to myself I was sort of writing a book, then I started trying to sneak away for longer, take an afternoon on the weekends and try to focus on it. But I was working the whole time, so it was a lot of really early mornings where I’d get up at like five and try and work for a few hours before work and school for the kids. I wrote it on borrowed time.”

Seybolt carefully crafted query letters to agents about her new book and had signed with one within a couple weeks. They sold the book to a publisher within the span of another few weeks. 

“It was like six weeks,” she said, “from sending out my first letter to signing the book deal.”

Now that her debut novel is out, Seybolt has book events scattered throughout the spring. “The weirdest part about publishing a book is that mostly it’s out of your control by now,” she said. 

She has already started working on her next book, which will be in the same genre but with an entirely new plot and characters. 

“It’s not a follow up book at all, but I think it would appeal to the same audience who likes this book,” she said.