Press Kit

Watercolor of Queen Anne Hill at twilight. Women silhouetted walking up the hill. Warm golden parlor windows. AI-generated.

Cream background with watercolor header strip. Teaser text, author name, URL. Print-ready for 6x9 trim.

The full book as a single styled HTML file. Open in a browser, print to PDF for a clean 6x9 print-ready file. Includes all chapters, foreword, epilogue, source cards, and photos.

Clean plain text version optimized for text-to-speech. Chapter markers, pause indicators, no HTML. Ready for ElevenLabs or similar TTS service.

"A book about 130 years of Seattle women's friendship, built from the archives of the Queen Anne Fortnightly Club — a chorus of seven voices, a letter from 1987, and a way of being alive the world is trying to remember."

"The quiet stories of Seattle women who built a community that lasted 130 years. A ceiling that fell in 1896 and was covered in fishnets and ferns. A pillow placed on a winter storm window to touch the stars. A letter from 1987 that will stay with you. Free to read at thewomenonthehill.com."

"In September of 1894, twelve Seattle women gathered in a parlor on Queen Anne Hill and founded a literary club. They kept meeting every two weeks for the next 130 years. They buried three charter members to the flu in a single year. They staged imaginary voyages around the world during the Depression. They read letters from sons at the Front. They kept their own memoirs in drawers. And one of them, in a letter from Denver in 1987, thirty-eight years after she had left Seattle, wrote that her fondest wish was to attend one more meeting. The Women on the Hill weaves 465 original papers, minutes, and photographs into thirteen chapters of narrative. Every quote is real. Every name is real. Every event happened. The whole archive is published alongside the book, one click away. Free to read at thewomenonthehill.com."

"The Women on the Hill is a book about the Queen Anne Fortnightly Club, a Seattle women's literary society founded in September of 1894 and still meeting today. Over 130 years, members wrote more than 465 papers on subjects ranging from the price of sugar during the First World War to the King of Swaziland to what Marilyn Monroe understood about belonging. They kept minutes of every meeting. They preserved photographs, letters, yearbooks in pink and green. In 2025 a woman named Pamela Miles, the club's modern archivist, opened her drawers to a writer from outside the club. The writer digitized the archive and, with the help of narrative-nonfiction techniques modeled on Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet and Kate Moore's The Radium Girls, wove it into this book.

The final book has thirteen chapters and about 60,000 words. It is organized not chronologically but emotionally: from the founding (a green shawl, twelve women, twenty-five cents in dues) through the loss of three charter members to the 1918 flu, a single fully-reconstructed meeting in February of 1917, the Depression's imaginary ocean voyage, the refusal to become the war in 1942, the 1978 North Dakota memoir read aloud thirty years later by a dying daughter, the 2019 resurrection of Adelaide Pollock, and a closing chorus of seven women speaking sentences a woman of their generation was not, strictly, allowed to say in public.

Every quoted line in the book is real. No person speaks a sentence she did not write or say. An Author's Note at the front discloses the narrative-nonfiction method in full. The full archive is online at thewomenonthehill.com/archive."

"Andrew Conru is a Stanford-trained engineer, internet pioneer, painter, and founder of the Conru Art Foundation in Seattle. He runs ArtLove Salon, a 16,000-square-foot gallery where artists keep 100% of sales and admission is free. His values: beauty, truth, and love. The Women on the Hill is his first work of narrative nonfiction, made in collaboration with AI tools and the living members of the Queen Anne Fortnightly Club."

• “We are all different women because we have known them.” — Alice Rayner, 1919 (epigraph)

• “I still love Seattle, since it left me, because I never really left it. My fondest wish is that I could be in Seattle on a meeting day and so attend one more meeting. Oh, well… one can dream.” — Margaret Siegley, 1987

• “The stars were there to touch and the air was like diamonds.” — Dorothea Checkley, 1978, on opening the storm window at ten years old in a North Dakota winter

• “And that is how old she was when she died.” — Dawn Mullarkey, 2008, on her mother's cancer and a fortune teller's prediction

• “But what about me?” — Joan Loop, 2009, widow in the house she had fought for forty years

• “We weren't that kind of club.” — Marion Christoffersen, 1988, on the Federation's 1942 request for a history of the club's wartime accomplishments

• “Have any of you heard of her?” — Pamela Miles, 2019, opening her paper on Adelaide Pollock, who had been forgotten for 81 years

Source material: 465 original papers, 1,075,701 words, 1894–2025
Book: 13 chapters, ~60,000 words, Author's Note, Foreword, Rayner 1919 epigraph, Epilogue
Three wholly new chapters from deep archive mining: February 22, 1917 (single meeting), Have Any of You Heard of Her? (Pollock/Miles), Dorothea (Checkley)
Seven Siegley-tier voices in the emotional-peak chapter, spanning 1987–2009
Method: AI-assisted research and drafting, human-directed throughout; Author's Note discloses reconstruction technique in full
Published: April 2026, web-native, free to read, no paywall, no login

Andrew Conru headshot for press use.