Meet The Authors of the Viral Book, Milk & Vine

Scrolling through Twitter on an otherwise normal day, I came across a tweet that had some photos of a book called Milk and Vine. I was familiar with the book because my friends had talked about it earlier, but I’d been too lazy to look into it. Alas, here it was on my feed, and I had not choice but to give in to the internet’s most recent meme.

I read through the excerpts, had a few laughs, and wanted to know more about this modern-day masterpiece. I zoomed in on the cover and saw the name Emily Beck. I knew this name had some sort of significance to me, but wasn’t sure why. Later, I saw her name in my dorm floor group chat and put it together. “The Milk and Vine girl” lives on my floor. Naturally, I texted everyone I knew that I brush my teeth next to an internet celebrity.

The book, a parody of popular poetry book Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, was written by couple Adam Gasiewski and Emily Beck. Both freshmen at Temple University, Gasiewski is a computer science major with a business minor and Beck is a political science major with a business minor.  They got the idea for Milk and Vine while skimming through books at a Barnes & Noble.

“Adam was reading Milk and Honey and he was like, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool,’” Beck said. “He wanted to write a book and I was like, ‘Why don’t we just put Vines in it to make it funny?’”

“We were at the store the 19th [of October] and within, like, three days we had the book written, formatted, and published on Amazon,” Gasiewski said.

It’s safe to say they weren’t expecting their book to blow up as much as it did. Word of the book spread through social media like wildfire, earning it a spot as Amazon’s No. 1 Best-Seller for a bit.

“We made it for our friends. It was literally never supposed to leave our little group chat circle,” Gasiewski said.

Since then, Gasiewski and Beck have gained quite a following on Twitter and have been rather busy with interviews and even attending a gala in the city. There have been some public backlash, however, but they have been working hard to ensure that artists are properly credited for their Vines. On top of this, they even have a sequel to the book coming out in the spring.

“Right now we’re kind of working on a sequel for it, working with some publishers hopefully for like early spring,” Gasiewski said. “Same type of book, we don’t wanna say too much yet.”

You can follow Adam and Emily on Twitter at @a_DAMN7 and @emiilybeck, and look out for their new book in Spring 2018!

• milk and honey
• Rupi Kaur
• Temple
• twitter
• viral