Memoir asks writers to transform the messy materials of lived experience into structured stories that illuminate larger questions of identity, loss, resilience, and meaning. In this conversation, Renee Gilmore (Wayfinding(opens in new tab), Trio House Press, 2025) and Kelly…
When Elaine U. Cho’s debut novel, Ocean’s Godori(opens in new tab), came out in 2024, I had the privilege of being in conversation with her for the Washington, DC stop of her book tour, as well as for its…
Essay by Shara Kronmal • I first met Diane Josefowicz through Necessary Fiction where she serves as book reviews editor when she edited a review of mine. Diane is one of those editors you love to work with, one…
By M. Beth Zimmer • “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” Henry James, The Art of Fiction During the first month of my first semester as an MFA student,…
A few years ago, when I was developing a graduate course on flash writing, I knew that I wanted to include Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2017) because it showed how brevity helps language to draw…
I first learned of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague because we share a love for the famed Unicorn Tapestries, a set of unicorn tapestries woven more than 500 years ago, depicting a medieval unicorn hunt. In Sidorova’s novel,…
Christopher Bowen’s forthcoming flash fiction collection, The Things They Forgot to Tell Us When They Left from Cervena Barva Press, features twenty-five compellingly crafted and vastly different stories that all explore vividly realized settings across the American Midwest. Writing…
In Jaclyn Desforges’s aptly titled short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, April 2026), we meet a wide cast of characters that include a ghost, a tarantula caretaker, a mother with five unexplained and well-behaved babies, and telepathic…
For as long as I’ve been around the indie lit world, Aaron Burch has been a steady source of positive energy and endless creativity. Over the past fifteen(ish) years, he’s been responsible for so much inventive writing—his own, of…
Genre-bending is a not a new concept, yet it seems to have recently made its way into the mainstream (at least, as far as TikTok goes) with works such as the memoir/fantasy/gothic/horror In the Dream House by Carmen Maria…
