Stepping Out of My Storytelling Box
By Tim Bascom • When I was twelve, I wrote my first short story, which was about a boy who, while hiking alone, falls off a mountain cliff and lands on a narrow outcrop, unable to get down or…
Author: Guest Author
Interview: Deni Ellis Béchard
Deni Ellis Béchard’s speculative novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, is set in a future dystopian United States divided by a civil war. The machine, a powerful AI which was designed with the goal to protect humans…
Hybrid Interview: Chelsey Pippin Mizzi
When I began reading Chelsey Pippin Mizzi’s second book, Tarot for Creativity: A Guide for Igniting Your Creative Practice (Chronicle Books, October 2024), I wondered if she’d been in the divination panel at AWP in Seattle, which was so…
Interview: Heidi Czerwiec
I started writing lyric essays long before I knew the language for what I was doing. Working at the intersection of poetry and prose, I wrote about big emotions (love, grief) because I wasn’t sure how else to convey…
Comfort Animals
By Pascha Sotolongo • The cat on the proposed book cover—a white-whiskered piebald—shouldn’t have surprised me. My debut story collection is full of furry mammals, birds, insects, and at least two lizards. A handful of these (often fantastical) creatures…
Hybrid Interview: Puloma Ghosh
Essay by Ruth Minah Buchwald • What keeps you up at night? For me, it’s genocide, climate change, another epidemic, hopeless politics, something embarrassing that I said in middle school, the finite nature of time, and so on, but…
Persuasion, Camouflage, and Inoculation: Introducing Magical Elements in Fiction
By Duncan Whitmire • Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it…
Conversations Between Friends: Nicole Haroutunian and Apryl Lee
When I signed the contract to publish my novel-in-stories, Choose This Now, with Noemi Press, I asked to include a clause that the press would make a “good faith effort” to publish it as an audiobook too. They’d never…
Interview: Janis Hubschman
In her debut short story collection, Take Me With You Next Time, Janis Hubschman illuminates the inner lives of girls and women by guiding the reader through the intricate crevices of her characters’ psyches—the thoughts and feelings that we…
Hybrid Interview: Afabwaje Kurian
Essay by Anna Polonyi • What does it mean to revise a novel? I’ve been doggedly asking this question ever since attending workshop beside Afabwaje Kurian, whose stunningly written debut novel, Before the Mango Ripens, was released on September…