BettyJoyce Nash and Jody Hobbs Hesler are Charlottesville authors who teach at the community writing center, WriterHouse, and participate in writing groups together. Over the years, they have workshopped each other’s stories, served on panels together, and hiked in…
Jennifer duBois’s latest novel, The Last Language, published this month with Milkweed Editions, explores the ethically precarious choices of Angela, a promising linguist and young mother who’s lost everything: her husband, her second pregnancy, and her place in a…
Set alternately in Yerevan, Armenia, and Queens, New York, Nancy Agabian’s novel The Fear of Large and Small Nations is a beautifully crafted interweaving of third-person storytelling with first-person metawriting and journaling. The main character is Na, a young…
Excerpted from Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading By Joan Frank • What is it, finally, about letters? Why does this old-fashioned form, even maimed and shrunken, volleyed mostly through ether…
Acclaimed shortform author Chelsea Stickle has recently published two chapbooks: Breaking Points, which explores crucial moments in women’s lives through a variety of flash forms; and Everything’s Changing, which conjures images of transformation, both magical and otherwise. Chelsea took…
Aaron Burch and Austin Ross first became acquainted when Burch accepted one of Ross’s short stories at Hobart in 2018. Here, they discuss Ross’s debut novel, Gloria Patri, which deals with the aftermath of religious extremism and domestic terrorism.…
By Sarah Twombly • I am at work on a novel, and have been for more than a decade. It is autobiographical fiction, which is to say it’s about me, but also, it isn’t. The same way Einstein might…
I’ve been listening to Brad Listi’s Otherppl podcast for years, very used to his voice and candor, but I didn’t pick up his fiction until he flipped the script and sat as a guest on his own show. In…
Wheels, puzzles, the art of Zen—how do these seemingly unrelated topics pertain to the craft of condensing prose? Three authors and friends who bonded over their love of writing “short” explore how writers can fine-tune their flash or novella…
By Beth Kephart • The writer of the memoir in pieces is an assembly artist—a hunter, a gatherer, an arranger, a culler, a keeper. They are not at work on a collection of essays loosely bound by voice, style,…
