CRAFT: The way you move between backstory and the present moment is seamless, showing the reader how much the characters live in the past in their minds. Did you run into balance issues as you were writing, wanting to stay…
Doppelganger In his dreams the people of the city are ghosts. The writer is walking down a crowded sidewalk, but the pedestrians around him are made of mist or smudges of light or dust. They speak in the…
CRAFT: In the Acknowledgments, you indicate that Late Air, your debut novel, grew out of a short story. Can you talk a little bit about that process? How did you know that this short story would be able to be…
Here’s a quick look at some of the great fiction out this November. Happy pub day to all! What a great month for us readers… Laura Adamczyk, Hardly Children: Stories “In Hardly Children, characters make bad but not irredeemable choices,…
Fire When I was eight years old, I watched a fire leap over the forest in glowing arcs and the men in my family battle it away. The fire had taken out farms on the panhandle for a…
By Amber Wheeler Bacon • David Gates doesn’t recommend flashbacks to new writers when he’s teaching fiction. When line editing a student’s piece, he cuts pretty much every flashback he sees. I know because he cut plenty of mine when…
By Amelia Brown • Daisy Johnson is quite obviously inspired by folklore in her debut collection of stories, Fen—her pages are home to sentient objects, immortal monsters, and animal transformations galore. In fact, Johnson’s stories pledge their allegiance to two narrative…
Here’s a quick look at some of the great fiction out this week. Happy pub day to all! Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black “This book is dark and captivating and essential. This book is a call to arms and…
O was twenty-nine when he died, and now he lives in my head. He says it’s like swimming. He can’t breathe. “You don’t have to,” I say. “You’re dead.” But he just sighs. At first, there was a lot of…
By Elizabeth Mayer • Death and loss and decay pervade the stories of Joy Williams’s collection Escapes. If a character is not facing the immediacy of their own death, often they are mourning the loss of someone close to them. Yet…
