On Wednesday, July 1, 5:30 PM PT/8:30 PM ET, I’m hosting a Zoom meeting for monthly and annual subscribers. For the Zoom link, message me here or reply to the email of this post. Bring your writing- and publishing-related questions. ✒️

Summer class! Beginning Wednesday, July 15, I'm teaching a 6-week online flash fiction workshop, 6-8:30 PM PT, for Stanford Continuing Studies. More information and registration link here. Still a few spaces open. ✏️

A quick welcome to , novelist and cultural critic, who’s writing a great new Substack newsletter. Her latest post is “Intermittent Joy #3: Notes on Forgetting.”

Lastly, if you’re a potato leek soup fan, for an episode of New Day New Chef on Unchained TV’s plant-based network, I recently prepared the recipe I use.

Many readers who closely follow the release of new books know that Donna Seaman, editor-in-chief of Booklist, where she’s also the adult books editor, is an expert, incisive critic. I’ve long marveled over how she’s able to write highly specific reviews that cleanly summarize a book’s subject matter and assess its artistic merits—often in under 200 words.

Along with her demanding work for Booklist, she is a frequent conversation partner for Chicago-based and visiting writers during the Chicago Humanities Festival and Printers Row Lit Fest, among other literary events of note.

In the interstices, Seaman teaches graduate creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and has written and edited several books, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, the short-fiction anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wilderness, and now the engrossing River of Books: A Life in Reading, her most personal book to date.

The pleasures of reading her newest title are manifold. Not only does she offer readers an insider’s look at her formative years as a writer and critic, we float down the titular river with her as she shares a coming-of-age story that includes her peregrinations from the town where she grew up, Poughkeepsie, New York, to art school in Kansas City, to Chicago, her home now of many years. Her warmth, intelligence and surpassing love of books and their authors grace every page of River of Books.

My complete interview with Donna Seaman, which first appeared Newcity Lit, is available here.

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Christine/Bookish: River of Books is part memoir, part encomium to books and reading. In the first chapter, while recounting your earliest memories of the books you were introduced to as a child, you artfully segue to fascinating historical details about your hometown of Poughkeepsie. This interleaving of the public and historical with the personal is present throughout “River of Books.” Did you settle on this form from the beginning or did it evolve over time?

Donna Seaman: It’s odd to say this, since, as you note, “River of Books” is part memoir, but I really didn’t want to write about myself! When I was invited to contribute a title to Ode Books, a series of book-length essays about books and places devoted to books, I knew I couldn’t write about the work I do at Booklist—there are too many sensitive aspects to that. So I decided to tell the story of how I ended up doing what I do. I intended to write most about the books that inspired me, but I also wanted to create a context for the early years of my “life in reading.”

I began writing about Poughkeepsie, my hometown, and because I love doing research, I found myself delving into many aspects of the river city’s past. So, yes, the combination of the personal with the historical and the communal was there at the start.

CS: Instead of majoring in English at a more traditional college or university, you went to art school in Kansas City (although later you earned a master’s degree in literature from DePaul University). How did art win out over books after high school? Like your mother, did you plan to make a life and a living as a visual artist?

DS: I had a love-hate relationship with school, finding much of it boring and oppressive. I felt so confined. And as much as I loved to read, I was restless. I needed action. So I gravitated to making art, to working with my hands. That way of thinking with your entire being, of working in three dimensions, of engaging with the physical world, nurtures the body, mind and soul. I love being in studios and workshops as much as libraries and museums. Art school seemed like the ideal place for me to pursue my passion for making things and my ardor for books, since I knew that liberal arts classes would be in the mix.

I had no practical ideas about earning a living. I had no career in mind. I was focused on learning about art and making art, on reading and writing. I had only the haziest of notions about finding a job of some sort that would keep me solvent enough to do what I loved. I knew the odds against supporting oneself as an artist or writer were extremely high.

I was deeply influenced by my mother and her passion for visual art. But the world I came of age in was very different from the one she grew up in, including expectations for women. My mother did not go to art school or college, though she would have loved to. Instead, for many reasons, she married right out of high school and always put family and home first.

Unlike now, when so many families need two salaries to get by, my father was able to support our modest middle-class household on his own, so my mother didn’t have to work. She always hoped to sell her paintings in the many gallery shows and exhibitions she participated in, and she often did, but that didn’t provide much income. I always knew I would work; I wanted to be independent. I started working when I left home and I’ve been extremely fortunate in finding work I love.

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CS: One of the revelations that surprised me most, which you mentioned above, is that you found high school to be a grind—until you began attending a private day school in tenth grade. I have to think, however, that as early as junior high school, you were more well-read than most of your teachers. Would you comment on the chasm between your voracious reading habits and your experience with enforced “book learning” in school?

DS: I have many vivid school memories of junior high and high school, but none of them involve English classes! This feels very strange. What am I blocking? Maybe I need a hypnotist. I surely did all my assignments, but I have no recollections of what we read and discussed in class; I can’t recall a single paper I wrote. I must have found it all rather dull.

Curiously, I remember science classes much more clearly, and geometry, which was the only math class I enjoyed in public school. I loved the diagrams. I remember Latin and French classes. Why not English? I’m sure I learned useful interpretative skills, and I assume I enjoyed at least some of the books and certainly Shakespeare, but somehow other experiences have overwritten all that. Instead I clearly remember the books I read on my own.

CS: Along with chronicling the joys of a life enriched by avid reading and artmaking, you write about tragedy in River of Books: the loss of your adored younger sister to a house fire when you were both in your twenties, and the drowning of a brilliant teaching artist you studied with at the Kansas City Art Institute. Do you recall the books you turned to during those intense periods of mourning? Which books do you periodically return to as if they’re Vitamin C (or antibiotics or Xanax)?

DS: When I lost my sister, I turned to poetry. I read Wordsworth, Keats and Yeats. I read Dickinson and Whitman. I read Dylan Thomas. I was especially taken with Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath, her poetry and her fiction.

Books that have been strong medicine for me include works by all of the above, along with the writings of Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Clampitt, Jane Hirshfield, Edward Hirsch, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Diane Ackerman, Cynthia Ozick, Sandra Cisneros, Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison. I’ve also found myself rereading “King Lear” in grim times.

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CS: Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Carl Sandburg, among others, are presiding spirits in River of Books. Similarly, the city of Chicago is a main character. I love how you describe it here:

“…Chicago is a bricky town of harsh weather and bluster, hard work and avid play, pragmatism and creativity, violence and kindness, competition and comradeship… The little yards and parkways were alive with sparrows, robins, cardinals, mourning doves, crows, squirrels…”

After college in Kansas City, you write that you thought you’d eventually return to New York, a city ostensibly considered more literary than any other U.S. city (certainly up for debate!), but ultimately you settled in Chicago. How would you characterize Chicago’s literary scene in comparison to New York’s?

DS: Chicago’s literary community has grown so much since I first moved here. For years it seemed that once a Chicago writer landed a book contract, they would move to New York. To Brooklyn. Now people stay. Chicago is a much more affordable and manageable city than New York, after all.

The blossoming of creative writing programs at Chicago colleges and universities has provided more opportunities for writers, which strengthened our community. All kinds of literary groups and indie bookstores provide venues for author events, readings and conversations, and Chicago has a small but ardent array of publishers. All this has sustained and vitalized the city’s literary community.

I’m always hearing about writers I didn’t know were living here. Chicago is home to poets, children’s authors, graphic novelists, mystery writers, romance writers, creative nonfiction writers, literary novelists, essayists, memoirists, you name it. And best of all, there is remarkable camaraderie among Chicago writers and other literati; there’s so much mutual support, it’s phenomenal and deeply inspiring.

The vibe is different in New York because there are so many more writers, more of nearly everything. And having so many major publishers there raises the stakes.

When the American Writers Museum was just a dream, the founders considered all the major cities in the country, and ultimately decided that Chicago was the ideal location. They liked that it wasn’t the obvious choice; that would be New York. They were impressed with Chicago’s strong, if somewhat under-appreciated literary history, its robust public library system, its community of caring and generous writers, and the continual round of many literary events held by the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Printers Row Lit Fest, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, bookstores, colleges and universities. They saw that this is a city of ardent writers and readers.

Full interview here

Donna Seaman is editor-in-chief and adult books editor for Booklist. A recipient of the Louis Shores Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, Seaman is on the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum and an adjunct creative writing professor for Northwestern University. Seaman’s author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists and River of Books: A Life in Reading.

Today’s post is June’s list of agents currently accepting queries, along with a few other items of note. A preview of May’s agent list is available here.

New novel alert: Deborah Kalb, a past Bookish interviewee, recently published a detective novel, Everything She Most Admired (Apprentice House). Deborah is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and former journalist who covered Beltway politics for years. She also curates a literary blog with a large archive of author interviews.

And , one of the writers I admire most (she’s here on Substack, and has written for the New York Times and many other publications), is celebrating the one-year anniversary of her debut novel The Satyr in Bungalow D. I spoke with Joyce about it last year for Bookish. If you haven’t read Satyr yet, I hope you’ll pick up a copy soon.

On Wednesday, July 1, 5:30 PM PT/8:30 PM ET, I’m hosting a Zoom meeting for monthly and annual subscribers. For the Zoom link, message me here or reply to the email of this post. Bring your writing- and publishing-related questions (e.g. the agent search, query letters, hybrid presses, indie v. corporate/Big Five presses, book contests, should you hire a freelance editor?, to self-publish or not to self-publish, how to start a reading series in your community, writers’ groups, etc.)

Tangentially, I teach a college course on the publishing industry, and one of the assigned texts is ’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. Sinykin examines and demystifies the industry’s history and current trends—it’s fascinating and well researched. (He’s here on Substack too: .) 📗

Summer class! Beginning Wednesday, July 15, I'm teaching a 6-week online flash fiction workshop, 6-8:30 PM PT, for Stanford Continuing Studies. More information and registration link here.

Bookish yearly subscriptions are 30% off, and through the end of June, new founding memberships include two books (your choice of one of mine, and a book by another author—specify if you’d prefer fiction, nonfiction, or poetry).

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On JUNE 4, 7 PM, presented by WORD Theatre: California Women: Golden State Writing in Performance, William Turner Gallery (2525 Michigan Ave E-1, Santa Monica). A celebration of women writers shaping the California literary scene: Michelle Latiolais, Caribbean Fragoza, Dominica Phetteplace, Toni Ann Johnson & Lisa Alvarez!

These authors’ works will be read by actors Constance Marie (George Lopez), Mimi Rogers (Bosch), Mishel Prada (Vida), Midori Francis (The Sex Lives of College Girls) & Fay Hauser (Roots: The Next Generations). Tickets and more info here.

A preview of May’s agent list is accessible here. Bookish yearly subscriptions are 30% off. 📗

You might have seen the news about a short story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” believed to have been written primarily with AI, which won a major contest co-sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation and Granta, a UK-based literary magazine long held in high esteem by many readers and writers. (It’s a rare day when a scandal features a short story and its writer, but add AI to the plot, and here we are.)

Among others, over at published an essay about the controversy a few days ago that I liked very much, and LitHub’s detailed article about the matter is here.

Along with Bookish, I write short stories and novels, and news of a fellow writer winning a prestigious contest with a story he probably didn’t write fired up all my neurotic, striving, schadenfreude-prone impulses.

The writers I’m close friends with are generally open about their feelings of frustration when their writing isn’t going as well as they’d like, or they can’t find a publisher (or an agent) for a new book (or if they do have a new book out, it isn’t being reviewed or it isn’t selling as hoped).

Add to this prickly mix fears of obscurity and envy of other writers who appear more successful than we are, and it’s hard not to wonder why we didn’t listen to our hand-wringing parents long ago and become accountants.

And! Now! A news story about a guy winning a big contest with a submission he probably didn’t write! It reminds me of the steroid scandal in baseball with Barry Bonds and other MLB sluggers, and of Lance Armstrong, whom the French suspected all along of cheating during the six (seven?) consecutive years he won the Tour de France. Eventually, voilà, their hunch was proven right. But what a lot of corrosive fury and outrage to have borne in the meantime.

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What the current AI-related controversies (Google Mia Ballard and Shy Girl for another recent publishing-related one) tell me is that humans will always look for shortcuts, if not outright hacks and cheat codes.

Shortcuts aren’t always a bad thing, admittedly. But what liberal use of them also tells me is that plenty of people have no problem lying—by omission or commission—about taking a shortcut, perhaps especially when it’s ethically dubious, if not outright illegal.

That AI can be helpful with some rote tasks, I admit too—why not ask for help planning your 5-member family’s weekly menu, especially if you have food allergies and gluten sensitivities to contend with (not to mention a vegan and a paleo at your table)?

And why not also ask the AI genie for its advice when you’re unsure if your landlord is gaslighting you about the ominous sounds emerging from the pipes in your bathroom, or when someone ghosts you and you’re about to lose your mind (I wonder what ChatGPT would have advised the lovelorn Sean Penn if it had been around after Charlize Theron ghosted him some years ago: I’m an extremely famous actor and a very beautiful, younger actress—we’re both Oscar winners, fyi—appears to be ghosting me…)

But my aging, saddened heart is further aged and saddened when I read about someone proclaiming to the world they’re a writer who, instead of writing and rewriting (and rewriting some more), made use of material AI indiscriminately (and illegally) ingested in order to burp up instant stories subsequently passed off as the work of a unique, human imagination.

This post is, I suppose, a cri de coeur. I’ve spent the last 35 years reading and writing and earning my livelihood from both. As our country is being degraded and bankrupted by shortsighted, blackhearted, greedy assholes, there are days when I feel pretty blue (Did your understatement detector just go off? Okay, very, very blue).

Nonetheless, other writers and creators and I persist. When I finish this post, I plan to pick up one of the books by real writers I’m presently reading: Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, Timothy Hillegonds’ memoir And You Will Call It Fate, Virginia Evans’ novel The Correspondent. Yesterday morning I finished a new short story. I finished a new novel earlier this year which is in part about book people.

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Below are links to short stories by writers who took dictation directly from their mysterious brains and private hearts and wrote them without AI—in some cases well before ChatGPT and its brethren began rapidly throwing sugar in the tank of the creative vehicle all of us non-AI-using fiction writers, poets, essayists, screenwriters, musicians, etc. have been custodians and fuelers of for many centuries:

“The Informant,” Matthew Lansburgh, Virginia Quarterly Review

“Touring,” Karin Lin-Greenberg, Colorado Review (also published in Faulty Predictions)

“Bad Neighbors,” Edward P. Jones, The New Yorker (also published in All Aunt Hagar’s Children)

“{I Wanted a Goth Disco Party},” Ann Tinkham, Denver Syntax

“The Solutions to Ben’s Problem,” Bonnie Jo Campbell, Diagram (later published as “The Solutions to Brian’s Problem” in American Salvage)

“Melvin in the Sixth Grade,” Dana Johnson, The Missouri Review (also published in Break Any Woman Down)

“Daredevil,” Colette Sartor, The Kenyon Review (also published in Once Removed)

“Occupational Hazard,” Angela Pneuman, Ploughshares & The Best American Short Stories 2012

“Straightaway,” Mark Wisniewski, The Antioch Review & The Best American Short Stories 2008

“Aftertaste,” Cynthia Weiner, The Sun

“Currency,” Patricia Henley, Witness (also published in Apple & Palm)

“Folie à Deux,” William Trevor, The New Yorker

“Clown School,” Rachel Swearingen, SAND Literature & Art

“The Shame Exchange,” Karen E. Bender, The Yale Review (also published in The New Order)

“Only Son,” Kevin Moffett, Electric Literature (stand-alone excerpt from novel of the same name)

“Fall,” Don Tassone, Friday Flash Fiction

& a short story by me, “Ma’am?” Another Chicago Magazine (also published in Direct Sunlight) & recent flash story, “Tax Day,” Flash Fiction Magazine

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If you’ll be in L.A. next week, come on by Chevalier’s Books, 133 Larchmont, Wed., 5/27, 7 PM for a book discussion with Michael Elias about his new novel Bender’s L.A. Along with writing books, Michael is a screenwriter (The Frisco Kid, Young Doctors in Love, and he cowrote The Jerk with Steve Martin and Carl Gottlieb). He’s also acted and written for TV.

I recently read Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection. If you’ve read it too, I’m curious to know what you thought - pls drop a note in the comments section at the end of this post.

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Novelist, poet, and playwright Patricia Henley’s recently published story collection, Apple & Palm, immediately makes clear we’re in the hands of a master of the form. There are no shortcuts, no plot hacks or gimmicky tropes—each of the eight stories in this book is as immersive and rich as a novel.

Linked by setting and character, Apple & Palm chronicles the private and public attractions, obsessions, reunions, crimes and misdemeanors of her vibrantly imagined, complex characters, who range in age from the centenarian Roxy to children still far from independence from their parents’ contentious households.

In an interview published in Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process (co-edited by fellow Substacker , incidentally), Henley stated what she considers non-negotiable traits of a fiction writer: “A compassionate heart seems to me to be very, very important. A willingness to really look closely at human beings and their motivations and their foibles without judging them is really important.”

Perhaps best known for her novel Hummingbird House (reissued by Haywire Books in 2019), a National Book Award and a New Yorker Fiction Prize finalist, Henley is also an accomplished poet and playwright and is likewise a recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Montana First Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Willow Springs, South Dakota Review, and many other publications.

(Adapted from a March interview with Patricia Henley for The Rumpus—full text accessible here.)

Christine/Bookish: One of the great pleasures of reading this collection is how immersive and specific each story is. I’ve heard beginning writers say, “I didn’t include many details because I want everyone to be able to relate to this story.” Exactly the wrong way to go about it! Do you often begin a story with a specific image or detail about a character?

Patricia Henley: I usually begin with place. The elements of my sense of place, geography, the flora and fauna, the climate and seasons, the culture of work in a particular place, the leisure—all that—keep me grounded. I start with a place and add a character. I believe it was Barry Lopez who wrote that landscape shapes mindscape. Where we are shapes who we become. It’s the details that engage readers emotionally and allow them to enter fully into the world the writer has created.

CS: Most of the stories in Apple & Palm are set in Whistle Pig, a small town in the Appalachian region of Maryland. Some of your characters have left for bigger cities such as Chicago, but are drawn back for various reasons. Others have lived there much, if not all, their lives. I see that whistle pig is slang for groundhog and it’s also a brand of whiskey. What is your Whistle Pig based on?

PH: I don’t like driving. I’m often a passenger in a car and that gives me the chance to take note of the names of roads and streets. For several years, while riding through a remote area in Allegany County, Maryland, I’d spy a narrow street named Whistle Pig. I’m sort of fascinated by the choices people make when naming roads. It stuck with me. I decided it might as well be a small town, too. Whistle Pig is not based on a particular town. It is a work of fiction.

Although I love cities, and have my favorites, I seem to be pulled inexorably to small towns and rural places. I wanted to write about the small-town people I knew and loved, not the stereotypes. Philip Roth said that fiction is the exploration of private lives. And I saw the small town people I knew having creative, authentic, exploratory inner and outer lives.

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CS: Your characters are filled with desire for friendship, sex, and beauty, and in some cases, regret and nostalgia too. Aging and memory are also central themes. Would you share a little about what motivated you to explore these subjects?

PH: Many years ago I asked the poet Gerald Stern what the difference was between being his age and my age. I think I was around forty and he was almost sixty. He said, “I live in memory more.” I stole that line for one of the stories, in fact. I’m there now, almost two decades past sixty. I’m a woman of a certain age, as some people like to call it, a crone. Hence, my memories are plentiful and worth diving into. I’ve lived a full life. And about regret: it’s always there, lurking. I poke it like a bear. It’s more powerful than I am. But once in a while I can befriend it, make sense of it, by writing.

Aging is a ubiquitous topic among people I know. I think perhaps we discuss it more readily with friends who are experiencing aging, figuring it out, weighing our options, maintaining agency.

I can’t speak for other writers, but I have written fiction that explores the particular concerns of my age. In my thirties, I wrote often about romantic connections and relationships; in my forties, I was concerned with family life, both past and present. In my fifties, I realized that my wider concerns could be incorporated into fiction. I wrote the novel Hummingbird House, about the lives of women and children in wartime in Central America.

CS: The centenarian Roxy in “Currency” and her granddaughter-in-law Lulu, for example, are more like girlfriends than elder and child. Roxy subverts societal stereotypes of older women, i.e. that they don’t have a lusty appetite for life, carnal or otherwise. Are any of your characters based on family or friends or people you don’t know but admire? And whether or not that’s the case, do you occasionally fictionalize real people and events?

PH: I’ve been writing for over fifty years and I always try to follow the advice of Henry James: Be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost. Maybe it comes from growing up with trauma and being hyper-vigilant, always alert to trouble, signals, unspoken signs. It is a writerly habit to notice all the small and large things that comprise characters or potential characters.

By the time they reach the page, I may not even recall the source of a snippet of dialogue or a gesture or a bit of clothing. A tiny detail might come from sixty years ago. My characters tend to be amalgams of all I have observed in the world, with a generous dose of imagination folded into the mix.

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CS: Jill Zebrak, orchard owner and longtime Whistle Pig resident, appears in or is mentioned in many of the stories in Apple & Palm. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge came to mind as I read—both how Jill and Olive K. share a few personality traits and how Jill struck me as your book’s presiding spirit, i.e. on the periphery when she’s not central to the story. Was Strout’s Olive an inspiration and what were others—books, films, other media?

PH: I did not intend, at the start, for Jill to be the presiding spirit of this collection. But she kept resurfacing. She made the decision early in her life to accept her asexuality and fly solo, without a romantic partner.

Questions about sex and gender expectations are in dispute for some of the characters in Apple & Palm. The women in Jill’s orbit intuitively understand that Jill fully owns who she is. Without being entirely aware, some of these characters yearn to be strong like Jill. I saw a meme recently that purported to quote Margaret Atwood, I say “purported” because who knows these days whether quotes are accurate. Supposedly, Margaret Atwood said or wrote that the desire to be loved is the last illusion. Once that goes, you are free. That’s Jill Zebrak. She is a north star guiding the other women, even when they resent that.

As for books, films, media—we don’t have to go far these days to read a news feature or a post on social media that depicts women questioning the role of romantic love in their lives. It’s in the air we breathe. I admire the brilliant Melissa Febos and the books she has written about desire. Febos writes in The Dry Season: “… I craved time. I wanted more time to write, to dance, to sleep, to read, to meditate, to exercise. I marveled at people who had hobbies. It’s hard to have a hobby while juggling multiple obsessions.”

Jill, in Apple & Palm, decided long ago to eschew the obsessions of desire, love, lust, attachment—all the drama. Doris Lessing once wrote that love has turned into a kind of illness, a madness that destroys everything else. I hope this collection will be part of that public conversation.

CS: The Lessing quote mentioned above certainly is borne out in the title story when Jill comes to the rescue of three young girls who lose their mother and father suddenly and violently. Would you say more about this, specifically in regard to the posts you mention above made by older women?

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PH: Jill is free. In “What Goes Around,” she is free to offer shelter to her niece Harper who is recovering from a disfiguring car accident. In “Apple & Palm,” she doesn’t hesitate to take in the three girls who have lost their parents. She doesn’t have to negotiate it with a partner. She doesn’t have to persuade someone else to agree to open a home they share.

That’s what living solo is partly about. If you are straight, you don’t privilege a man over others. There is no man constricting Jill’s life, making it smaller. I’m not saying that flying solo is the right decision for all women of a certain age. I’m saying that it’s not a choice to denigrate; it’s a choice to be honored when a woman chooses it. You can be whole without a romantic partner.

CS: You’ve published several acclaimed story collections and novels, and presumably are comfortable moving between the two forms (along with poetry and nonfiction). Do you prefer the short story to the novel, however?

PH: To commit to a novel, it needs to be a story that I feel called to tell. I need to be motivated by a passionate curiosity. With Hummingbird House it was the demise of the Mayan people and the lives of women and children in wartime. With In the River Sweet (Anchor Books, 2004), a novel set partly in Vietnam, I wanted to write about a woman who had a long-held secret that was finally coming to light, and I wanted a political backdrop because that allowed for several lines of tension. I enjoyed doing research in Vietnam and Guatemala for these books.

Writing short stories feels like sculpting a clearly defined head out of clay. It’s visible right in front of me. It is a finely made object that may be completed in a few weeks or months.

When asked by a student what she did, when she couldn’t write, Grace Paley said, “I visit my sister.” I loved her answer. It epitomizes the short story lifestyle. A novel requires enormous patience and diligence over the long haul.

CS: You’ve been writing and publishing short stories with distinction for many years, but is there an element you still find yourself wrestling with as often as not when writing a new story—point of view, the balance of scene and summary, time?

PH: The question of time is one that needs to be resolved early on. How much time in the life of the characters will the story cover? The shorter the time span, the easier it is to write, perhaps. But I’m keenly interested in how the past informs the present, like a therapist, I suppose. Students are frequently advised to keep the story in a present time storyline.

A better rule is this: If you switch time frames, make sure there’s sufficient tension in each time frame. For that tenet I can thank Rust Hills, former fiction editor of Esquire and author of the craft book Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Figuring out the role of the past, and then figuring out how to economically reveal it—that is always a challenge. 📗

Opening to first story in Apple & Palm:

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One spot remaining: Aug. 8 - 14 in Valencia, CA at CalArts, hosted by Vermont College of Fine Arts, a summer fiction workshop I’m scheduled to teach: “The Long and the Short of It,” open to all writers & part of VCFA’s annual writers conference. Registration form is here & more info on the various workshop offerings is here.

A preview of May’s agent list is accessible here. Bookish yearly subscriptions are 30% off.

Next week’s feature is an interview with Patricia Henley about her new story collection, Apple & Palm. It’s National Short Story Month! Thanks to , over at his Substack , for including The Virginity of Famous Men in a recent post.

📗

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Welcome new and returning subscribers ☀️

This week I’m traveling for work and trying to stay above the waterline, and today’s post is a short assortment of literary resources, including and a couple of fascinating conversations I listened to in the last few days:

’s interview with Patrick Radden Keefe for his new book London Falling for Brad’s Otherppl podcast (so interesting that I’m tempted to listen to it again).

, who publishes the Substack, spoke with novelist and short story writer Karen Shepard earlier this week. (A Bookish interview with Aimee is coming soon.)

’s conversation with for was likewise absorbing (and reassuring—history shows us, over and over, what happens to people who think it won’t repeat itself. )

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MFA Lore

Karen Shepard on the Epistolary Essay, Mixed-Race Family Heritage, & Publication in 'The Paris Review'

“It was when I was going through all the papers that I had from her, and made some discoveries that I hadn’t known would be in there, that the form of the essay and just the desire to write the essay came about…

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a month ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · Aimee Liu and Karen Shepard Author

National and international writer and artist residencies:

Book contests:

New (flash) story:

Earlier this week, I published a flash story, “Tax Day,” in Flash Fiction Magazine. I don’t often write stories based on actual events, but this one is an exception (I couldn’t get this poor woman off my mind.)

Two upcoming events:

📘 If you’re in Chicago today, Friday, May 15, at 6:30 PM: join me for a reading featuring some of Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies graduate creative writing program faculty at the Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago. Readers: Naeem Murr, Donna Seaman, Rachel Swearingen, Jim Stewart III, and John McCarthy. I’ll be there to host.

📕 For friends and literary travelers in Los Angeles: on Wednesday, May 27, 7 PM, please join Michael Elias and me at Chevalier’s Books, 133 N. Larchmont, L.A., where we’ll be talking about Michael’s new novel Bender’s L.A. (A favorite line: “He got into his 1954 Alfa Romeo Giulietta, a car of such temperamental nature that when Bender turned the key in the ignition, he had already done something wrong.”)

Along with writing books (incl. You Can Go Home Now, a great 2020 noir novel), Michael is a screenwriter (The Frisco Kid, Young Doctors in Love, and he cowrote The Jerk with Steve Martin and Carl Gottlieb). He’s also acted and written for TV.

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And is offering an online class, Saturday, May 23, 9 AM Pacific: “Write Your Pitch in 15 Minutes”: “A 60-minute workshop for freelance writers that ends before perfectionism kicks in. You have a story idea. You’ve had it for a while, actually. And somehow, the pitch still isn’t written.” Suggested donation: 15 euros. More info available here.

A preview of May’s agent list is available here. Yearly Bookish subscriptions are 35% off through tomorrow, May 10.

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Greetings fellow book nuts and book-nut adjacents,

Novelist Cynthia Weiner and I met at the AWP conference in Baltimore this past March, but her reputation as a skilled fiction writer preceded her—along with her short stories, published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and other esteemed journals, I’d heard nothing but fervent praise for her debut novel A Gorgeous Excitement. I can’t properly convey how smart, assured and engaging this book is. Line by line, it’s truly a serious accomplishment.

Along with a real-life crime, the August 1986 “preppy murder” in Central Park of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin by popular, handsome chameleon Robert Chambers, Weiner’s dramatization of the subsequent media-led character assassination of Levin is skillfully and horrifyingly conveyed, as is her protagonist Nina’s coming-of-age in a household with an unstable parent.

If you haven’t yet read A Gorgeous Excitement, I hope you will soon. It’s now in paperback and the ebook is currently on sale at Bookshop.org for $4.99.

Christine/Bookish: In A Gorgeous Excitement you viscerally convey the thrill of being young in New York City in the 1980s, along with the late-adolescent intensity of wanting to be seen, to no longer be a virgin, to be included. In the foreword, you mention that for years you’d wanted to write about the August 26, 1986 murder that is the book’s focal point. I’m wondering what eventually spurred you to do so, and as a novel rather than a work of nonfiction (or a screenplay or poetry collection).

Cynthia Weiner: I tried for years to write about this time and the murder as a short story, from various perspectives, but it wasn’t until I figured out that it was emotionally and temporally connected to another story I’d been trying to write—a girl’s profoundly depressed mother becoming manic over the summer of 1986—that I realized what the story was for me: the way an insecure young woman’s reckless behavior in pursuing the acceptance and admiration she craves mirrors her long-depressed mother’s increasingly erratic behavior as she ascends into mania; and how their parallel, newfound “excitement” is actually illusory and self-destructive.

As ideas, scenes, and characters came to me, I realized it was going to need more space than a short story would provide. I didn’t write it as memoir because I wanted to portray characters who have the naïveté and biases of the time, versus looking back on events with any kind of “wisdom.”

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CS: The book’s title and epigram come from Sigmund Freud’s Uber Coca, in which he characterizes the effects of cocaine as “...a gorgeous excitement and a maniacal compulsion to move.” Even if I didn’t know this novel is based on a real crime, I’d be in immediate suspense reading this. When/how did this title come to you?

CW: I’m glad it drew you in! It wasn’t until fairly late in the game that the title suggested itself, but once it did, it seemed like the right encapsulation of the book’s story and themes (not to mention the cocaine use!). Also, I like how jangly and frenzied the words “gorgeous” and “excitement” sound next to each other; separately, they’re positive and enticing, but together they hint at something feverish and out of control, which is kind of what the book is about.

CS: Nina, your POV character, isn’t you, nor are her friends meant to be viewed as your actual friends, but there are some overlapping situations and characteristics—most remarkably, perhaps, that you knew Robert Chambers socially, the “preppy murderer.” How did you balance actual events and people with the demands of the novel?

CW: I wanted everyone and everything in the book to feel authentic, even characters and events that were fictional or fictionalized. Using historically real people and occurrences to ground and time-stamp the fictional aspects helped a lot: the Mets’ World Series run that summer; Len Bias’ cocaine-induced death before he played a single game with the Boston Celtics; the street slashing of Marla Hanson that I mentioned before; film references like The Fly and Ghostbusters; Mayor Koch; Playland for fake IDs; Palladium, where Nina and Stephanie have a wild night together.

Even though I changed the name of the Upper East Side bar where so much happens from Dorrian’s to Flanagan’s, I described it as accurately as I could. And, of course, the Preppy Murder itself. Although I fictionalized key aspects of it, the killing was so shocking and inconceivable I sometimes had to remind myself that it really had happened. I tried to stay true to its core by capturing the attitudes that shaped public opinion and the media’s narrative, and the profound impact it had on our thinking about the power dynamic between young men and women.

Some of my real-life experiences with Robert Chambers made it into the book and helped vivify Nina’s infatuation with Gardner Reed [the fictionalized Chambers] as well as her inability to see and heed the red flags.

One night, Nina bonds with Gardner at Flanagan’s over one of those magazine personality tests; I clearly recall giving the real-life Robert Chambers a personality test at Dorrian’s (his favorite animal: gazelle).

Another, darker memory is a night in my parents’ apartment when he violently grabbed my arm because I had thrown the remnants of a joint out the window prematurely. That memory became a scene in the book where Gardner violently grabs Nina’s wrist after she tosses an expensive watch into the East River, which they’d stolen from Gardner’s friend’s father.

But overall, the characters and the situations they find themselves in are fiction. Changing all the names and personality details helped, as well as finding visual images of people who weren’t the real characters that inspired them, so that I could let my imagination be free to create them. And I just kept working to make the details as colorful and interesting and vibrant as I could, with a (hopefully) much tighter narrative than a real-life story naturally has.

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CS: As noted above, you lived in New York City at the time your novel is set, but I’m guessing you still had to do quite a bit of research to build the world of A Gorgeous Excitement. What forms did your research take?

CW: I was actually surprised by how much I remembered! Stores, clothing brands, music, what it felt like to be eighteen: it all came to me pretty easily, as if I’d never left the ‘80s. But I did collect a ton of photographs (of the subway, nightclubs, preppy boys), pored through a 1986 Hewlett yearbook, read a lot of old New York magazine articles and restaurant listings, and ordered some old perfumes off eBay (Opium, Anais Anais), scent being an incredibly helpful source of memory.

A serendipitous, if gruesome, find through research was at the New York Public Library, where I was looking through microfiche (!) of the Daily News, and discovered the date I always wanted the novel to start—the first Friday of June, 1986—happened to be the date that the assault of Marla Hanson hit the news. She was the young model whose landlord hired two men to slash her face with razor blades. The novel starts with a reference to that incident, and its violence and misogyny are motifs throughout the book.

CS: You explore sexual obsession, risk-taking, and the allure of personal charisma in this novel. What draws you to the psychology of obsession?

CW: There’s so much drama and richness in obsession, how it compels us to act in ways that are risky and often self-destructive. Obsession overrides judgment. A positive aspect of obsession, if there is such a thing, is that it can provide a kind of comfort zone when everything else is in conflict, pain, or turmoil, or a sense of excitement where the rest of one’s life seems bland. It doesn’t last, of course, and the consequences can be devastating.

With A Gorgeous Excitement, I wanted to illustrate how a young woman, bright and curious and from a “good family,” yet crippled by self-doubt and shouldering the shame of a family secret, might have a high tolerance for, or even a need for, the risk-taking and self-destructive behaviors that drive her obsession with someone who seems to be the answer to her struggles.

Obsession can be awful in real life, but it’s a lot of fun to write and read about.

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CS: What are you working on now?

CW: A (very nascent) novel about a woman who’s kept a dark secret for ten years that she now may have to confess, involving a man who murdered a couple in their home during an alcoholic blackout.

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Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was named a Best Book of 2025 by the New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, and Oprah Daily. Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

A Gorgeous Excitement’s opening:

The Flannery O’Connor Award (University of Georgia Press) for short story collections is open for submissions through May 31.

Ragdale is open for residency applications through May 14, 11:59 PM CT. More information & application portal here. “A residency at Ragdale offers individual artists 18 days of uninterrupted time and space to focus on their work, surrounded by remarkable Arts and Crafts style architecture, cozy spaces for gathering and working, and the camaraderie of an exceptional cohort. Residents gather on weeknights to enjoy delicious meals made with ingredients harvested from our gardens whenever possible. Residents have access to 20 acres of open prairie land maintained by our friends at Lake Forest Open Lands Association. A local train line provides a quick trip to and from Chicago.”

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Today’s post is May’s list of agents currently accepting queries. A preview of April’s list is available here. Last week’s post, an interview with poet Ruth Dickey, can be found here. Next week: an interview with novelist Cynthia Weiner about her debut novel A Gorgeous Excitement.

I’m keeping today’s introduction brief. Yesterday I flew home from a writing retreat hosted by Foreword Retreats in Blaye, France. The Harry Potteresque chateau where the retreat took place is in the photo below.

I’ll leave you with a dumb joke that made me laugh out loud: Have you heard about the sauna that serves food? Their specialty is steamed mussels. 😬

35% off yearly subscriptions thru 5/9

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A preview of April’s agent query list is available here. May’s agent list will be out soon, as well as interviews with novelists Cynthia Weiner and Patricia Henley. Bookish subscriptions are 30% off.

I couldn’t let National Poetry Month pass without an interview with a poet! Today’s Bookish post features Ruth Dickey, who let me pepper her with questions about her most recent collection, Our Hollowness Sings, which I could not put down—it brims with riches.

Ruth and I met in a poetry workshop during our senior year of college, one taught by the great Roland Flint (RIP), poet laureate of Maryland from 1995-2000 and a Georgetown professor for nearly thirty years.

Along with writing poetry, Ruth has worked in the non-profit arts sector for close to three decades and is currently the executive director of the National Book Foundation. She’s also taught poetry workshops in the D.C. schools, at soup kitchens and drop-in centers, and is a co-founder of the the women’s monthly open mic mothertongue.

I remember Ruth’s poems from our long-ago workshops, their clarity and unassailable lines, each word having earned its place. The poems in Our Hollowness Sings move fluidly between celebration and elegy, the sublime and the material. The world is so much with us, her poems reminded me, and how fortunate we are this is true.

Christine/Bookish: There’s an alternately celebratory and elegiac quality to many of the poems in Our Hollowness Sings. Your parents, for example, are remembered with such clarity, affection, and grief.

"I stop listening, spinning out among quarks,
lost in my face tilted skyward, imagine I’m basking
in light from above
my skin aglow with songs
my mother sang me, my father’s guitar, aflame."

Did you begin this book thinking grief and family would be central themes?

Ruth Dickey: These poems were written over a period of years when I was sitting with deep grief – for my parents, for my marriage, for my dog, for the life I’d imagined would be. They were written poem by poem with zero attention to the idea of a larger book or project. I was lucky to be part of a group of women poets who tried to write a poem a day in April and November for several years, and many of these poems have their roots in poems that began in those months.

The themes bubbled up because they were the issues I was circling and wrestling with during these years, and then I tried to revise towards them as I ordered and put the collection together.

CS: I was particularly struck by the musicality and line-by-line energy* of your poems. Your title, i.e. the idea of singing issuing from a hollow space, is arresting too. How does sound shape your writing process? Do you often read lines aloud as you write?

RD: Ah, I love this thoughtful question—thank you! Some of my earliest and most formative poetry communities were rooted in sharing poems out loud—whether that was in writing workshops I led in DC at soup kitchens or other community spaces, in mothertongue, a monthly DC women’s open mic I co-founded with Karen Taggart, or when I was teaching in DC middle schools with the youth poetry slam league.

Across these spaces, my initial approach to poems often centered on how they sounded and felt when read aloud. Sound is still really important to me, and I absolutely read poems out loud as I write and edit, both to find what’s working, and to find the tangles and spots that need work.

CS: Many of the poems in this collection, and in your first, Mud Blooms, are written in couplets. What draws you to this form? (When I read poems written in couplets, it’s like the writer is allowing us to breathe more fully, suggesting visually that we slow down.)

RD: I found the couplet form by happy accident—I’d stumbled across a few poets who used it, and it just felt like a poetic home to me. My poems are often narrative, and long line couplets allow me to honor that narrative impulse while preserving a poetic structure. They also allow me to play with line break and sound in ways that are interesting to me. I also love, and I love the way you articulated it, that there is so much space in this form.

Because so many of these poems were trying to hold things that I find hard to hold, having space around them felt particularly important.

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CS: I love that your dog also appears in several of your poems, and how movingly you write about the city as well as wilder areas of the earth. From “Frost psalm”:

The grass crunched silver on my morning walk.
Pine trees are found in all 50 states.
Every night, I lie awake.
I am afraid of ruining everything.

I’m wondering who (and what) your primary influences are, both literary and worldly--e.g. the weather, the ocean, the birds outside your windows.

RD: Hooray for dogs, in poems and in life! I think in my work, I’m trying to pay attention—to the world around me (weather, ocean, birds, trees, trash, gum on sidewalks, all of it), to the people and creatures I’m trying to honor, to myself and – though I often fail—to my own breath and emotions.

I think one way of trying to get our arms around unbearable, unthinkable things is just to slow down and truly see them. So in the moments I couldn’t (or can’t) hold and metabolize loss, I’m trying (and failing) in these poems to take the reader with me, knowing that we’re all trying to hold and understand impossible things.

The world is so full of them, these impossible losses and griefs, in a daily way, and these days more than ever, in profound global, national, and local ways as well. And the idea and most fragile hope of these poems and this project was to hold all of that grief and loss and terrible with tenderness and space and (in the very most aspirational moments) grace. My hope is that if I can find a small space where my hollowness can sing, that perhaps that space can exist for the reader as well.

CS: Our Hollowness Sings is divided into three sections, “The season of losing things,” “Wallet of lottery tickets,” and “Look at me with horizon,” and some of the poems strike me as continuations or variations on a theme, for example, “Belladonna blessing,” “Gutted blessing” and “Tidal blessing,” “Hog plant psalm,” Early psalm,” “After, 1” “After, 2” and “After, 3.” Did these organizing principles take root as you wrote or were they there from the beginning?

RD: I really did write these poems one by one with no idea of a larger whole. It was only after I had a whole bunch of them together that the form of the collection began to crystallize for me. I’m forever grateful to the Whiteley Center in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island where I got to spread out piles of printed poems and began to find the larger shape. It was there I realized the poems were circling this central idea of how hollowness and loss might be honored and might also become something more than that.

I’m not religious (though I grew up going to church), but I realized the poems were my version of prayers and hymns and songs and chants—for all that I’d lost, but also for my hopes for what might be. I also realized that some poems were connected or were echoes of one another, and the sections of the book allowed me to heighten that, and to put those connected poems in conversation with one another, and in the context of a larger movement, from loss through grief and then gesturing toward healing.

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CS: What are you working on now?

RD: I’m not sporty, I’m not a hiker, I didn’t own a backpack, and yet, in this same time in my life when I felt overwhelmed by grief, I walked 400 miles of a historic pilgrimage, the Camino del Norte in Spain. I’ve been working on a memoir about that and what doing something that feels almost impossible can open in us, and I’ve loved getting to explore the same questions these poems are wrestling with, but in a very different form.

What’s been most interesting to me is how writing the memoir has continually surprised me and forced me to understand my own grief and healing in new ways, and particularly to think about what is unique about queer divorce, and what’s just regular old-fashioned heartbreak. Pilgrims navigate the Camino by following yellow arrows, and at the messy heart, it’s a project about learning to find and trust the yellow arrows of my life, however they appear.

—

* “line-by-line energy” is something I heard George Saunders say when he was in Chicago promoting his 2013 story collection, Tenth of December.

A poem from Our Hollowness Sings:

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Originally from North Carolina, Ruth Dickey is a writer and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, New York, who has spent 30 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. Her first book, Mud Blooms, was selected for the MURA Award from Harbor Mountain Press (2019), and awarded a 2020 Silver Nautilus for Books that Build a Better World. Her poems have recently appeared in Cave Wall, Kestrel, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rhino, SWIMM, storySouth, Vice Versa, and Zocalo Public Square. She was a co-founder of mothertongue: DC women’s spoken word and began her career as a teaching artist, leading poetry workshops in soup kitchens, drop-in centers, and the DC public schools, and she currently serves as the executive director of the National Book Foundation. More at ruthdickey.com.

Aug. 8 - 14 in Valencia, CA at CalArts, hosted by Vermont College of Fine Arts, a summer fiction workshop I’m scheduled to teach: “The Long and the Short of It,” open to all writers & part of VCFA’s annual writers conference. Registration form is here & more info on the various workshop offerings is here.

Greetings scribes and literary travelers,

Today’s post is an interview with fellow Substacker , who writes the erudite and always engaging newsletter. Denise’s fresh (and harrowing!) debut novel, The Unmapping, was published last year by Bindery Books.

A short summary: every night, New York City is literally rearranged—buildings shift locations, streets reconstitute themselves, and residents wake to an urban geography they don’t recognize. This nightly reset is inexorable and of course deeply unsettling, and what begins as a logistical nightmare soon progresses to an existential conundrum as the city’s infrastructure, institutions, and inhabitants struggle to adapt to a reality in constant flux.

At the novel’s center are Esme Green and Arjun Varma, members of NYC’s Emergency Management team, who must find effective methods for responding to the nocturnal reshufflings, public fear, and obstructive bureaucracy. The Unmapping’s speculative premise raises timely questions about climate change, political fragility, and humans’ pressing, often futile desire to impose order on chaos.

In our interview, Denise and I discuss the origins of her unsettling premise, the challenges posed by a perpetually shifting city, and her innovative new publisher Bindery Books.

Christine/Bookish: The premise of The Unmapping is both surreal and eerily plausible: a city rearranged overnight without warning. Where did the idea for this novel come from?

Denise Robbins: There is a very specific starting point to this book. I used to go on long walks after work to clear my head, and I would go on the same route every time. One evening I had something stuck in my shoe and stopped the walk midway through to remove it, and when I did I realized I had no memory of the past 30 minutes. I thought: what if everything had changed in that time? The idea came from there.

CS: New York City feels less like a backdrop and more like a living organism in your novel. How did you approach writing a city in motion—literally?

DR: I love New York City but didn’t really intend to write a story about New York City. There are too many books already about New York City. But for The Unmapping, about a city rearranging, I basically had to base it there. There is a shared grammar to the place that is hard to match anywhere else.

I needed to be able to say things like “the Empire State Building is on Coney Island” and have that be understandable. So given that, this city was more like the paint I used to play with on my own new canvas, where I could invent my own world.

I also did some practical things like reading the staff manual for the city’s emergency department, but didn’t hold myself to that. It was my own version of the emergency department in my own version of the city that was not a city but a microcosm for the world.

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CS: Your home state of Wisconsin also figures into The Unmapping with a fictional Door County represented as Gleamwood City. Would you share a bit about how G.C. is linked to the nightly unmappings?

DR: A few years ago, I walked into the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison and the entire first floor was taken over by a display of aluminum Christmas trees. It was… very bright!. It used to be a big industry up in Door County, which is otherwise this very rural, beautiful natural area between a bay and a Great Lake.

Something about the trees fascinated me. They symbolize religion, consumerism, tradition, industrialism, technology, and nature all at once.

Aluminum is flammable and also highly reflective. It’s what astronauts use as mirrors in space. In the book, there is a lot of reflection and refraction happening, because my idea of the unmapping started as a way for characters to get outside of themselves and see their lives from a different angle.

So that’s why I invented a fictional company town that was centered on these trees and dialed all the weirdness of it way up. The “unmapping” begins in this strange town.

CS: The novel gestures toward climate change and political unrest without naming a single cause for the titular unmapping. Would you comment on your decision to leave these forces somewhat ambiguous?

DR: At first I thought I wasn’t writing a book about climate change. My day job was climate change; my passion since I was eight years old was solving global warming. I thought this book was an escape from that, a respite.

Only about halfway through the first draft did I realize I actually was writing an allegory of climate change. It makes sense, because I lived climate change, and big things in your life tend to find their way into your work, whether or not you want them to.

Once I realized this, though, the story clicked into place in a new way. It became more urgent. It allowed me to access the characters’ minds and drive their reactions. And it allowed me to write a book about how the idea of climate change, the chaos of the matter, feels. That’s what I think surrealism can do: elevate a feeling.

The story “Orange World” by Karen Russell, for instance, is about a new mother who makes a deal with the devil, and learns quickly that most new mothers have made this same deal…when I read that, I was like, oh, this is what it feels like to be a new mother. There are plenty of nonprofits doing good work to communicate the problem of climate change very clearly. Fiction is working in a different vein.

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CS: You published this book with a newer press, Bindery Books, which uses innovative marketing and publicity tactics. How did you find Bindery and what were the pleasures and challenges of releasing your first novel?

DR: It was all my wonderful agent! I actually hadn’t heard of Bindery before I got the offer. When that came in, I was really curious about their model, and the more I learned, the more I liked it. Publishers these days are freaking out about social media, trying to find influencers to help sell their books. Bindery Books is going straight to the book influencers—whom they call “tastemakers”—and getting them to start their own imprints.

Now their entire communities can follow along with and get excited about the book publication process from square one. It was truly bizarre when she posted the announcement about my book and there were dozens of people commenting about how excited they were for it. It already had a fanbase, a year ahead of publication.

Working with Bindery also inspired me to be more comfortable using social media myself. I used to be anxious and perfectionist about every single post, and it was so stressful I pretty much quit every social media platform. But I started seeing it as a different artform, and that felt freeing.

Once you separate your sense of self from your social media, it’s not so bad. This freedom also allowed me to experiment more on Substack, which has been fun.

CS: What are you writing now if you don’t mind sharing a few details?

DR: I’m working on a novel that’s going to be big and unruly. It involves scientists resurrecting mammoths, but also love, academia, motherhood, and of course, climate change.

But novels take a long time, so in the meantime, I’m also getting more focused about writing essays on literature, science, and music on Substack! I’m also playing cello in the local community orchestra, which is just as exciting.

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Bio: Denise S. Robbins is from Madison, Wisconsin, the city where she grew up and to which she returned after sixteen years of living and working in climate activism on the East Coast. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author whose stories have been published in literary journals including The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, and many more. Her debut novel, The Unmapping, was published in June 2025 from Mareas at Bindery Books. She writes on Substack at denisesrobbins.substack.com.

Aug. 8 - 14 in Valencia, CA at CalArts, hosted by Vermont College of Fine Arts, a summer fiction workshop I’m scheduled to teach: “The Long and the Short of It,” open to all writers & part of VCFA’s annual writers conference. Registration form is here & more info on the various workshop offerings is here.

Now accepting submissions: Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (short story collection - 40,000-75,000 words) – submission period is April 1 - May 31.

BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize (short story collection, 100 - 200 double-spaced pp) - $1,000 cash prize, publication by BOA Editions. Submission period is April 1 - May 31. Judge is BOA publisher Peter Conners.

Last week’s interview with debut novelist Della Leavitt can be found here—yesterday, April 14, was her novel Vivian’s Decision’s publication date!

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The other night I opened email and lo and behold, a fan letter from celebrated Irish novelist Sally Rooney awaited me at the top of my inbox!

First reaction: What the hey?

Second reaction: This is definitely a scam.

Here’s an abbreviated version of the email:

Hi Christine,

I almost talked myself out of sending this. But when something sticks with me I’ve learned to just say something.

I came across Please Be Advised and what got me was the cast. A drunk, delusional CEO…a new office manager who is a disgraced former coroner…Nobody becomes a disgraced former coroner and then ends up managing a company that sells collapsible office machines without a story worth reading.

What I found really sharp was the company itself. Collapsible, portable, and occasionally dangerous office machines. That word occasionally is doing so much quiet work. It’s the kind of detail that makes you laugh and then makes you slightly worried…

And a work world more like our own than most of us would care to admit…The comedy works because the absurdity is only a few degrees off from reality.

I’m a fellow author, and have been publishing for a while. Not reaching out to pitch anything, just genuinely entertained by what I came across and wanted to connect.

Curious, where did Dr. Ken Crickshaw Jr. come from? He feels like a character who arrived fully formed and refused to leave.

Thank you for putting this one out.

Best,

Sally Rooney

International Bestselling Author | Ireland

Author of Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You

It’s not immediately obvious whoever’s behind this note is running a scam. As the recipients of scammy author-targeted letters yourselves, some of you know this particular variety of cyber-criminal tries to woo their victims by heaping on highly specific flattery, and it might take several email exchanges before they ask you for money.

Maybe they’ve created a charity they want you to donate to, or they have a publicist who can help you sell your book to millions. Or they want you to do a podcast interview or a book club appearance. They don’t immediately ask for money (and often say they never will), but before long, they inevitably do.

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Using AI, the sender was able to extract mostly accurate information about my novel-in-memos Please Be Advised. The signature, “International Bestselling Author,” is a tell—I very much doubt Rooney would state this if she were the real author of this email.

My natural/cynical inclination, when something seems too good to be true, is to believe it really is too good to be true. The sender’s email address also struck me as overly long/trying too hard. This is similar to the address used: “authoremail.sallyrooney@—”

Scams are easier than ever to implement with email, AI, fake websites, etc. The New York Times published an article in February about other author-specific scams. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it yet. John Warner over at published a post about his own experience with a cyber-scammer earlier this year too.

Long ago, in April 2015, when we were much younger and presumably more innocent, I also wrote an article for the New York Times about the monstrous grandparent scam, which my grandfather was a victim of. This scam is probably still out there, but as landlines disappear, I’m hopeful it’s a little harder for criminals to use it as profitably as they once did.

If secrecy is insisted upon, and/or immediate action/urgency is required, it’s very likely a scam. Or if something seems too good to be true, as in the case of writer-targeted scams, it most probably is.

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On a less dire note:

A new favorite song: “Thunderstorm,” by the great St. Charles, IL-based Dave Ramont. Dave recently started a YouTube channel and has three song clips up over there. Please take a look, like, subscribe. He’s one of the most talented singer-songwriters I’ve encountered anywhere.

He’s also a past Bookish interviewee—I spoke with him a couple of years ago about his music and his decision to donate a kidney to the U.S. organ bank. April, coincidentally, is National Organ Donation month!

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Aug. 8 - 14 in Valencia, CA at CalArts, hosted by Vermont College of Fine Arts, a summer fiction workshop I’m scheduled to teach: “The Long and the Short of It,” open to all writers & part of VCFA’s annual writers conference. Registration form is here & more info on the various workshop offerings is here.

A preview of last week’s post, April’s agent query list, is available here. Bookish subscriptions are currently 30% off. 📗

Greetings fellow literary travelers and welcome new subscribers!

Today’s post is an interview with Chicago-based writer Della Leavitt, whose debut novel, Vivian’s Decision, will be published on Tuesday, April 14. Della is a generous and supportive participant in the Chicago literary community, and she’s also an excellent example of a tenacious and talented writer who has worked hard on developing her voice and style on the page.

Before our interview, here’s a summary of Vivian’s Decision (adapted from the jacket copy):

When Vivian Jacobson, a mother of four, learns she’s pregnant again, she can’t imagine adding a fifth child to the family. Her husband Mel is a devoted partner, but works long days in his family’s Maxwell Street tavern, leaving Vivian isolated and overwhelmed in their suburban Chicago home. She pleads with Mel to permit her to have an abortion, Mel reluctantly agreeing.

Her doctor won’t risk his license but refers her to someone who will. Once she finds herself in the abortionist’s disgusting makeshift flat, she can’t go through with the procedure. As she flees, the man warns her the clock is ticking: if she decides to end the pregnancy, she must return within the week. As Vivian struggles with what to do next, she’s buffeted by a series of revelations, including her Jewish immigrant mother's parallel secret. Ultimately, she must find the courage to make the decision that is best for her family—and her own fulfillment.

Christine/Bookish: What inspired you to write Vivian’s Decision? Was there a particular memory, experience, or question?

Della Leavitt: One of my late aunts shared a phrase that a hostile druggist used to rebuke my pious Russian Jewish immigrant grandmother: “If you don’t want this baby, I’ll take him!” I wondered about that encounter and my sickly Grandma Della’s powerlessness to control childbearing and her associated health risks. She died young and each of her seven children named a child in her memory.

In early drafts of Vivian’s Decision, Vivian’s immigrant mother Hannah was the protagonist.

During subsequent revisions, as I explored Hannah’s daughter Vivian’s story, it became clear that women who bore children in the 1950s faced similar constraints to those of preceding generations. The novel evolved to become Vivian’s story alongside sections that reflect back to her mother’s experiences in the 1920s.

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CS: The novel is set in north suburban Chicago and the Maxwell Street area of the city. How did place shape the emotional and social pressures Vivian faces?

DL: Vivian’s Decision highlights the generational tensions between immigrants’ Old World traditions and the next generation’s aspirations amid American post-WWII hubris. Vivian and her husband Mel Jacobson are keen to assimilate into mainstream suburban culture despite explicit anti-Semitic attitudes and housing restrictions. Chicago’s Maxwell Street marketplace was the landing place for waves of European immigrants and African American migrants from the South.

Vivian and Mel’s parents arrived there at the turn of the 20^th century, having fled murderous pogroms from the Russian tsar and his cossacks. Although Vivian’s husband Mel continues to work in his family’s Maxwell Street delicatessen-turned tavern, Vivian aches to distance herself from that world and offer their children the opportunities for college that she and Mel were denied as children growing up during the Depression.

Vivian yearns for an independent identity outside the home, yet at the same time, she’s conflicted about measuring up to the impossible 1950s ideal of dutiful wife and perfect mother.

CS: What research went into portraying reproductive healthcare in the 1950s, and how did you balance historical accuracy with narrative momentum?

DL: NYC’s Tenement Museum’s virtual “tenement talk” about the history of birth control in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was my introduction to the punishing Comstock Act of 1873 that criminalized sending birth control and abortion-related items through the U.S. mail.

Research librarians at the Chicago History Museum’s Abramowicz Research Center, the Special Collections of the Chicago Public Library at the Harold Washington Library Center, and the Newberry Library guided me to sources about home births through the Chicago Maternity Center (1895-1973) details and national statistics from volumes written in the 1930s and 1940s. I revisited the documentary film, The Chicago Maternity Center Story (Kartemquin Films, 1976).

I wove that information into the novel’s arc along with narratives gleaned from various anecdotal accounts. One critique partner’s mother was a nurse in a local hospital that routinely performed elective D & C’s before Roe v. Wade. Many novels portray women’s desperation when contemplating an illegal abortion such as Joan Didion’s Run, River (1963), Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), and Jennifer S. Brown’s Modern Girls (2016) where a 1935 Jewish mother and daughter are both pregnant at the same time.

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CS: You resist simple answers and easy judgments in this novel. How did you navigate writing about abortion without turning the book into an argument?

DL: I state the obvious to say abortion has become an increasingly polarizing issue across today’s political spectrum. Yet despite efforts to codify restrictive laws surrounding reproduction options, abortion remains a deeply personal choice, no matter one’s political stance or religious beliefs. There are many reasons why a woman might consider taking this action. Her ultimate decision is not clear-cut, nor formulaic.

When I explored Vivian and her loving husband Mel contemplating termination of her fifth pregnancy, my goal was to portray the multi-faceted, complex nature of this decision. The poem “The Mother” (1945) by Pulitzer Prize winner, Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks, is important to the novel. A guide from the Poetry Foundation describes this poem as “neither pro nor con abortion.” I had a similar goal for Vivian’s Decision. From your question, I’m gratified to see that you believe that I accomplished this goal.

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CS: I know it was an odyssey to find the right home for Vivian’s Decision - would you say a little about how you decided on She Writes Press?

DL: After years writing and revising this novel, winning a grant from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events (DCASE) and a fellowship from the Newberry Library, I continue to believe in this story and sought a publishing option poised to best reach readers.

I was thrilled when award-winning She Writes Press, founded in 2012, offered me a contract. I appreciate the press’s emphasis on collaboration with my sister authors and direct communications with publisher and her dedicated staff. Given my longtime support of independent bookstores, She Writes Press’s distribution arm, Simon & Schuster, gives readers the opportunity to order my book through the indie bookstore of their choice.

My two launch events on April 14, 6:30 PM, at the Book Cellar in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood in conversation with Abby Geni, and on April 27, 6 PM, at Winnetka’s Book Stall in conversation with Lindsay Hunter, would not be possible without this traditional distribution channel. Also, I was excited to learn that Chicago’s Women & Children First and Judy Blume’s Books & Books in Key West will also carry Vivian’s Decision on launch day.

CS: What are you working on now?

DL: Many fellow workshop participants and editors have found two key secondary characters of Vivian’s Decision to be particularly intriguing: Vivian’s bossy, unmarried older sister Ethel Kolson, and Vivian’s mother’s bohemian friend “Aunt” Ruthie Lavin, who befriended Hannah when Ruth overheard her praying for a miscarriage in the women’s balcony of the old synagogue.

My new novel-in-progress takes place in 1930s Chicago where Aunt Ruthie takes Ethel on trips to the infamous Dill Pickle Club in Chicago’s artsy Towertown neighborhood and Ethel brings ten-year-old Vivian to see Sally Rand’s fan dance at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the Century of Progress.

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After careers in technology and math education, Chicagoan Della Leavitt turned to learning the art of writing fiction amid the vibrant Midwestern literary community, including the long-running Off Campus Writers’ Workshop (OCWW). In the early 1970s, the author, a first-generation college graduate, joined the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, sharing a feminist vision of a society to transform women’s personal, professional, and political lives. Years later, in her debut historical novel, Vivian’s Decision, Della contrasts 1950s-era pressures to be a dutiful wife and perfect mother against a woman’s yearnings for an independent identity. Given the current rise of punishing laws restricting women’s reproductive freedoms, Vivian’s Decision is all too relevant and timely.

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NB: Della’s fast-approaching launch events for Vivian’s Decision:

* Tuesday, April 14, 6:30 PM, the Book Cellar, 4736–38 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, with Abby Geni
* Monday, April 27, the Book Stall, 811 Elm Street, 6 PM, Winnetka, IL with Lindsay Hunter

April is National Poetry Month (it’s also National Canine Fitness Month, National Welding Month, Second Chance Month, and Earth Month)!

I found the poem below on a social media platform that in days of yore was a great connector of bookish people, but arggghhhh has since transmogrified into a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome-like outpost of malcontents and malevolent bots.

…on that note:

Before April’s agent list, two new books & reminders about three book contests now open for submissions:

Poetry: The Alice James Books Award – (48-100 pp - single spaced), “winner will receive $2,000, book publication, and distribution through Consortium. In addition to the winning manuscript, one or more additional manuscripts may be chosen for publication as the Editor’s Choice” - submissions deadline is October 17.

Fiction: Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (short story collections, 40,000-75,000 words; publication by University of Georgia Press) is now open for submissions, deadline May 31.

BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize (short story collections, 100 - 200 double-spaced pp) - $1,000 cash prize and publication by BOA Editions. Deadline is also May 31.

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Randy Richardson’s new novel Another Havana Hangover (sequel to 2023’s Havana Hangover), is now available! Paperback here, ebook here.

Vivian’s Decision, a debut novel by Della Leavitt, is out on April 14. Next week’s Bookish post will be an interview with Della.

A preview of March’s agent list can be found here. Other than a few early-days features, agent lists are the only paywalled posts. Bookish subscriptions are currently 30% off. 📗

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Denver Quarterly’s spring submission window for poetry and prose closes on March 31. More information and submission portal here.

32 Poems’ spring submission window is also closing on March 31. More information and submission portal here.

Granta likewise closes its spring submission window for fiction and nonfiction on March 31. It will reopen on June 1. More information and submission portal here.

New England Review is open for prose and poetry submissions through May 1, and a special feature related to Agnes Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I through June 15. More information and submission portal here.

Chill Subs has an extensive database that lists hundreds of literary journals’ submissions specifics. If you’re not familiar with that site, you can find it here.

Congratulations to Randy Richardson, whose new novel Another Havana Hangover (sequel to 2023’s Havana Hangover), is out on April 1! Preorders for paperback here, ebook here.

Today, Saturday, 3/28, is the national No Kings March. You can find a march near you at this link.

Last week’s post, “Big Fun (Possibly): Writing Exercises, Book Contests, and an Upcoming Event,” is accessible here.

Next week’s post will be April’s agent list. A preview of March’s agent list can be found here. Bookish subscriptions are currently 30% off.

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The Chicago Cubs’ opener at Wrigley Field this past Thursday didn’t go as well the ball club and its fans hoped, but there’s always…tomorrow (well, in fact, today - the Cubs face off against the Washington Nationals at Wrigley at 1:20 PM CT.)

To celebrate the return of the boys of summer, I’m publishing an excerpt from an interview with Rajesh Oza about his 2025 novel Double Play on the Red Line (Third World Press). The full interview was conducted by and originally appeared in .

Jim Garner: Can you give us a quick summary of Double Play on the Red Line?

Raj Oza: Here’s the quick version—

An American pastime. 
A wrongful conviction. 
An unlikely friendship. 
A life redeemed. 
A love letter to Chicago.

Here’s a longer summary:

Two American men of color—one Black, one Indian—are bound by a brutal encounter in Wrigley Field’s iconic bleachers. Ernie was poised to become one of the first Black players in the Major Leagues. But on the eve of his historic debut in 1953, his life is derailed by a wrongful conviction that steals 16 years from him. When he returns to Wrigley in 1969, it’s not as a player—but as a peanut vendor.

Ratan, a young journalism professor and avid Cubs fan, witnesses a violent assault on Ernie during a game and is galvanized into action. What begins as a moment of horror becomes a journey up and down Chicago’s Red Line discovering multiple truths and venturing deeply into the legacy of racism, silence, and survival in America.

JG: Your book examines social justice as it might play out against a backdrop of Chicago Cubs baseball. Did the theme come first, or the setting?

RO: Setting. This was always meant to be a Chicago novel. In college I read a lot of Saul Bellow and admired how he brought Chicago alive. Emulating Bellow, I’ve written a love letter to my American hometown; it’s as much a character as any of my novel’s humans.

JG: What was most challenging?

RO: Literary fiction must get its world-building right. In my late teens and early twenties, I spent a lot of time on Chicago’s elevated train system, exploring different parts of the city. While it was a joy to bring alive the stops and neighborhoods along my novel’s Red Line, I did a good amount of research to ensure the writing was geographically and historically accurate.

I do take some liberties such as calling it the Red Line in 1983 even though the CTA didn’t begin color coding the train system until 1993. So, what was challenging was blending the setting’s fact and fiction.

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JG: You use doppelgängers in your alternate history of those Cubbies. How did you decide on this literary device?

RO: I believe in the idea that all of us could have a parallel existence. I loosely translate the German doppelgänger to the baseball term double play. Most immigrants—maybe all people—have double plays. We wonder, “What if?” What if my family hadn’t moved from India? Who would I have been? Maybe a Bollywood stunt man; perhaps a screenplay writer; maybe a goonda (gangster). Most of the characters in Double Play on the Red Line wonder what their lives might have been, if only… Coulda. Shoulda. Woulda.

JG: Can you describe how the caste system of India weighs on the narrator’s mind and his actions in America?

RO: The narrator, Ratan, needs to find a way to connect with the other protagonist, Ernie. Empathy means being able to stand in the same emotional space with another human. Thus, I have Ratan reflect on how casteism (which affects his wife) and racism (which impacts Ernie) are universal structural hierarchies of power—who has it and who doesn’t.

I’ve long studied India’s caste system from an anthropological lens; but because I left India at the age of five, caste wasn’t my lived reality until much later in life. America’s racial inequality was—and continues to be—my experience of power up and power down … the red, white and blue lines.

JG: You mention baseball as a portal for immigrant kids to enter American cultural life, which is a classic idea. Can you describe your experience with it? Did you notice a difference coming from Canada? Are there other ways your friends with a South Asian background assimilated?

RO: My parents, siblings, and I moved to Canada from India in 1965; of course, hockey was king in Ontario. We moved to Chicago in 1969, the year of the Cubs’ late-season collapse to the Amazin’ Mets. Given that all the home games at Wrigley were played during the day, my summers were spent watching ball games with my two brothers and sister after watching Bozo’s Circus on WGN. Clowns at noon; dreamed-of-baseball-crowns at 1:00 p.m.

Whether the Cubs were at home or on the road, we’d play stickball. Sunup to sundown, the four of us gathered with neighborhood kids. We’d draw a rectangle on a park or a school wall and use that as the strike zone. Pitching, fielding (very light), hitting, and blowing bubbles with the gum packed with Topps baseball cards were good ways to become an American: just being a kid pretending to be a Major League All-Star before heading home and hitting the books. Sports, schooling, and television made for a pretty powerful hat trick of assimilation.

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JG: When will we see more ballplayers of South Asian descent?

RO: When crickets stop chirping. Given how popular and lucrative cricket is in England’s former colonies such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, it’s unlikely that those countries will be talent pipelines to the Major Leagues. In terms of homegrown American ballplayers whose ancestors migrated from the Indian Subcontinent, I absolutely believe we’ll see a South Asian baseball unicorn like basketball’s Jeremy Lin.

JG: Your background is in management consulting. Have you always written fiction while in that career?

RO: Yup. Fiction and nonfiction. For decades I wrote early in the morning before the paying work began; sometimes at lunch; occasionally in the middle of the night if the muse kept me awake. And now with Bardball, I write drivel vaguely resembling poetry.

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Dr. Rajesh C. Oza has contributed to Living in America and written Globalization, Diaspora, and Work Transformation; Satyalogue//Truthtalk; and P.S., Papa’s Stories. Over three decades he has written columns and book reviews for India Currents and Khabar. Double Play on the Red Line is inspired by his daughter’s experience with Northwestern University’s Innocence Project. Dr. Oza is a management consultant, serves on an advisory board at Northwestern University, and facilitates the interpersonal dynamics of students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He can be reached at www.satyalogue.com.

James Finn Garner is a "master of modern satire," according to a defunct Cleveland newspaper. He’s the author of the NYT-bestselling classic Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, and many other books, including the clown noir series starring Rex Koko (Honk, Honk, My Darling: A Rex Koko, Private Clown Mystery, et. al.) Jim’s Substacks are & .

Upcoming posts include interviews with authors Rajesh Oza, Della Leavitt, Cynthia Weiner, Patricia Henley, and Denise S. Robbins, and April’s agent list.

Bookish subscriptions are 30% off.

The L.A. Times Book Festival is Sat. & Sun., April 18 & 19. More details at the end of this post.

Greetings fellow literary travelers,

It’s now officially spring! If you’re like me, you’re also buying new outdoor plants because you don’t mind your neighbors seeing you fail publicly. Other people’s flowers, however, are blooming copiously here in Pasadena (the roses below are growing in a yard about a mile from my apartment).

‘Tis the (tax) season: the other day I read a fascinating post about taxes by fellow writer (and Bookish interviewee) Kelly Daniels, whose new Substack is —apparently the U.S. is the only country that requires its citizens to file their own taxes. (!!!?? #%^@)

March 28 in the U.S.: No Kings march - there’s very likely one happening near you.

Along with flowers, today’s post features several prompts and book contest deadlines.

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📘 Book contests 📙

The Alice James Books Award – (48-100 pp - single spaced), “winner will receive $2,000, book publication, and distribution through Consortium. In addition to the winning manuscript, one or more additional manuscripts may be chosen for publication as the Editor’s Choice” - submissions open through October 17, 2026.

The Publishing Laboratory - University of New Orleans (novels & short story collections - no word/page limit) - “the contest is open to all authors from around the world, regardless of publishing history” - submission period ends on August 31.

Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction (novel - submissions above 40K words recommended, but there is no hard minimum) - submissions close on September 30.

Opening soon: Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (short story collection - 40,000-75,000 words) – submission period is April 1 - May 31.

&

BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize (short story collection, 100 - 200 double-spaced pp) - $1,000 cash prize, publication by BOA Editions. Submission period is April 1 - May 31. Judge is BOA publisher Peter Conners.

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✒️ Writing exercises ✏️

Most of the prompts below can be written as poetry or prose.

Memory and associative logic

Write a series of sentences that begin “I remember.” (Joe Brainard’s book I Remember has spawned a lot of excellent homages; one by Sigrid Nunez appeared as a short story in Harper’s a few years back.) Be as specific as possible.

Suspense and raising stakes

Put a character in a situation where they must choose between two things but neither is an especially good option and write how they decide in real time. Be sure to include details about the setting too.

Subtext and vulnerability

Choose a character from a work-in-progress or make up a new character. Have them write a letter to someone they cannot or will not send the letter to. You might use this exercise to get to the core of what your character desires.

Third-person POV

Write a scene with two characters, one of whom is attracted to the other. The character who isn’t interested in the other person is reluctant to be direct about this, but by the end of the scene, it should be clear the person with the crush won’t get what they’re hoping for. Be sure to include sensory detail and concrete imagery to place the reader firmly in the setting where the encounter takes place. Write from only one character’s POV (third-person limited). Neither character is drunk or otherwise under the influence. One of them is romantically involved with someone else (it doesn’t have to be the person who is the object of desire)

Narrative voice - monologue

Write for at least ten minutes: let your POV character rant, confess, and/or rationalize a decision that others in their life find objectionable or otherwise suspect. Be sure to clarify what the circumstances that led to the decision are. Keep writing until you’ve revealed something about your character that surprises you.

🎉 Lastly…

If you’re in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 18, come by the USC campus for the L.A. Times Book Festival. I’ll be moderating a panel at 4:30 PM, “Nature is Healing...Or Is It? Humans and the Natural World in Fiction,” featuring novelists Anna North, Mariah Rigg, and Janelle Brown. Location: Ray Stark Family Theater/USC.

Andrew Martin, author of the novel Early Work and Cool for America (stories), has a new novel out, Down Time. He’s a big talent and I'm really looking forward to reading this new book.

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Bookish subscriptions are 30% off.

Deadline this Saturday, 3/21: National Poetry Series’ poetry collection contest (suggested length 48-64 pp - but no set requirements) submissions are due on March 21.

What I’m currently reading: Colored Television by Danzy Senna and Cynthia Weiner’s A Gorgeous Excitement (interview in the works). Stay tuned for an interview with poet Ruth Dickey too, whose most recent collection is Our Hollowness Sings. Other upcoming author interviewees include Della Leavitt, Rajesh C. Oza, and Denise Robbins.

If you were to happen upon a magic lamp with a resident genie, would you too wish for a deeply boring news cycle for the next few decades? I mean…😭 😱

Another question/non sequitur: If you were at all invested in the hoopla, what did you think of the Oscar winners? I had hoped Train Dreams would win something (best trees, at the very least—this should be an actual category). Along with Sentimental Value and Marty Supreme, this beautiful film, based on the novella by Denis Johnson, was the one I admired most last year.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day ☘️

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Today’s main attraction: an interview with Chicago-based novelist Naeem Murr. I loved his new novel, Every Exit Brings You Home, published in February by W.W. Norton.

In Every Exit Brings You Home, Naeem Murr has written a powerful exploration of a man navigating the fault lines between homeland and exile, conscience and survival, love and loss. Jamal “Jack” Shaban, a Palestinian immigrant from Gaza living in an ailing condominium building on Chicago’s north side, moves through his life as a caretaker: as a flight attendant tending to strangers in transit, a proxy superintendent managing the conflicts of his neighbors, and as a husband devoted to his wife, Dimra, whose fierce political clarity and physical suffering stand in stark contrast to Jack’s instinct for compartmentalization and secrecy.

Beneath his handsome and patient public face, Jack hides the pain of a history defined by violence and loss. Set primarily in 2007 and 2008 during a period of escalating violence in Gaza and the onset of the American housing collapse, Every Exit Brings You Home is deeply attuned to the meanings of home, exile, and return. Murr uses the intimate microcosm of a condo building—crowded with complex characters and daily frictions—as an analogue for much larger historical and political conflicts. The result is a work both personal and expansively geopolitical, animated by moral ambiguity, humor, and profound empathy…

(The full interview with Naeem Murr for The National Book Review is available here.)

Christine/Bookish: Jamal “Jack” Shaban is a generous, conflicted, wounded man whose past contains tragic and violent losses. He uncomplainingly and capably takes care of other people, as a flight attendant, as a husband to his wife Dimra who struggles with endometriosis, and as a proxy super to their neighbors in the ailing condo building, they inhabit in Rogers Park, a far northern Chicago neighborhood. How did he arrive in your imagination?

Naeem Murr: Every Exit Brings You Home was prompted nearly five years ago when I took a walk in my Chicago neighborhood one afternoon and noticed a man and woman sitting in an old Chevy Impala hitched to a U-Haul trailer just outside my condominium building. An infant sat asleep in the back. Though the couple were leaning tenderly against each other, they looked bereft—alone. I couldn’t tell if they’d arrived or were about to leave. It felt like the moment after the Biblical Fall.

My paternal family were Palestinian refugees in 1948, and for a while I’d been thinking about what “home” means for a Palestinian. Gaza was also on my mind because it had erupted into the worst violence in years over tensions in East Jerusalem. This prompted the idea for a novel about a Gazan immigrant to Chicago—Jack—the story catalyzed by a troubled and aggressive single mother moving into an apartment in his condominium.

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This book felt as if it had been gestating in me for a long while and was ready to be written. It just needed the trigger of the couple in the Impala. When a book is ready in this way, the characters appear more or less fully formed, emerging and deepening as the story itself progresses. Indeed, they are the story. Before I began writing the novel, I had no idea what Jack’s history in Gaza had been or why he was forced to escape. I had no idea he’d be a flight attendant, or that he’d lead such a compartmentalized life, lying to everyone.

Only after I’d completed the novel and could look at it a little more objectively did I begin to understand why Jack behaves in the way he does, living these separated lives, this man with a past too full of love to cauterize, too full of pain to integrate. He’s a good man, but morally flawed and deeply aware of the capacity for evil in himself—in all of us. When I began the novel, I thought he’d be single, but Dimra, his wife, appeared. She’s a perfect contrast to him, Palestinian to the bone and obsessed with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

For Dimra, being Palestinian and Muslim is her identity, her essence, her being: I am what I am. For Jack, it’s his predicament: I am not what I am. But, again, I didn’t think about any of this beforehand. A novel always fails if a character is not substantial enough early on to challenge the author’s desire to control his fate and story.

CS: In an interview you did with your publisher recently, you said you write fiction because your Anglo-Irish mother told you nothing, i.e. she never spoke about her past while you were growing up. Would you talk about this silence as a springboard to your becoming a novelist?

NM: I grew up in London in the ’70s and ’80s. There were two silences in my home. One was rooted in my deceased Palestinian father, a black-and-white glamor shot of a man in his twenties on the mantle. This was a vast but impersonal silence. The other originated in my mother, a single parent working three jobs whose life in Ireland would have made Angela’s Ashes seem like a beach read. But she never said a word about her past.

Her Irish brogue had been knocked out of her by the nuns at her convent school in Dublin, and she made sure that my brother and I spoke with an upper-middle-class accent far too posh for the working-class neighborhood we lived in. (At that time in England, the Irish were the lowest of the low).

All of this served to separate us as completely as possible from the suffering of her past, which also included her grief for my father. Childhood, of course, is the deep source of our creative selves, a time when the world has not been fully named, when we are at our most open and sensitive. In childhood, we know so little and intuit so much, intuitions that are not, at the time, articulated and therefore gather within them the primal force of mystery. From her silence, I intuited and absorbed the raw, generative substance of her tragic history.

When I published my first novel, The Boy, I received a letter from my mother’s sister. She seemed to believe that the book had been based on her life. In fact, I’d had no idea my mother had a sister.

That deep connection with a loving but mysterious mother became part of a general fascination with the truth that lay behind every grown-up façade. Every adult became, for me, an aperture into their pasts, the stories of their lives. But there was also something unknowable in everyone, and that unknowable thing, their mystery, provided them with their dimension and dignity.

For me, a significant character in fiction must maintain some level of mystery, of the unknowable within them. This is what brings them to life, allowing them to look back at me from the page. My fiction emerges out of mystery, silence, but the story isn’t an attempt to explain or solve that mystery, only to capture it in character.

CS: As alluded to above, Every Exit Brings You Home focuses on the complexities of identity, immigration, long-held secrets, and suppressed desires. Jack and his wife have emigrated from Gaza via Egypt to Chicago where they have lived for more than 15 years when the novel begins. What inspired you to set the story in a Chicago condo building?

NM: At the most fundamental level, fiction thrives on conflict. I’ve lived in a condominium building for a couple of decades. In that time, I’ve witnessed and often mediated a great deal of conflict between the residents. The novel is set during the 2007/8 housing collapse, the condo on the verge of bankruptcy, putting even more pressure on its occupants. The building also has two tiers of property, with the above-ground units far superior to a badly built basement unit that deteriorates alarmingly through the course of the novel.

Rogers Park, where the book is set, and where I live, is also one of the most diverse neighborhoods in America, full of immigrants, many of them escaping persecution or conflict in their own countries. A condominium building is a perfect setting to explore all the complexities of the struggle of diverse people to share the same space, particularly when some of those people, like May [a Vietnamese immigrant], have been victimized in their pasts. In this way the building becomes an intimate analogy of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, which is this same struggle writ large and in blood.

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Having joined thousands of other writers last week in Baltimore for our annual NeurosesFest, aka the AWP conference (Associated Writers and Writing Programs), I am still catching up on work and rest after the four-day gallop/wallop of the conference.

I hope you’re doing as well as possible. What to say about the present moment that isn’t prefaced by a string of expletives? The demons keeping track of hell’s occupants continue to add to their lists of future residents. 🤬

On a less profane note: if it hasn’t yet, may spring birdsong soon enter your home, although I hope not at two in the morning. (Here in Pasadena, unmated male northern mockingbirds have woken up entire neighborhoods as they cycle through their repertoire—obvi having ignored the memo that good manners are a highly ranked trait in a future mate.)

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Today’s post includes a few approaching book contest deadlines, information about a new Substack, , which features interviews with writers who haven’t yet published their first books, and you’ll also find links to resources I’ve put together for past Bookish posts since this newsletter’s inception in March 2023.

A preview of last week’s post, March’s agent list, is accessible here.

Artist and writer residencies, most in the U.S.

Artist and writer residencies, most outside of the U.S.

Assembling a literary anthology: a how-to

A guide to creating your own audio book

Poetry, fiction and nonfiction book prizes

“The Art of the Book Dedication”

Three book contests - deadlines soon upon us:

National Poetry Series book contest (suggested length 48-64 pp - but no set requirements), open January 7 - March 21, 2026. Five winning manuscripts selected for publication, $10,000 cash prize for each poet, $35 submission fee.

Prairie Schooner Book Prize (two prizes and two genres: short story collection & poetry collection - at least 50 pp), open January 15 – March 15, 2026. Each recipient receives $3,000, publication. $25 submission fee.

Black Lawrence Press’s Hudson Prize (poetry or prose - 45-95 pp for poetry). “The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book - annual submission period is January 1 - March 31.

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A Rumpus interview I did with Patricia Henley about her just-released story collection Apple & Palm (Curbstone Press) is here. Our conversation includes a number of Patricia’s excellent insights on the craft of writing. I loved this book. ⬇️

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Writer, former Chicago Tribune staffer, and film critic Mark Caro and I talked recently about the book business and all things writing-related for his podcast Caropop - if you’re interested, the episode is available here. 🎤

Tomorrow, Thursday, March 12, 5-7 PM PT: for Flash Fiction Institute, I’m teaching a course on comedic flash - still a couple of spaces left - link for more info & registration here. Comedy principle: Brevity is key/don't over-explain - My doctor told me to eat more salad, so I added ranch dressing to my pizza.

Lastly, sharing here details about ’s which “is a free newsletter where I interview unknown, unpublished authors about their completed manuscripts. The interview includes manuscript specs, a craft interview where I ask questions to orient the author within their target market, an author bio, and a short excerpt of their work. The goal is to cultivate an audience of agents, editors, and other publishing professionals who subscribe to my newsletter to peruse and acquire new talent before it hits the slush pile, thus making the newsletter function as an author showcase.” Evelyn is interested in hearing from writers whom she might interview for future posts.

Bookish subscriptions are 30% off.

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National Poetry Series’ poetry collection contest (suggested length 48-64 pp - but no set requirements) is approaching its March 21 submission deadline.

Prairie Schooner Book Prize (two prizes and two genres: short story collection & poetry collection - at least 50 pp) – submission deadline is March 15.

Black Lawrence Press’s Hudson Prize (poetry, short story, essay collections). The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers - submission deadline is March 31.

Bookish subscriptions are 30% off.

Other news and offerings:

Writer, former Chicago Tribune staffer, and film critic Mark Caro and I talked recently about the book business and all things writing-related for his podcast Caropop - if you’re interested, the episode is available here. 🎤

Over at , I gave a short interview in advance of a class I’m teaching on comedic flash fiction, 3/12, 5-7 PM PT. (Link for more info & registration here.)

Looking ahead, Aug. 8-14, I'll be teaching an in-person fiction workshop, "The Long and the Short of It," for Vermont College of Fine Arts' Writers Conference on the CalArts campus in Valencia, CA. Sue William Silverman (nonfiction), Vandana Khanna, and David Wojahn (both poetry)—along with several other instructors - workshops in prose, poetry, and dramatic writing.

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Today’s post is March’s list of agents currently open to queries. A preview of last month’s agent list is accessible here. Most Bookish material is freely available, but I paywall these once-a-month posts.

You’ll find last week’s post, an interview with screenwriter and YouTube luminary Glenn Gers is here.

If you’re currently at the AWP conference and have the time/chutzpah/stamina to add another event to your schedule, come say hello! I’m on a panel about literary podcasts and Substacks tomorrow, Friday, March 6, 1:45 PM, Convention Center, room 317, 3rd flr. I’ll also be taking part in the Cream City Review - Epiphany - Baltimore Review reading on Friday, 3/6. Event starts at 6 PM, upstairs at Peter’s Pour House, 111 Mercer St., Baltimore. Participant list & other info here. (Free and no tickets required, despite the event page tickets option.)

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Thursday, March 12, 5 - 7 PM Pacific: I’m teaching an online flash fiction class, Laugh Lines, focusing on humor for the Flash Fiction Institute (founding director is Grant Faulkner, whose new book is something out there in the distance). The course is equally suited for new and experienced writers—anyone wishing to write comedy based on the everyday, the personal and the public, and all categories in between. More info & registration here.

Upcoming summer workshop: Aug. 8-14, I’ll be leading a fiction workshop on the CalArts campus in Valencia, CA, “The Long and the Short of It,” for Vermont College of Fine Arts’ writers’ conference. Sue William Silverman & Vandana Khanna will teach nonfiction and fiction workshops respectively, along with several other writer-instructors - prose, poetry, dramatic writing - info & registration link here.

Bookish subscriptions are 30% off.

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Welcome new and returning subscribers!

Today’s post is an interview with Glenn Gers, a veteran screenwriter and one of the most insightful people on the craft of writing I know. There are so many passages I wanted to highlight I had to restrain myself when formatting our conversation (although some readers will probably raise an eyebrow, considering how many I did end up highlighting).

Glenn has a popular YouTube series, “Writing for Screens,” and recently published an excellent book on screenwriting, which shares titular DNA with his YouTube show, Writing for Screens: Skills, Tools & Process for the Art of Screenwriting.

Whether you presently write screen material or simply want to know more about the art and craft of writing creatively, I hope you’ll pick up a copy of Glenn’s book—it’s available in affordably priced paperback and ebook editions. 📗

Christine/Bookish: This book is an excellent balance of craft and practical advice. You include sections on characterization, structure, subtext, but also on finding an agent and handling one’s fear of writing. The art of screenwriting is for sure an encompassing and complicated topic—how did you decide what to focus on?

Glenn Gers: There are way too many screenwriting books. So my focus was: what can someone get from me they can’t get anywhere else?

I tried not to talk about things I didn’t have experience of first-hand. Instead of just echoing the agreed-upon formal conventions of the script itself, I wanted to look at the problems of being a writer no one seemed to talk about, the stuff I had to figure out for myself. That meant talking about the process of writing more than the type of contents everyone thinks the industry wants.

Similarly, I tried to shift the focus away from business. I strongly advise anyone looking for business advice to stop looking for that and get really good first. Develop your skills, your talent, your craft, your process.

I think of narrative art and the writing process as the basics. Over them there is a layer of specific craft for screenwriting. I try to keep the screencraft very short and simple. I want everyone to focus on the art, the process, the essential value of storytelling.

Then they can go make of that what they will—

I don’t want to tell them a certain structure or type of character is “great” or “universal,” because that is simply not true. There are many, many ways of shaping a narrative, and many, many things which can be said in that narrative. This whole approach of finding “the basic universal story shape” pisses me off no end.

The whole point of creative writing is to make it your own, which means there can be no absolute rules or formula. Tools, skills, methods: that’s what you can teach. What each artist does with all that is for them to figure out.

CS: One of the challenges for emerging writers is learning to think visually. How do you teach writers to translate emotion, conflict, and interiority into cinematic action?

GG: There is a mistaken belief that “cinematic” means “visual.” I suspect it’s a side-effect of historical trends (the factory filmmaking of the “golden age,” overthrown by the technological and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 70s), but it might simply be a sinister conspiracy by directors to rule the world.

Either way, the truth (well, my truth) is:

Screenwriters mostly need to think dramatically. They need to think in terms of behavior and dramatic action (meaning emotional, not necessarily physical, action between characters.) Turning everything visual can steer you to shallow spectacle and stimulation: eye candy.

It is important for a screenwriter to learn the difference between summarizing and dramatizing, to find the ways in which interior insights can be played out between characters. But none of that is necessarily visual. In life, most people act upon each other by speaking.

In fact, sometimes a writer is so busy “thinking visually” they neglect dramatic action, character depth, cause-and-effect, or emotional coherence: the stuff everyone actually needs from a script.

It is certainly great to understand the many ways ideas and feelings can be conveyed on a screen, but honestly if you write good characters in a good narrative, the director will find ways to “make it visual.” That’s their job. Your job is to give them people and a story.

CS: In your view, what distinguishes a technically competent screenplay from one that feels alive and compelling?

GG: The main thing that “elevates” competence is a writer caring about stuff other than filmmaking. Unfortunately, most screenwriting teaching focuses on technical competence, which leads to empty competence. It’s an art. People who know it’s an art will bring the art.

Of course, that will narrow the audience. That’s okay. It’s only a problem when you need something to sell more than anything else ever has sold. Not just profitable, but the most profit ever. It’s bizarre that we have come to equate sales numbers with creative quality. There was a time when “selling out” was considered a bad thing, not a career plan. Even when you get someone who’s both artistically exciting and popular (like Dickens or Spielberg), you lose another whole audience who feels that stuff is bland or easy. That’s not a matter of popular versus elite—it’s just the truth of creative work. Nothing is for everyone.

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The most important thing that brings life to creative writing is wanting to bring life—humanity, complexity, real experiences or emotions even within a fantastical genre. If you care about that, you’ll find your ways to do it. But most screen-teaching doesn’t talk about that, it talks about formula.

CS: You’ve spent years teaching screenwriting. How did your experiences in the classroom influence the structure, tone, or exercises in the book?

GG: I’ve only spent two semesters teaching in an actual classroom (at UCLA Extension). I’ve also guest-lectured a bit though. The primary thing I learned doing all that is less is more. Teaching creative work should never be about “learning everything and then you’re ready to work.” It should be about “go play with this.”

A lot of my approach came from the reality of putting my ideas into “how-to” videos. I had notes for a book, but I just felt there were too many screenwriting books. It felt futile to add to that mountain. Millions of people now choose to learn from YouTube, so I decided to turn my book notes into videos. (Joke’s on me, of course: the videos prompted people to ask me for a book version.)

The practical experience of trying to explain something verbally, i.e. directly, steered me to what I hope is a more accessible form of teaching and writing. For one thing, I couldn’t remember many lines when I was recording them, so I had to write short sentences. I had to to feel honest speaking these ideas directly to an imaginary student, so I couldn’t be all academic.

When I thought about what actually had been helpful to me while learning to write, it was never a complex intellectual framework...it was small practical steps and methods.

Most screenwriting books advance some over-arching theory-of-film. They assume a set of values, and they work from a set of “successful” examples. They work so hard to prove that all movies really have the same structure or message. That’s simply, factually, not true. Not all stories are hero journeys. Not all stories have three acts.

It’s good to collect different ways the art can work. But until you actually do it yourself, you know nothing about your own art. You have to make it. You have to discover it. You have to stop comparing and actually work with what you have, who you are, how you truly operate. And that is constantly changing! So you never get it “right.” And you are never “done.” So don’t wait, don’t set impossible goals, don’t look for reassurance. Learn by doing.

That’s why I try not to “prove” my ideas by showing examples from great films. The proof of whether an idea works for you is that it will actually work when you use it, in your way, for your project. If it doesn’t work when you use it, then it doesn’t matter how great it was in The Godfather.

I spent way too many years trying to get “ready” to write, and after amassing all this knowledge, I was still a rank beginner, a creative infant trying to learn to walk. The only way you learn to walk is to try it, and keep trying, and fall down, and see what parts of that worked and what parts didn’t.

When I am looking for help with something, I don’t want to read a whole book. I don’t want to fit into a system or have to learn a system. I just want tools, techniques, skills.

The truth no one wants to emphasize (since it puts us out of business) is: what helps writers is writing. If they’re reading my book, they’re not writing. My main goal is to give them some short, active thing to try—and ask them to put my damn book down and go try stuff.

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CS: Are there common mistakes you see beginning, and even advanced, screenwriters make that you were particularly eager to address here?

GG: I try to focus on mistakes of process, not content.

The most common is not paying attention to what works for you. Thinking there is a “right way” to do creative work, or that there is a “right version” of your work that you’re trying to get to—instead of the truth: you’re making choices, and you can’t control how people will react to them, so you’d better like it yourself.

Everyone is different. Every artist has to honestly ask what they want out of making art, and what they can realistically accomplish right now. There’s no point worrying about the hunger-games of professional writing when you are just starting out. Not everyone is built for that. And that game is no longer the only way to be creative in the scriptwriting

Have fun, get better, get familiar with writing. Do what you can, as who you are, with what you have, right now.

But if things are not working—if you’re unable to write, or your writing isn’t coming out as you want—then instead of looking for some content formula to follow, look at how you do the work. Focus on the process, the pleasure, the artwork itself—not the result. Think in scenes. Break the work into small steps. Ask questions. Make writing a ritual that fits into your real life.

CS: For writers coming from fiction-writing or playwriting, what are the biggest conceptual shifts they need to make when writing for the screen?

GG: Well, first off: see Question #2.

But then also, I think most of the conceptual shifts are built in for you. The screenplay format itself steers you to limit what you write to (mostly) what characters do and what they say.

Screenwriting convention takes care of the rest: scenes oughtn’t to run too long (a half-page to three or four pages usually.) Long dense paragraphs of text get scripts tossed aside (or, if digital, deleted). There isn’t really anything wrong with a sentence or two of insight into the internal workings of the characters, or essayistic opinions on them—but most of what’s on the page should be laying out what the people are doing to or with each other, in their reality.

Not what information you need to convey. Dramatic action: people trying to do something to or for or with the other people they are with, in that unique moment.

I actually believe the biggest hurdle for fiction or stage writers coming into screenwriting is understanding that you’re an employee. Screenwriting contracts mean the writer has no ownership or control over their work. You’re doing work for hire, even if you are selling them a genius, artistic original script.

Once it’s sold, it’s theirs: they can rewrite it without telling you; they can even simply use it as the jumping-off point for a whole other version.

And more often, you are simply hired to work on someone else’s project—you are putting your talent and skills at the service of some other person (hopefully talented) who is making the final choices. Often you are just one of a team of writers.

Producers, actors, executives and hosts of others may tell (not ask) you to change your work—often in conflict with each other. That’s the job. As Don Draper memorably explained (see the amazing Mad Men episode, or if you must, the meme): That’s what the money is for.

CS: Writing for Screens positions itself as a practical guide rather than a prescriptive formula. What gap did you see in existing screenwriting books that this one aims to fill?

GG: I think the biggest problem with most existing screenwriting books is that they are professionally-focused. This is understandable: for almost a century, there was simply no way to make a film without a huge amount of money and technical expertise. Even indie films required professional equipment.

But that has entirely changed in the past 20 years. For the first time anyone can make and distribute a movie with stuff they already have. Or stuff they can buy, consumer-grade stuff you can play with at home.

So making a movie can be like writing a song or drawing a comic book. You can do it by yourself. You can do it badly.

My focus is on the creative art of it, not the business. The more I worked on it, the less I cared to talk about the results. Process. The joy of making, experimenting. Differing goals, differing talents, differing uses of the medium are all possible if you learn how to get comfortable with the basic process.

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CS: Lastly, how do you address revision in the book, particularly the emotional difficulty writers often face when reworking a script?

GG: There’s a whole chapter about this in my book and a video on my YouTube channel each with the subtle title, “Rewriting.”

But if I had to come up with three desert island tips on rewriting, they would be:

Spiral

In the good sense: come back around. And around, and around. Way too often the writing process is taught as a line: first you have a segment of outlining, and then a first draft segment, etc.

Very few writers ever experience the process that way. You don’t complete one way of thinking (which is what each stage of the process is: a way of thinking) and then set it aside. You do a little bit of outlining (i.e. structural, conceptual or summary thinking) while you write the first draft or revise it.

You do a bit of first draft (i.e. rough, raw, creative spitballing) while you’re outlining. And you never get it all at once. You get bits, flashes of inspiration, but other bits you’re just putting in a placeholder.

So the process that lets you do this without fear is a spiral. Each time you come around, you focus on a different element; it is a little different, and you are a little different. Maybe you only tweak a few things each time around. Maybe you skip some parts. That’s all fine, because you’re making it a bit tighter or closer to your chosen center.

And that idea of the “chosen center” points me at the next tip:

Stop Trying To “Get It Right”

A lot of writers and teachers talk as if there is some actual right version of the work waiting for you to get to it, but that’s not true, as any browse through making-of materials or artists’ biographies will show you.

Any work of art is the result of choices and accidents. You learn as you go. You guess. You work with what you have. Every word, every scene, every character is a pile of choices you make because you have values that steer you to one choice or the other, and because you have instincts, which we could also call talent or vision or inspiration. You simply like one color more than another for that bit, you feel something should go faster or slower at that moment.

All that “get it right” stuff is mostly trying to adhere to a formula, which is generally a great way to end up with lifeless, boring work. It’s also a great way to paralyze yourself.

One of the central tasks of being an artist is getting comfortable making choices. Learning to accept that you’ll never know if it will work until it is too late. Learning to balance what is expected (the formula, which you should be aware of) with your own feelings and preferences. Learning to live with uncertainty and the fact that nothing is going to win over everyone.

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As mentioned above, making art means making choices. Each choice steers you ever so slightly closer to the “center” of that spiral process. You aren’t steering to a finished point, you’re choosing the center by making that choice. Once you really own that, it helps you feel a momentum during the work—you’ve made a bunch of choices, you’re halfway into the spiral and now you know things that make it easier: previous choices limit and steer all the remaining choices.

And my final tip for rewriting:

Work From What’s Good

All the advice on rewriting seems to be about fixing things that are wrong, correcting mistakes, looking for failures and problems. Who wants to do that? It makes you feel crappy.

Why not look for the stuff that’s good, and then try to get the other stuff to be more like it or to support it? Even something that is nearly good, or heading toward being good can be immensely valuable. It helps you make choices. It tells you what the voice of the work, the method by which it operates, is.

If you can just find a single sentence, a single scene or idea that you like—that’s art. That’s an authentic accomplishment. You’re almost done! Just another 99 percent to go! Sixty or seventy more bits like that. Feel some pride, enjoy that kick, and keep going. 📗

In his 25-year screenwriting career, Glenn Gers has worked in a baffling array of genres, including thriller (FRACTURE, starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling), caper-comedy (MAD MONEY, directed by Callie Khouri, starring Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, Ted Danson, and Katie Holmes), and many other films across a range of genres. Glenn’s awards include an Emmy, a special award from the Women's Film Critic's Circle, Writer's Guild and PRISM Award nominations and a Fellowship Grant in Screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has lectured or served as a mentor at the Austin Screenwriting Conference, Full Sail University, CineStory, the David Lynch MFA Program, and the AFI Directing Workshop for Women. His interview on the Film Courage YouTube channel is (for now) their most viewed video, with over 4.5 million views.

Deadline TODAY, Sunday, Feb. 22 at midnight for Harper’s Bazaar UK short story contest: “Entrants should submit an original story of up to 2,000 words to shortstory@harpersbazaar.co.uk on the theme of "the conversation" by midnight on 22 February.”

Thursday, March 12, 5 - 7 PM Pacific: I’m teaching an online flash fiction class, Laugh Lines, focusing on humor for the Flash Fiction Institute (founding director is , whose new book is something out there in the distance). The course is equally suited for new and experienced writers—anyone wishing to write comedy based on the everyday, the personal and the public, and all categories in between. More information and registration link here.

Bookish subscriptions are 30% off.

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Long ago, when Bill Clinton was nearing the end of his first term, and the White House rose garden was left to peaceably bloom, I went to school for a poetry MFA and first read the poems of Scott Stubbs, today’s featured writer. I remember one of Scott’s workshop poems ending, rather than beginning, in medias res, which struck me as brilliant. His beard was smaller back then, but his mind was big, his poems lapidary.

In his excellent 2025 collection Learning To Drown, Scott writes about the search for emotional and physical sanctuary in a world that rarely offers it freely, the complexities of masculinity, and the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse. His poetry is marked by an intimacy alternately restrained and devastating, and a refusal to look away from what wounds us, even as he remains deeply receptive to beauty.

Bookish/Christine: Throughout Learning to Drown, there are a number of sublime poems with asylum in their titles: “Asylum Ghosts,” “After Asylum,” “Asylum Office” (“The air is heavy/ahead of schedule. I used to be a hummingbird/dipping its bill into everything that might be/sweet. I hovered for hours over open cocoons.”) Did you see these poems as a series from the beginning or did you write one poem and at some later date start writing others? (Incidentally, these poems brought to mind John Berryman’s Dream Songs and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems). Had you thought of titling the collection Asylum at any point?

SM Stubbs: The Asylum poems came about entirely accidentally. I had taken a long break from writing poetry after the conclusion of my MFA. I hadn’t been back at it for very long when I found a workshop through Bowery Poetry with Rowan Ricardo Phillips. I was scouring through my new material and found a piece I liked, but it didn’t have a title. The voice in the poem—me, of course, but also not—came from a literal place I couldn’t identify at first. I slapped the title “After Asylum” on, brought it to workshop and it was a hit. I started writing more of them, sometimes consciously, sometimes realizing a piece was an Asylum poem only after I’d written it.

The metaphor was too juicy not to explore. Soon I had a handful and magazines were publishing them. I thought of Berryman’s Dream Songs, as well, and decided I’d push toward something similar to that. I always intended to publish them as a stand-alone but realized I had to have them in Learning to Drown.

I definitely considered titling the collection Asylum but that term had made the rounds in public discourse in reference to immigration, and I wanted to make sure the book wasn’t mistaken as being part of that conversation. I have plenty of thoughts on that, but they had nothing to do with this collection.

CS: Who are some of your primary influences--both poetry and other art forms?

SMS: In poetry, my early influences came from my poetry 101 professor, Robert Hedin: Roethke, Bishop, Kinnell, Sexton, Williams, Moore, Rexroth, Levine. Charles Simic was big, too. I studied [in graduate school] with Yusef Komunyakaa, so his work became incredibly important. He was the first to say something about “The Elephants” that made me think I had something. His collection Neon Vernacular sits next to Gerald Stern’s Leaving Another Kingdom on my desk because I refer to them so often.

Many of the poets I studied at IU are still big for me, from Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Beckian Fritz Goldberg to C.D. Wright and Jack Gilbert. Mark Halliday was a visiting writer and I really like his work. I didn’t read Larry Levis until later. I took a long break from writing after grad school.

Serendipitously, I discovered three books around the same time that got me interested in poetry again: Roger Reeves’ King Me, Paul Guest’s My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, and Josh Bell’s No Planets Strike. All three just blew me away.

I started writing again and read everything I could get my hands on. Some favorites: Patricia Smith, Mary Ruefle, Carl Phillips, Matthew Olzmann, Terrance Hayes, Kim Addonizio, John Murillo, Bruce Weigl, Bruce Smith, Natalie Shapero, Tyehimba Jess, Ocean Vuong—I could go all day. Add in the talented poets from my grad program, plus the ones I’ve met at Bread Loaf or other conferences…it’s incredible. We are in a golden age of poetry.

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My list for fiction would be as long as the one for poetry: Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Colson Whitehead, Haruki Murakami, Joy Williams, Angela Carter, Paul Auster, Richard Powers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. Olga Tokarczuk is a current favorite. Emily St. John Mandel is another. George Saunders. Edward P. Jones. Percival Everett.

There are at least as many amazing fiction writers as there are poets, especially now. From the world of art, the Impressionists. Schiele. Klimt. Louise Bourgeois. Camille Claudel. Edward Hopper. That’s just scratching the surface. I’m not going to do film, music or theater because this truly would never end. But my influences are legion. I’m very impressionable.

CS: In one of the longer poems in the book, “Rise and Run, North Palm Beach, Florida, 1978,” you write about a child sexually abused by a babysitter, and the victim as an adult living with the aftermath of this crime. It’s a poem of such power, restrained but nonetheless devastating. “I was brought up to believe/every rule has repercussions./For example, do not molest a child,/that’s one of the most basic, most sacred.” Were the Epstein crimes what spurred you to write about these experiences with a pedophile or had you been writing or trying to write about this incident before Epstein was arrested?

SMS: Epstein had nothing to do with it. Wasn’t even on my radar as I was writing. The poems that tackle sexual abuse are all autobiographical using real details from the incidents that happened to me. I wrote “The Elephants” years ago in grad school and it scared the crap out of me. But I needed to write it because this was the central issue of my psyche and I hadn’t dealt with it in any real way and thought this poem might be enough. Which was ludicrous.

After that, I didn’t write about the sexual abuse again until I was in my forties. I should have been in therapy from the age of eight, but it was an era when that wasn’t the norm and I got, instead, zero support. Which meant I had to deal with it eventually, and writing these poems became my therapy. Even when the Epstein story came to light, I didn’t connect what happened to me and what happened to these girls we’ve heard so much about.

Again: ludicrous. It’s so obvious now that it’s painful to admit I didn’t see it. But that was my brain trying to protect me from this horrible stuff. One of the hardest things to accept, aside from the incidents themselves, was how easy it was for me as a child to be convinced of the rightness of what we were doing. It terrifies me when I think about it.

CS: As I read this collection, I thought of a famous William Carlos Williams quote: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for a lack of what is found there.” Your poems examine and express aspects of the world’s extraordinary beauty along with its grit and tragedies. Would you speak a bit about how this collection came together and what you see as its primary themes?

SMS: Learning to Drown came together the way I suspect a lot of first collections come about: I took a look at all my “decent” poems, the ones I thought passed muster, and just stared at them a while to see what they had in common. Some themes were obvious, like the ones in which I struggle to confront or cope with the sexual abuse I suffered as a child, plus there were poems that were clearly abuse-adjacent. Those groups spoke to each other in deeply scarred and utterly inconclusive ways but they had to go together.

I had another group of poems that dealt with masculinity and issues with male relationships. That goes back to the abuse and the trust issues stemming from that, so they echo that first group of poems. Plus, these crazy Asylum poems that were my way of working out what I’d done to myself emotionally for the past forty-plus years because of the abuse.

I knew they had to be indirect, had to come at the issue from a different angle in order to surprise myself into revelations I sometimes wasn’t ready for. They needed space for that.

There were poems that had an apocalyptic aspect, and I eventually understood those as part of the abuse story, too, because when you’ve been through that, both your brain and body feel as if the world has ended or may any minute.

It took about five tries to get the mix right. I had help from several fantastic readers along the way.

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CS: What are you currently working on? Are there any new subjects or styles you’re exploring—or plan to explore—in your new work?

SMS: I’m always working on twelve different projects at once. This is a problem but I feel like something good’s bound to emerge from the chaos. I had my first short story published recently. I’ve submitted more, hoping for some good news from those. I’ve got a couple of novels I’ve been kicking around, too.

As for poetry, whatever it is, it will be rather different from Learning to Drown. I keep writing the “coping” poems but don’t want to revisit that in book form. Destruction as a general concept keeps cropping up in response to the fascist political theater we’re witnessing daily. Now, it’s just a matter of which theme I write toward the most. If I can find two slow months, I might be able to finish something. It’ll be as much of a surprise to me as anyone else.

Born and raised in South Florida, SM Stubbs co-owned a Brooklyn bar for twelve years. He holds an MFA in poetry from Indiana University and in 2025, Gunpowder Press released his first book of poems, Learning to Drown. He has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best New Poets and served as a staff scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was named runner-up in the Dappled Things J.F. Powers Short Fiction Prize, his only published fiction to date. His poems have appeared in over 50 publications, including Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, New Ohio Review, and The Rumpus.

A preview of February’s agent list, accessible here. A tutorial on the agent query letter is here. Bookish subscriptions are currently 30% off.

Upcoming class: Thursday, March 12, 5 - 7 PM Pacific, I’m teaching an online flash fiction class, Laugh Lines, focusing on humor for the great Grant Faulkner’s Flash Fiction Institute. The course is equally suited for new and experienced writers—anyone wishing to write comedy based on the everyday, the personal and the public, and all categories in between. More information and registration link here.

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My guess is many of you are asked this question often, “How do you choose the books you read?”

Word of mouth is how I find at least half of the titles I read each year. Book-review or literary Substacks such as ’s, ’s, ’s, ’s and ’s are another. ’s Otherppl podcast is also a reliable source. (Over the weekend, I listened to his interview with Lily Meyer about her new novel The End of Romance. I’m sold—have to get my hands on it soon.)

Other sources: book sections in newspapers and magazines, although in recent years they’ve been pruned disastrously or disappeared outright. Bezos, whose resemblance to a comic book villain is inarguable, struck again at The Washington Post earlier this month when he fired the Book World staff.

I make no claim that the lists you’ll find below are a comprehensive survey of new and forthcoming books—in the main, they’re books I’ve read recently or plan to read soon that reached me via word of mouth or emails from friends and/or the authors themselves.

Please feel free to add a comment with the title and author of a new or forthcoming book you especially enjoyed or are looking forward to reading soon.

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Forthcoming:

Zeeva Bukai’s novella The World Between (2.24.26, Delphinium Press) “With the breakup of her marriage, a once famous actress of the Yiddish theater travels to Tel-Aviv to revisit the apartment she once shared with her husband, Max. Soon after, she finds herself at the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition Hospice in Jaffa, a sanitorium, run by a group of nuns. Unclear as to how she got there, she begins to piece together the events that led her to this moment.”

Patricia Henley’s story collection Apple & Palm (3.10.26, Cornerstone Press) “The town of Whistle Pig, like the mountains that surround it, can appear unchanging, as immutable as geography. The lives of the characters in the linked stories in Patricia Henley's Apple & Palm contrast with that predictability…Apple & Palm is a provocative close-up examination of aging, memory, and desire.”

Eric Beck Rubin’s novel Ten Clear Days (4.14.26, Turtle Point Press) “The first full fictional account of what is involved in pursuing the right to die, based on the author’s family story. When a Holocaust survivor, requests medical assistance in dying, it divides her family. Over ten increasingly tense days, we come to know her story and its final outcome.”

Greg Sarris’s novel The Last Human Bear (6.16.26, Heyday Books) “An epic story of curses, love, hard-won independence, and healing--and the first novel in 28 years by a widely acclaimed Native writer.” “Lush and gripping.” —Rebecca Solnit “It’s revelatory on every page.” —Dave Eggers

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Kathleen Rooney’s novel Man Overboard (7.7.26, Gallery Books) “From the nationally bestselling author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, comes a funny and moving novel in which a former college swimmer falls off a cruise ship and must keep treading water as memories and regrets wash over him—perfect for fans of Where’d You Go, Bernadette; Florence Adler Swims Forever; and The Wedding People.”

Recently published:

Yasmina Din Madden’s story collection You Know Nothing (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press) “Following women and girls as they navigate everyday life in contemporary America, You Know Nothing explores the experiences of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and lovers whose inner worlds are animated by a tangle of emotion--from desire to rage and everything in between.”

’s novel Burn (Cowboy Jamboree Press) “Burn is filled with beautiful losers covered in scars of their own making. And yet it also finds hope in the dark places, both real and in the mind. A stunning, assured, and risky debut.”
—Tod Goldberg,

’s novel The Hitch (Roxane Gay Books) “From the author of the cult classic Treasure Island!!!, a delightfully unhinged comedy following a woman as she attempts to exorcise the spirit of a dead corgi from her nephew and renegotiate the borders of her previously rational world.”

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Rajesh C. Oza’s novel Double Play on the Red Line (Third World Press) “Traveling up and down Chicago’s elevated train system’s Red Line, Ratan, a professor of sports journalism, puzzles through a near-lynching of a peanut vendor at Wrigley Field.”

Don Tassone’s story collection New Again (Toerner Press) “New Again features an eclectic mix of 25 short stories by Don Tassone. Readers are sure to find these finely crafted stories moving and thought-provoking.”

’s novel Cyan Magenta Yellow Black (Black Lawrence Press) “Stylish, smart, and big-hearted, Cyan Magenta Yellow Black lovingly summons the Minneapolis Saint Paul of December of 1993, just before the internet changed everything. It’s a place where friendships form in group therapy sessions and blossom in coffee shops-and where a handful of people contemplate kerning, color palettes, and headlines with the passion of artisans.” (Kevin’s interview for Bookish is available here.)

Lori-Rader Day’s novel Wreck Your Heart (Minotaur Books) “From award-winning author Lori Rader-Day, Wreck Your Heart is an engaging, “wisecracking and wonderful” crime novel with a big heart, about a country and midwestern singer out to catch her big break before family—or murder—wrecks everything.”

Naeem Murr’s novel Every Exit Brings You Home (Norton) “Readers are rarely lukewarm on Naeem Murr's work, which has been compared by critics to an astonishing array of greats: Margaret Atwood, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Flannery O' Connor, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulker, Vladimir Nabokov, and more…in this, his first book in two decades, the conflicts, griefs, and hopes of an immigrant community in a Chicago condo come to represent those of the wounded world we all must share.” My interview with Naeem for The National Book Review is accessible here.

And stay tuned…

’s novel Coin of the Realm (March 2027, Northwestern University Press) “Coin of the Realm is set in a near‑future United States, where a man called Tom the Hunter lives off the grid at a Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin and resists the techno-fascist regime that dictates the life most lead. When the newly ratified Of Native Born amendment requires everyone under nineteen to prove at least one U.S.-born parent or lose citizenship, eighteen-year-old Raven begins a desperate search for this man, the father she has never met, hoping he’ll officially claim her before it’s too late.”

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