Nominations for Best Small Fictions
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Interview with Agata Maslowska
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
The poems in the collection explore my main areas of interest which include ecopoetry, migrant literatures, translation, and experimental writing, among others. I think through the parallels between botany and migration and look at migrant experience through the lenses of the natural world and ecology. I like to interrogate language(s) to see what is possible and how words can point beyond their ascribed meanings to create multi-dimensional, polyphonic connections.
Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and why?
I most enjoy writing poems when I am guided by language, when I give myself into the music of language without control or an agenda. I feel that this is how I come up with my freest poems. An example of such a poem is a sequence “Sounding Soil” where I give up using words altogether and focus on sounds to create a soundscape which hopefully resonates beyond the sounds themselves. I also enjoy writing poems in conversation with other poets, artists, and writers. There is a sense of dialogue and being connected to something larger than myself. An example of such a poem is “A Bird in Flight” written after Jane Hirshfield’s poem “A Chair in Snow.” The poems that gave me most trouble are the poems where I attempt to tackle specific topics that are difficult and emotional for me, for example, the poem “Women’s Hell” where I look at the total abortion ban in Poland. I wrote six or seven versions of this poem before I was somewhat satisfied with it. It still feels like it only scratches the surface.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
Most of the poems in the collection have been written in the last five years. I started immersing myself in poetry during the Covid pandemic as I could only read and write poetry at the time. I got hooked and have been obsessively writing poems since then. A few years ago, I saw that one of my favourite poets was judging a poetry manuscript competition. While I didn’t expect to win it, I really wanted him to read my poems. I put the manuscript together and sent it. I didn’t win of course, but I had a manuscript ready to submit for publication. I submitted it to Bad Betty Press who accepted it. It was totally unexpected and the opposite experience to submitting my novel manuscript for publication which was rejected so many times I lost count. Working with Amy Acre, my editor, has been one of the most nourishing experiences. I feel Amy understands my poems even better than I do and has helped me make the poems stronger. I’ve been very lucky to have been selected by Bad Betty Press.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Read, read, read. Read as much as you can, particularly writers and poets from other countries.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
What surprised me about writing these poems is how indispensable writing poetry has become in my life. My perception and sensitivity to the world around me has changed completely since I started writing poems regularly. I have fallen in love with it. I still occasionally write prose, but it is influenced by my poetry writing practice.
How did you find the title of your book?
I was initially trying to find a phrase in any of the poems, but nothing seemed suitable. I then thought of distilling the main themes of my book and this is how I came up with Woman : Plant : Language. The colons represent the interconnectedness of these themes in my collection. I also like to view the title as an image rather than a string or a sequence of words.
Editor’s Choice Award Winner & Runners Up
Pushcart Prize Nominees
We’re pleased to announce that we have nominated the following writers/pieces for a Pushcart Prize.
Interview with Katrina Denza
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
The stories in BURNER explore technology’s influence on the way we communicate with each other for better or worse. Some also touch on the ways in which women are compelled to inhabit their own power in a patriarchal society.
Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?
Burner was so fun to write. Having worked in restaurants in my twenties, I know the environment and the family-like relationships that can develop. I had a great time imagining how my character might try to seduce a man who’s clearly not interested in her, and especially not intellectually. There’s No Danger Here was probably revised the most drastically. In its earliest drafts the story was over six thousand words. I chipped away at it until the narrator’s understanding of what she really wanted revealed itself.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
I sent the manuscript out to about six or seven agents and received some positive responses, but the prevailing message was that story collections are difficult to sell. At the same time, I entered the collection into contests and submitted directly to a few smaller presses. Burner was a semi-finalist in a 2023 Autumn House Press contest for fiction and longlisted for Dzanc’s 2023 contest for short story collections. A few months later, Cornerstone Press accepted it for publication.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
My favorite piece of advice is from Richard Bausch, and I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially to ground the reader in the story with details. And I also like the more general advice: write the things you’d want to read.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
My surprises show up in revision. The way I revise is probably the least efficient, which is to rewrite the story from start to finish every time, but this method tends to yield the most surprises.
How did you find the title of your book?
Burner seemed to capture the disposable nature of communication that technology encourages or allows.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
The chef in Burner makes a delicious coq au vin, but unfortunately, he’s as tightlipped about how he makes it as he is about himself.
Nominations for Best Microfiction
Congratulations to the following contributors to South 85 whose work has been nominated for inclusion in Best Microfiction. Read more about the forthcoming edition of Best Microfiction 2026: https://www.bestmicrofiction.com/
Surviving
By Angela Joynes
To the Empty Robin’s Nest Nestled in the Shrub Behind Our House
Across the Line
By Kris Faatz
Interview with R.L. Maizes
Interview by Leslie Pietrzyk
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
A Complete Fiction is about a writer who takes to social media to accuse an editor of stealing the novel she submitted for publication, and is then herself accused of revealing her sister’s secrets in the book. The novel examines the questions of who has a right to tell a story and has cancel culture gone too far in our social-media obsessed world?
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?
I most enjoyed creating P.J. Her aspirations are frustrated, as often as not she gets in her own way, and she just manages to stumble toward her goals, but I found all of that endearing and recognizable. She continues to create in the face of repeated disappointment, which is true of a lot of writers, present company included, and which I find admirable. It’s challenging to create a flawed character that readers root for and remember, rather than just complain about in reader reviews. Reaching a balance between the flaws you give the character and the redeeming qualities is hard. I don’t think I had the right balance with P.J. until one of the very last drafts.
And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
If there’s a victim in the story, it’s George. I say if because both P.J. and George are complex characters and there are ways that George contributes to his own troubles. But he’s more of a victim than P.J. for reasons I won’t go into to prevent spoilers. What I will say is that it’s tricky to create a victim. A character has to have some agency or there will be no character arc. I struggled with that in the book until I found ways for George to take control of his own story.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
Wow. This was such a torturous road. The low was when an editor strung my agent and me along for months, repeatedly assuring us that he wanted to buy the novel, and then ghosted us. I hope he reads this. All told, more than two dozen editors rejected the book. All of that was very tough. The high came after that when I had an insight into how to improve the book, took it back from my agent, and rewrote it. It sold two weeks after that rewrite. I’m glad all of those editors rejected it, so I had a chance to make the novel the best version of itself. I’m happy readers will get to enjoy it, happy I can stop obsessing about selling it, but mostly happy for all my friends and family and the Trader Joe’s clerks who won’t have to hear me go on about it. Writers can become very one-dimensional when their books are on submission. We should be exiled temporarily from polite society without any electronic devices and with an enormous pile of chocolate and an equally enormous pile of literary classics all of whose authors are dead. It’s hard to envy a dead author, though not impossible.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Fifteen years ago, I took a novel workshop with Karen Shepard. I was working on my first novel, which I later abandoned. But she taught that once you set a plot in motion certain events will naturally follow, and you can just think about what those events would be to keep the story moving forward. That advice has helped me write both of my published novels. I think about what would naturally follow not only from the plot I’ve set in motion but also from the characters I’m developing. What would these characters in particular do in the situation I’ve put them in? I also think about something Jennifer Egan once said in a class I took from her, which is that your characters shouldn’t be consistent because people aren’t consistent. That shocked me at the time because in all my fiction workshops I’d heard the same orthodoxy that characters had to be consistent. So I imagine what my characters might do that is inconsistent and might, like a mutation, allow them to grow or change. Egan’s linked stories A Visit from the Goon Squad make an appearance in my new novel. Go read the novel and find the reference.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
Without giving anything away, I’ll say the end very much surprised me. I had a different ending through all the drafts, until I did a final big revision and thought about what my brilliant developmental editor, Erika Krouse, says, which is that “endings make meanings.” The revised ending means something very different than the earlier ending did. It will give readers more to think about when they put down the book, at least I hope it will. The new ending couldn’t have existed without the changes I made in the final revision, and it surprised me.
How did you find the title of your book?
The book went through many titles including Blank Page, Cancel George Dunn, and others, but neither my agent nor my editor at the publishing house liked the title I had, so I literally stared at the novel for three days until my sacrifice to the publishing Gods was recognized and I was rewarded with the current title, A Complete Fiction, which pleased all the relevant parties.
Who is your ideal reader?
My ideal reader is someone who likes to laugh. I might even say someone who’s generous in that way. It’s also someone open to new ideas and who’s willing to engage with nuance. It’s someone who says to their friends, “You have to read this.” Someone who buys books as gifts. A lot of them.
***
Leslie Pietrzyk is the editor of South 85.
Interview with Michele Wolf
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
Peacocks on the Streets explores what is wild and unpredictable in our lives — both what slams us and what uplifts us — and how we find the resolve to triumph after trauma. The poems’ subjects range from pandemic bereavement, hate crimes, and terrorism, to falling in love at midlife, adopting a child, and caring for a parent stolen by dementia. With grit and compassion, Peacocks on the Streets offers an acute sense of the privilege of being alive.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?
I broke personal boundaries in that I began to write about some previously self-censored subjects, such as the emotional pain of my infertility and my often fraught relationship with my mother, a tension that peaked in my teens and 20s but always lingered under the surface. This loss got magnified once my mother plunged into dementia. The courage came from the grief I experienced even before my mother’s passing, as I watched her deteriorate cognitively and physically. My mother’s death released me to claim my truths and to see situations, whether real or conjured, with more clarity and a fuller appreciation of multiple points of view. This has led to an even deeper authenticity, strength, and warmth in my work, which I find people relate to.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
I spent a bunch of years sending a version of Peacocks to competitions offering a book-publication prize, and I received several finalist or semifinalist notifications. I steadily continued to publish pieces in literary journals and anthologies, and I didn’t give up trying to place the manuscript. I had previously published two full-length books and a chapbook, and I had confidence in the work. My breakthrough came when I began investigating and submitting to independent presses that offered book publication and royalties but not a prize. First I was offered a yes from an independent press whose seven-page contract did not seem author-friendly. Like the vast majority of poets, I don’t work with an agent — there’s not enough of a financial return on most poetry books to be of interest to an agent. So, I joined the Authors Guild and had my contract reviewed by an attorney on the staff. After that consultation, I sent an email to the publisher, requesting several changes to the contract. Via email, they withdrew their publishing offer, saying we were too far apart. That was not my happiest day.
But soon Broadstone Books offered me another yes. That was a hallelujah day. I’ve had a great experience with Broadstone.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
My favorite writing advice comes from a one-day master class I had with the late U.S. poet laureate W.S. Merwin. “We don’t write poems,” he maintained. “We listen for them.” Wow. I found that approach to be powerful — that the writing process is not so much that we will a poem into being, but instead that we get ourselves to a quiet place and listen for the words.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
This is something that surprised me after I had written the book. It didn’t occur to me until two people mentioned it that Peacocks on the Streets is rife with animals — five kinds of birds, a coyote, mountain goats, pandas, a hamster, manatees, deer, tadpoles, zebras, a beagle, fish, corals, seals, dolphins, whales, a ladybug, and more — and that I was making a statement about the wisdom and supremacy of animals. Okay, I suppose that makes sense. But it was never my conscious intent to suggest this!
How did you find the title of your book?
The book’s title, which is also the title of the poem “Peacocks on the Streets,” comes from that time during the pandemic when we were in quarantine and the streets were so empty that, worldwide, wildlife ventured out to residential and commercial areas. “Peacocks on the Streets” was always the title of the poem, and I knew, even before the poem was complete, that it would be the unifying, flagship piece and title that spoke for the entire book.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?
In the poem “Peacocks on the Streets,” my persona buys a rotisserie chicken. Here is my completely subjective ranking — from “Bleh” to “Meh” to “Scrumptious” — of supermarket rotisserie chickens available in the D.C. area.
5. Costco
4. Whole Foods
3. A tie: Safeway and Harris Teeter
2. Giant
1. Wegman’s—the best!
Interview with Bernadette Geyer
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
The poems in What Haunts Me examine what is passed down through families and societies – what is inherited, what we take with us as we age, and what we leave behind. How do we process and come to terms with the centuries that have preceded us? The collection interrogates how ancestries and beliefs serve as sparring partners within us as we forge and discover our individual roles in shaping our own lives.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?
I broke the mental boundary of believing that my writing path would be linear: I would work on one book, then move on to the next book, then move on to the next book, and so on. Most of the poems in this collection were actually written before the poems that appeared in my first collection, The Scabbard of Her Throat, which was published in 2013. Some of the poems in What Haunts Me are more than 20 years old. I think this change in perspective helped me to allow myself to work on more than one project simultaneously.
I don’t know if I’d call it courage, but more of an acceptance of reality. I don’t put off working on a new project idea simply because I am in the middle of something else. In fact, I use this to my advantage – when I’m stalled in one project, I switch to a different project. That way, I am at least making progress with something.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
When I first started sending the manuscript out in its earliest form as The Inheritance back in 2003, it was a finalist and semi-finalist for several book contests. However, as the years went on and I tinkered with it – adding new poems, removing others, and changing the title multiple times – I think the manuscript lost its way.
Following the birth of my daughter in 2005, I had started writing poems linked by a more cohesive theme that really came together over the course of a few years, and I started sending out that manuscript (The Scabbard of Her Throat) in 2009. It was then that I gave up pitching the first manuscript and set it aside.
Following the publication of The Scabbard of Her Throat in 2013, I moved with my family to Germany. My writing expanded into travel articles, essays, and short fiction. I translated several business books, as well as poems by German poets. I didn’t really look back at my first poetry manuscript until about 2022, when I really reworked it and settled on a new title. I began submitting it in earnest in 2023 – and only to publishers who offered a free open reading period. April Gloaming Publishing was one of the indie presses I sent an excerpt to that year. They requested the full manuscript for What Haunts Me in February 2024 and made me an offer four months later.
The whole experience taught me that there was something the original manuscript had been lacking, and that I needed the long break to really find the order and structure – and title – that the book had been seeking all along.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
My favorite piece of writing advice is actually the last two stanzas of the poem “Berryman,” by W.S. Merwin.
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
It’s a little bit depressing, but also freeing at the same time. And so I keep writing.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I honestly did not realize how many ghosts and spirits would show up in it! As I was reading through the final editing rounds with my publisher, I was also struck by how many of the poems were inspired by photographs and how prominently those images imprinted themselves in my mind.
How do you approach revision?
I love the editing process and am always surprised by how many writers believe that if it doesn’t come out perfect the first time, they need to throw it out and start over. I love trying out different word combinations to see what kind of vibe or nuance they bring to the poem. I also love researching word origins and alternate meanings to see how a single word can serve to emphasize a theme or hint at a subversive undercurrent. I also love writing an ending over and over and over dozens of different ways – it seems to break down the inner censor and help me find a totally unexpected image or turn.
Interview with Kerry Neville
reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Momma May Be Mad: A Memoiris an inventive and striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. Kerry Neville shares the story of how she was caught in the perfect storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism when her children were young and her marriage failing and how she found her way back to joy and hope. Electric shock therapy, hospitalizations, and even an exorcism were desperate, if failed, lifelines. But even in that dark chaos, she held fast to an abiding belief in love and fought to regain her own life and her life with her children.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?
The easiest way to answer this question is to quote the opening of the memoir:
“How do you write a memoir when you can’t remember? And how then do you honor and unravel that tangle of time?…Electric Shock Treatments erased years of my linear memory. What remains? Unreliable chaotic approximation. Incomplete jerry-rigged record. Splinters and fragments: a fat file of doctors’ shorthand notes and coded diagnoses, Social Security Disability Insurance legalities, journal entries composed in situ, email correspondence with therapist, and friends who fill in the blanks.
“External documentation functions with the specious authority of a third-person limited narrator. Even my journals, though read as if extemporaneous synchronous records, are always belated after-accounts. We don’t live in time’s flow but in time’s lag. Our brains create a coherent understanding of the world from stimuli that travel at different times and speeds. Auditory processing is faster than visual processing. Starter pistol rather than flash of light. The brain waits for the slowest information to arrive before “making sense” of “now.” An eighty-millisecond lag between what is happening and what we understand is happening.
“When I read my medical records and journals, scroll through photos, and listen to my friends recount who I was and what I was doing and saying and how I was lying and dying and trying and not trying to get myself into sensible order? That “I” stands in strange, estranged proximity. I cast forwards and backwards through lost and found time, never able to catch up. My unruly IIIIIIIIII’s arrive at different times and speeds to these pages.
“I’ve tried and tried to write this happened and then this happened and then this happened and now it’s done, but each attempt was a failed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of my corpse on the dissection table, so I ditched linear plot-forward-in-time.”
Additionally, the memoir is divided into three sections according to St. Augustine’s understanding of time as he outlines in Confessions: “present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation.”
Courage: There was no other way to write this story—except to find a way to represent how I—we—construct ourselves as changing selves every day, how we revise and rerevise our stories of how we have arrived in this moment now. The memoir is an attempt at simultaneity: becoming and unbecoming at the same time. So, linear plot can’t do that on the page with its neat, progressive timeline.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
My agent sent the manuscript out to the big presses, and I received positive feedback but…ultimately, no, no, no, no. I knew the structure would be a difficult sell—but memoirs are, anyway. My agent persevered because she believed the book would find a home, the right editor, at the right time. I know how fortunate I am to have an agent willing to keep on keeping on with the manuscript. Eventually, Kim Davis and her editorial team at Madville Publishing responded with a quick (!) and enthusiastic yes. The right home, the right editor, the right time!
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Write from your me-ness”—you don’t have to be decorous, polite, modest, or measured. Write out of your fierceness, unruliness, and daring. Disturb the universe. (Fyi: it took me far too long to realize writing, at least early draft writing, is ferocious and feral. Late draft revision is meticulous and exacting.)
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
What surprised me was how much I learned about what is beyond me—that is, research that brought the world and all its complicated wonders inside my understanding of self-as-world-on-the-page. Biology, neuroscience, anatomy, philosophy, botany, history, geology, religion, mythology!
How did you find the title of your book?
The title is the title of a long-retired blog I kept when I was in my dark, desperate times. Writing that blog about my mental health complications helped me to understand that I wasn’t the only momma, the only human being going through the really effing hard stuff—I heard from many readers who connected to my story (if not to exact facts, then to the ebb and flow of despair and joy). I had a running list of possible titles for the memoir but I kept coming back to Momma May Be Mad—there’s the sound of the M’s, but, too, there’s the uncertainty. Not “maybe” but “may be”—or may not be. And maybe it’s all of is: motherhood, madness, hysteria, wandering wombs, one body creating another body, body-at-hand and body-of-work. We are shapeshifters, phoenixes rising again and again from the ash. What are the forces at work on the inside and on the outside that contribute to despair, give rise to joy, and allow us to redeem ourselves?