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Interview with Barbara P. Greenbaum

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Go Out Like Sunday and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen short stories, featuring a cast of characters facing moments of decisive change. From a bullied boy in high school, to a couple shopping for coffins, the folks in this book face betrayal, loss, violence, grief, and yearning while dancing with the joy of new directions.

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

Of all the stories in the book, I enjoyed writing Park & Ride the most perhaps because that voice came to me so easily. I instantly could hear her. And yes – I too like pickup trucks – so I had a natural affinity. And she was just so much fun!

Several stories in the book took a while to develop. Midnight Swimmer was the most emotionally difficult because it was close to the bone. I left my home in New England after being in CT for almost fifty years. It took a bit to work to get to the psychic distance I needed to tell Cynthia’s story. 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

For me, the highs and lows collided. I found out the book had been accepted for publication by Main Street Rag the Tuesday after my husband died unexpectedly during an operation. While I was thrilled that I would be working with Scott on the book, my husband’s death stopped me for a while. The last story in the book, The Midnight Swimmer, was the last story he ever read for me. I knew the story wasn’t yet finished, yet it took me almost six months after he died before I could work on it again. I was lucky enough to attend the Writers in Paradise Workshop in St. Petersburg with Stewart O’Nan specifically to get help with it. It paid off. However, it would be another year before the book felt finished to me and we could go to press. Main Street Rag‘s publisher Scott, and his wife, Jill, were incredibly understanding about my situation and waited for me. I will be forever grateful for that.

When the book finally appeared, with the cover designed by my artist friend Randy Gillman, I felt just joy that it finally happened. There is no better feeling that seeing your work in print and so beautifully done.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

This one is simple for me though there are days when I don’t get there. Write every day. When I was working full time, I somehow convinced myself that I had to find an hour or two to write successfully. Then, while moaning to a friend that I could never find the time, he looked at me and said – fifteen minutes. From then on, whether I had to set the clock a bit earlier, I would write every day for at least fifteen minutes. Most often I would write before work with my first cup of tea. But I was almost immediately amazed at how much I could do in such a short period of time. And even when I had to stop, the stories and voices would often spill over into the day and those thoughts would add to the story for the next day. This helps me stay in that creative stream.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I hadn’t realized until the collection came together how much I enjoyed playing with voices and genres. Each story in the book is very different and yet I can’t help but really like these folks. I’m so glad I got to spend time with them.

How did you find the title of your book?

I am very bad at titles. The title story of the book had a different title originally. (It’s honestly too embarrassing to name here.) The editor of the Louisville Review wrote to me to say she loved the story, hated the title. I confessed my title deficits, and she suggested Go Out Like Sunday. I loved it immediately. When I was searching for titles for the collection, I knew immediately that’s what it would be. It just felt right.

Interview with Helen Fremont

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Outside the Lines is a queer love story between a young public defender and a married mother of two, who meet in a writing workshop in Boston in the 1980s. Drawn together by surprisingly similar family secrets, hidden identities, and a deep connection to the Holocaust, they fall in love. Subsequently, a terminal illness changes and intensifies their relationship with each other and with their families.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

By the time I got around to writing this memoir (my third), I’d inadvertantly become something of an expert at family demolition. After my first memoir (which I thought was pretty tame) was published, my family disowned me and declared me dead.

It took twenty years for me to get up the ovarian fortitude to write a second memoir, in which I told the rest of the story, including many of the gory details I’d tactfully left out of the first book. (My parents had died in the meantime.)

I think the need to write these stories as memoir stems from the need to claim one’s own voice and one’s own truth, when the writer’s reality has consistently been denied or disavowed. Family secrets manipulate and mess with one’s sense of self, which is why they are so potent.

In my new memoir, Outside the Lines, the two main characters died many years ago, so I feel a little less anxious about writing my story as it relates to them. Once again, I’ve changed names and details, and omitted scenes in order to protect the privacy of surviving family members. But of course, I worry a great deal about how family and friends will feel. I don’t think it’s particularly “courageous” to write memoir; I think it’s compelled by a need to speak your truth when it has been consistently denied.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time, but apparently I wasn’t ready to dive into the material until a few years ago. Writing the scenes set loose a flood of memories, both exhilarating and agonizing. So as with all writing, the highs and lows are always built right into the daily work. I write something one day and think it’s brilliant; I look at it in the morning, and it’s turned to garbage.

Perhaps my greatest high with this book came from my writer buddies, who never cease to amaze and inspire me with their own poetry and prose, and who never pretend something is working when it’s not. Every time we’d get together to talk about our work, I came away on fire to fix the things they’d suggested, and excited about the whole impossible project of bringing a bunch of words on the page into a completed book for publication.

It was also thrilling when my agent (whom I adore and revere) read the manuscript and liked it. Her belief in this little book was so powerful, it made the first slew of rejections from publishing houses less painful. Of course, when the next slew of rejections came in, and the ones after that, my mood descended  in direct proportion to the rise in rejections. Needless to say, it was wonderful to find a publisher I admired who liked this book enough to want to publish it. Working with her and her team has been a blast.  

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

“It’s all draft until you die.” The poet Ellen Bryant Voigt said that. Just conjuring her name makes me happy. She is the founder and mastermind of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, my alma mater. Ellen is all about process, all about doing the work, without letting yourself get distracted by anything else—the market or the critics, or your own inner judge. She reminds us that we can keep fiddling with a draft as long as we like, long after it’s been published, or long after we’ve given up on it. Writing is not just our work; it’s our play, it’s what reminds us we’re alive.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised when I wrote a sentence I liked for more than twenty-four hours. And I was surprised—well, more like embarrassed—to discover how incredibly immature and clueless I was at the age of thirty. It’s sort of amazing to see the effect that thirty-plus years of perspective had on my memories and feelings—even sensory perceptions—that came back to me when I was writing. So as you see, self-absorption really does have its own rewards.

How did you find the title of your book?

I am terrible at titles. Prolifically terrible. I must have scribbled down hundreds of titles, one worse than the other. For a while, I was convinced that if I just found the right Leonard Cohen lyric, I’d have my title.

Fortunately, my wife pretty quickly came up with the title, Outside the Lines. I liked it immediately, and then went on to brainstorm another couple hundred awful titles. But I kept coming back to this one, because it’s about coming out, and it’s about the complications of navigating a life outside the norm. The title lasted through all my mood changes, so it’s a keeper. (So is she.)

Interview with Sheri Joseph

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

At a remote Southern university in the late 1980s, student Leah Gavin becomes obsessed with a classmate’s unexplained fall from the bell tower, then begins to realize the mystery might implicate people close to her. It’s a literary thriller and heartfelt coming-of-age story with a kick-ass mixtape soundtrack.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

My most enjoyable character, a frat boy named Quinn Cooper, was intended to have only a minor role in the story: a sort-of friend Leah doesn’t trust who has some information to deliver. But he showed up with this outsized personality and rapacious desires and a vestigial conscience, and he just kept demanding more space, until he became my Iago—which, in John Updike’s terminology, is less the villain than the character who pushes all the other characters around. He completely took over the book, in large part because he was so much fun to write. I had the most difficulty with Leah, who is not me but is very often standing in my place, within my emotional experience. So it was hard to keep her vividly and precisely herself.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The less said about that, the better! My agent sent it out to editors for years, but what happens to most writers who have published a few books without selling any great numbers is that no one not already attached to the writer will read the book. Editors just let the manuscript sit on their desk until they have the pressure of another offer to compel them to pick it up. Even if they do read it and love it, “the numbers” don’t support taking the risk. So I took the book to a wonderful small press, Regal House, which has more freedom to avoid the really destructive business model of bigger publishers and can just publish good books.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

As a teacher of writing, I have a few hundred go-to favorites! Most of them require a whiteboard and a weird approximate drawing of what a story looks like inside my head, just as a starting point. Maybe that’s more instruction than advice. The best advice I’ve ever received about my own work was “Be more forthcoming.” That’s one I’m often repeating to students who overvalue mystery. And my evergreen, bedrock advice is read. Reading is the best teacher. Read widely at the level of quality you hope to achieve in your own work.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I’m with you on that advice! Almost everything I write surprises me because I start from a compelling situation I don’t fully understand, then I write to discover what’s going on. In this book, that included about 80% of the central mystery. Also, most of Leah’s love life and several key friendships got pulled in directions I did not expect. And some of my favorite scenes came from just asking myself a question mid-draft like “What’s Leah’s most intense relationship with a professor?” then writing toward that.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

The campus setting, Rockhaven, is very closely based on my alma mater, as will be obvious to anyone who knows and loves Sewanee. I renamed everything only to give myself the smallest room for fiction. My goal was to write a memoir of emotion and place, a novel in which everything is true except all of the characters and all of the events. Rockhaven as a place is so very Sewanee in the 80s that I worry it’s going to be hard for some alums to avoid thinking it’s a code pointing to real people and events. So I’m here to declare that 1) none of this happened and 2) (almost) no one I know is in this book! The exceptions are my late, great professor Douglas Paschall, who is dropped into the book as I remember him with only a name change, and two of our presumably late horses, Jojo and Matchless, who are playing themselves.

Interview with J.D. Smith

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repreinted 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?

This collection addresses our troubled relationship with the non-human world, from which we cannot separate ourselves; as others have noted, “Nature bats last.” While this book can be seen as a twenty-first century addendum to the work of Robinson Jeffers, it also records an attempt to view nature—Creation, if you will—through lenses other than those of appetite and ambition.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

Besides breaking through the usual writerly boundaries of self-doubt and procrastination, I claimed new intellectual territory for myself and began to find ways to describe it. In short, I have moved beyond the fraying narrative of endless technological progress fueled by cheap energy. As others have noted, we’re not getting our jetpacks, and that’s just the beginning. We’re in for a bumpy ride, and denial can only make things worse, especially for the vulnerable.

Expressing these concerns and publicly grieving for the human and natural world may entail a degree of courage, but I will leave that to others to decide. At any rate, people who share or come to share those concerns should know that they are not alone in having them, and that we are finding a language to address these issues.    

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

One version or another of this collection has been circulating for about ten years, so there have been a great many lows—many undoubtedly deserved when the book hadn’t yet taken the right form. There were plenty of flat-out rejections, and the manuscript never placed as a finalist or semi-finalist in a competition. Along the way, though, I did get a couple of rejections with encouraging words, and I kept revising the manuscript.

In June of 2024, I finally got the “yes” I was looking for. I had ordered a couple of collections from Broadstone Books and liked their editorial judgment and their attention to the physical quality of their books, so on a whim I sent them the collection. To my surprise and delight editor Larry Moore accepted the manuscript, which roughly fits in the category of ecopoetry and probably nowhere else. For most of that summer, and occasionally since then, I’ve been reminded of the Iron & Wine-Fiona Apple track “All in Good Time.”

Since I’m retiring from my day job at the end of September, there will be time to give this book the support I think it deserves.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1992, William Matthews told me, “You’re still finding out what you can do. Go home and write your ass off.” I can’t improve on that.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The poems in this book were written over a span of more than twenty years, so I probably can’t remember all the times I’ve been surprised. A poem’s coming to mind is always unexpected, as are the moments of arriving at a final version after years of being stuck on one or another detail.

Compiling and arranging the poems had further unexpected results. The persistence of various themes and perspectives reminded me of how the collection could only have come about after decades of education and experience, with a few major shifts along the way. I was also taken aback by seeing how much I’d been thinking about salamanders.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title comes from the last line of “Introit,” the collection’s first poem. The line sets up the collection’s concerns with a strange and troubling world that we do not have to go on great voyages to discover. It is finding us, whether we like it or not, even if our lives take place within a tiny radius. In a changing climate, weather is more unpredictable, and extreme events are occurring more frequently. The ranges of wild plants and animals, and the hardiness zones for agriculture and gardening, are changing accordingly. Whether I look at the Chicago area, where I was born and raised, or Washington, DC, where I went to college and have lived as a working adult since 2000, I no longer see the places I once knew.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

Food appears at several points in the book, though most of it is of the kinds consumed by other species and not very appealing to homo sapiens. Scavenging is important, but I can’t do it. The book does, however, include ingredients: sugar, fish, coffee, sea jellies (for the somewhat adventurous), and blue crab, to which I am apparently allergic. My previous books have touched on more appetizing choices, and books to follow will probably do so as well. Even if I can’t provide the rapturous passages of Thomas Wolfe or Jim Harrison, there will be nibbles.

Interview with Lacey N. Dunham

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Deena Williams is an outsider with a secretive past who will risk everything—including her life—to fit in. 

At secluded Bellerton College, Deena is desperate to join a powerful clique of wealthy girls anointed the Belles. She’s welcomed into their group with the gift of a black velvet ribbon, and the comfortable life she’s always dreamed of is within reach. 

But Bellerton hides a sinister history, and soon Deena is caught in a web of secrets, lies, and dangerous games in this chilling Southern gothic dark academia debut mashup of THE SECRET HISTORY, BUNNY, and HEATHERS.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I loved writing so many of my characters, it’s hard to pick! Ada May was a character who conjured herself, which is appropriate to her character’s genteel sinisterness. I hadn’t originally envisioned her in the book, but she quickly became the foil to my protagonist, Deena, and with her presence the book became a better, more interesting story. I also loved writing Fred, an iconoclastic young woman who is utterly unapologetic about who she is. Fred might be my favorite character in the novel.

Mary’s character was more challenging to write than I expected. I knew her background and her role in the story’s plot, but figuring out how to put her on the page while revealing the bits of mystery surrounding her at the right moments was difficult.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Publishing is a journey of highs and lows! I’m very lucky and privileged to have landed with an editor, the terrific Laura Brown, who understood my vision of the book and worked with me to elevate it to the greatest version of itself. And Atria has been terrific, the whole team there has been wonderful to work with.

One aspect of the publishing journey that isn’t talked about as much as the agent query process is the submission process. Writers are immensely focused on getting an agent—an important thing, especially if you’re interested in publishing with Big 5 and prestige indie presses like Graywolf or Algonquin—but for every book an agent has sold, they have five books from clients whose died on submission. I was, again, very lucky that this didn’t happen to The Belles—but it could have!

I think it’s important for writers to know that the journey doesn’t stop with getting an agent. There are no guarantees in this business. The journey continues for a long time beyond the agent, and it’s an emotionally challenging and difficult journey with no security at any point. Your book, and your career, face numerous hurdles every step of the way. And again with the next book. And again beyond that.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Stay connected to your creativity. The writing is yours; publishing is a business, and it’s a brutal one. There’s so much romanticization around book publishing. I encourage writers to stay grounded. Write for you, first and foremost. Not towards trends. Not towards what you think you “should” be writing. Not to the critics in your head. Not to the readers in your head. Write for you.

Then, worry about all the other stuff later. It becomes all-consuming and gets in the way of the creative work.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I have a drawer novel that I labored over for a decade. That novel was a book I wrote out of shoulds. It was not a book I wrote out of my own interests or obsessions, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. When I decided to write The Belles, I had two rules for myself, and the first one was that I wanted to write a book I would enjoy reading. A book that was wholly composed of things I love. What surprised me most was how much I enjoyed the actual writing process of The Belles once I followed my own obsessions, tastes, and interests rather than someone else’s ideas of a book.

How did you find the title of your book?

I’m terrible at titles! I think most writers are. The working title for The Belles was awful for a long time. I can’t remember when I decided on The Belles, but it’s perfect. It’s a title that references the group, and the consequences of conformity are a major theme in the book. The novel is set in Virginia, and the word “belles” is evocative of Southern Belles, a deeply complicated heritage that the young women in my book would be emerging from. The word “belles” also means “beauty” in French, and toxic white femininity is one of the core themes of my novel.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

The young women of Bellerton College love drinking sweet iced tea on the shaded porches of their dormitories. I personally can’t stand sweet tea—I drink unsweetened tea only.

Interview with Abby Geni

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by Cavenaugh Kelly

Your short story collection The Body Farm can be described as eclectic and genre defying, ranging stories about sharks, porcupines, and the neurodivergent, to the title story, The Body Farm, about a murder mystery involving a scientific research project on decaying corpses. How as a writer, do you go about researching and writing about such varied topics?

In truth, my research tends to find me rather than the other way around. I’ll be watching a documentary or browsing through interesting books at the library, and suddenly I’ll stumble across a fascinating fact about porcupines or the history of witches or the science of body farms, and down the rabbit hole I go.

I find my characters through their passions. What is the mindset of a scientist who happily studies corpses? How does someone find healing in learning about porcupines? Is it possible to work a magic spell in modern-day society? I learn what my characters know. I write about them doing what they love. That is how I discover who they are.

Can you tell us about your unique writing process, especially how you formulate everything in your head for quite a lengthy period before starting to write?

My approach to writing is almost entirely structural. I see sentences, scenes, chapters, and entire novels in terms of how they are constructed. There is a perfect architecture for each of these things, and my work as a writer is to find it. So I hold stories in my head for months or even years as I mentally put things into place. It’s like making a castle in the air. What is the staircase of the plot? What characters make up different wings of the house? What are the rooms of different chapters? Which windows look out on various scenes from the past? Just as a builder would not begin work on a house without a detailed plan, I don’t write a single word until I have a blueprint for the story in my mind.

What do you feel about the “writing rule” to only write what you know?

I love this rule, though I think it’s often misunderstood. Many people interpret it to mean Only write what you are. They feel uncomfortable writing outside their own identity; they feel it’s not okay for them to imagine the interior world of someone from a different background or race or gender.

And that’s a great instinct! We all need to be aware of our own limitations. I am a white woman who was born into a family of hippies, in the Midwest, as a part of a middle class that no longer exists. Given my own identity, I would not, for example, attempt to write from the point of view of a young Black man growing up during the early years of the Apartheid in South Africa in the 1950’s. I could research, I could interview, I could imagine, but I could never know enough to write that person’s story.

This does not, however, mean that I can only write from the point of view of people exactly like me. Sometimes I do stay very close to what I am. But other times I have traveled outside my own race, gender, background, historical context, species, and home planet. Only write what you know. The important word is know. Part of our work as writers is finding the balance between imagination and experience. If someone asks “Why are you the right person to tell this character’s story?” you must have an answer.

I knew a nurse anesthetist and pilot who said the use of anesthesia and flying were the same, it was all about the takeoff and landing. I think the same could be argued about short stories, so much is about the start and the ending. This is something that you are very skilled at doing in your short stories and I was wondering if you could walk us through your mindset when writing the start and ending to your stories, especially your skilled ability to almost dance around a great chasm of emotion but never fully give in to it.

First of all, thanks! Second of all, I totally agree. When I was a student at Oberlin College, I worked with Dan Chaon, who once told me that too many published novels could have been short stories, and that if you can write the piece as a short story, you have to.

A short story usually captures the beginning and end of a particular event: a love story, a job, a childhood, a life. That event is encapsulated in a series of scenes and flashbacks, and the reader is given enough to understand its meaning. If the story were fleshed out—if there were more scenes, more flashbacks, more characterization—the piece would become flabby and dull. It would lose its momentum and meaning. 

Novels, on the other hand, are almost entirely middle. They can’t be contained in a couple of scenes and flashbacks. I teach several classes on the novel, and one of the things I have my students do is write a synopsis of their novel. It’s almost impossible to do well, because every novel sounds insane if you summarize it. There’s just too much plot. There’s a reason novels are 90,000 words long. They can’t be shorter.

While your writing is very smooth and consistent in The Body Farm, the style, or format maybe, of the stories varies a lot. To me, as I read this, at times I felt like I was reading a more literary version of Stephen King, Roald Dahl, or even something like a Dateline episode. Where most story collections are preoccupied with relationships, I found this is to be very refreshing as a reader. What do you attribute all the different approaches to stories in this collection? Do you read widely? I know you’re a big fan of Dr. Who. Does it again go back to your wide-ranging curiosity and research?

I’ll start by saying that I was that kid who always felt annoyed that every single song on the radio seemed to be a love song. I wondered why nobody wrote songs about dinosaurs or space travel. There are a lot of brilliant short story collections out there that focus on relationships, but I would much rather focus on shark divers or serial killers.

It was my intention in this collection to play with format and style more than I ever have before. I’m fascinated by all the different ways a story can capture the reader’s attention. I love mysteries, speculative fiction, thrillers, romance, nonfiction, and graphic novels. There is so much we literary fiction authors can learn from other genres! The best mystery novels have perfect architecture. Sci-fi offers incomparable world-building. Fairy tales create childlike wonder.

All these genres filter into my work. You’re not the first person to mention Stephen King or Roald Dahl (though Dateline is new. Love it!). The title story of The Body Farm was chosen for The Best American Mystery and Suspense of 2024. I’ve been told my work is hard to classify; it often has elements of horror or mythology or thriller or mystery.

And yes, I do indeed love Dr. Who. Every story is bigger on the inside, isn’t it?

***

About Abby Geni:

Abby Geni is the author of the novels The Wildlands and The Lightkeepers and the short story collections The Last Animal and The Body Farm. Her newest novel, Children of the Wolf, will be published in the summer of 2026. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Her short stories and essays have appeared in dozens of literary publications, including Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Missouri Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, and New Stories from the Midwest. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequent Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

About Cavenaugh Kelly:

Cavenaugh Kelly, PhD, is a writer, occupational therapist, and teacher. His short stories have been published in Slice, Harmony Magazine, Pulse, Birmingham Arts Journal, Red Wheel Barrel, Braided Way, and other publications. At Husson University, as an associate professor, Kelly teaches in the School of Occupational Therapy, winning the Theresa W. Steele award for teaching excellence in 2022, and the Global Scholar award in 2025.  He has presented, taught, and published his research on the influence of literature on the empathy levels of healthcare students internationally and nationally, winning the Global Empathy Award at the 2022 International Global Empathy Conference in London, England, where he was a keynote speaker. He is a student in the MFA program at Converse University.

Interview with Penny Zang

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Reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Doll Parts is a dual-timeline suspense novel about two best friends whose past at an women’s college—and a secret club obsessed with Sylvia Plath—comes back to haunt them. It’s also about grief, friendship, and the culture’s obsession with beautiful, dead women.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoyed creating my character Nikki, a college freshman who is grieving the loss of her mother. She listens to loud music (lots of Courtney Love), wears dark, smeared eyeliner and dresses she stole from her school theater department’s costume room. Every time I thought I knew what she would do next, she surprised me on the page.

Characters like this, who are at transition points in their life, are especially fascinating to me because those are periods of my life that seem to linger the most in my memory.

The most challenging character for me was writing Nikki’s daughter, Caroline, who appears almost twenty years later in the novel. I wanted Nikki and Caroline to feel and sound different but be similar enough (the ways mothers and daughters often are) that it echoed across the two different timelines. It took a lot of revision!

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The lows: all the rejection and insecurity that came early in the process. It never ends. Even once you have an agent, even after you have a book deal, there are rejections at every stage.

The highs: getting the news of my book deal will forever be the best memory because it was the most ordinary day (work, my son’s swim practice, making dinner), but suddenly my world changed. I also got to sign a copy of my book at ThrillerFest in NYC this summer before the book’s release. Such a surreal experience!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My favorite writing advice is to step away. Pause. Take a break. Any version of that advice is what I tell my students and constantly have to tell myself. Things unlock when I walk away, and I know I’m not alone. Also, it isn’t healthy for anyone to sit for too long, staring at a computer screen. We need to move our bodies and tend to our other hobbies, our families, our pets. Every time I find myself getting frustrated with my writing, I remember that walking away, even for five minutes, always helps.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised by how little of my research actually made it into the book. I did so much research on Sylvia Plath, obsessively reading every biography (including the really big ones). It all added to the story in its own way in terms of tone and mood, and Plath’s legacy is very much part of the story, but the actual content of that research is hardly mentioned in the novel at all.

How did you find the title of your book?

I originally had a different title for this book, and I didn’t think anyone could sway me to change it. When my editor came to me with the title Doll Parts, which is also the title of a song by Hole, I emailed my agent the following sentence: “I kinda love it.” Not only does it feel a little creepy, but it brings forth images of girlhood and resonates with one of the larger themes of the novel: the romanticization of dead women. And for readers who know the song, the 90s vibes are strong.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes we might share?)

Well, my characters as college students eat a lot of sour candy and drink a lot of Dr Pepper. If you want an informal recipe for their favorite drink (which was, embarrassingly, also my favorite drink when I was much younger), mix Dr Pepper with coconut rum. It’s that simple. Bonus points if you drink it out of a TGI Friday’s kid’s cup with a lid so you can sneak it into concerts.

Best of the Net Nominations

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Congratulations to these writers, whose work the editing team has selected to nominate for 2026 Best of the Net!

Poetry

Drift

  • Richard Foerster

A coastline thinks aloud in 2024

  • Courtney Hitson

Anxiety Is a Bear

  • Bethany Jarmul

Muddy Lines

  • Shyla Shehan

Ode to Compost

  • J.D. Smith

Prose

Fever Dream

  • Sue Eisenfeld

Bailing Out My Sheetrock Man

  • Rupert Fike

Home Range

  • Jennifer Howard

The Dabbawala

  • Mikaela Mari

Artwork

Edmund R. Schubert

Issues:

S/S 2025: borders | boundaries | lines

borders | boundaries | lines

F/W 2024: METAMORPHOSIS

Fall/Winter 2024: METAMORPHOSIS issue

Interview with Denise S. Robbins

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A mysterious phenomenon called ‘the unmapping’ causes city streets and neighborhoods to entirely rearrange each day, leading to broken down power grids and other such chaos. Our two main characters, Esme Green and Arjun Varma, work in the New York City Emergency Management Department; Arjun is in love with Esme, but Esme has a fiancé, who disappears on the first day. The book is about climate change, about disasters, and ultimately about humanity. Also, lucid dreaming cults.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I loved writing from Arjun’s perspective. He tries so hard—at his job, at friendship, at love—and fails in ways that are endearing to me and generally brings levity to this disaster story with his particular brand of neuroticism.

As for the one that gave me trouble, each chapter features a brief perspective from an unnamed character, and the hardest one to write was one of these side characters known as ‘the wife’. Her husband is a disaster prepper yet he himself goes missing the first day, and the wife, meanwhile, stays locked up at home, full of fear, until she gets pulled into a strange lucid-dreaming cult. At one point, I realized I didn’t know very much about her—who she was before all this. That bothered me, the not-knowing. Then I realized this missing sense of self was actually perfect for the story—that’s the type of person who would get swept away in dangerous ideas. I thought her story was about fear, but I learned it was about a missing selfhood.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Three years elapsed between when I finished the book and when I got the book deal. In that time, as I secured an agent and my agent pitched out The Unmapping, I kept writing madly, finishing two more books: a novel and a novella collection. When I heard that Bindery had put in an offer to publish The Unmapping, it was both a high and a low, because I went back to my draft and realized how much I had changed as a writer, and how much I wanted to change in this book. I’d really grown in three years! Luckily, they were responsive to my wishes to make some pretty massive edits, which were in line with what they wanted, too, so I said yes, then embarked on an utterly insane two months of rewriting. It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, and very difficult, but also wonderful, with my mind always at least one foot in the dreamscape of the novel. Since then it’s only been high after high, working with an amazing team on editing, choosing the cover, and everything else that goes into turning a book from words on a page to a physical reality.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I am a diehard reader of George Saunders’s Substack, Story Club. In many of his essays he talks about the importance of finding and following the energy of a piece. Basically, when you read back what you wrote, what is it that gives off little sparks? Follow that. Let that energy lead the story. Take it as far as it can go.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Writing this story involved discovery on every level. In a broad sense, when I was first working on this years ago, I didn’t realize I was writing a slanted analogy of climate change. I work in climate change advocacy, but considered my fiction as an escape from reality. Nope. It’s a disaster story very much about our own reality, even as it’s based on an unreal premise, and once I realized this, a lot clicked into place. On a smaller scale, when I was reviewing the book for copy edits I laughed out loud at a joke I’d included in the penultimate chapter—one I’d completely forgotten about. I took that as a good sign that I’d created characters with a life of their own.

How did you find the title of your book?

I initially called it “Sidewalk n.” I graduated undergrad with a degree in statistics, so this is a super nerdy math reference, because in statistics, instead of solving for “x,” you work with “n,” which is the number of observations in your sample. The idea was that if all the sidewalks rearrange (along with everything else), the one you’re looking at is “n”: it could be anything. Also, the name sort of rhymes with “sidewalk ends.” My husband also loved this title because he’s also a big math nerd, but I secretly knew it was too esoteric, that no one would get it, and right there on the first page people were talking about cities becoming “unmapped,” so it just became obvious that I should name it after that.