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Interview with Jill Christman

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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?

 What I say if someone asks:

The Heart Folds Early is a memoir about what it means to make a choice.

 My third-person pitch:

River Teeth editor Jill Christman’s fourth book of nonfiction, The Heart Folds Early, is about what it means to make a choice. Loving, rageful, and often funny, Christman’s new memoir centers her decision to end a half-term pregnancy when a routine ultrasound reveals her baby has just half a heart—and asks: As mothers, how do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?

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

As a writer, I am a contrarian. In grad school, they told me No dead grandmothers. But I couldn’t help it. In my first memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, I wrote the hell out of my dying grandmother (Beatrice Coe Ingraham, school librarian and ace poker player, may she rest in peace). Later, I learned that using multiple points of view in a memoir is bad form, but again, sometimes I feel as if I’m looking at my younger self from somewhere near the ceiling or perhaps I need to issue instructions or establish myself as  part of a community. Third person, first person direct address, second person (sparingly), first person plural. . . I use them all. Why have tools if we’re going to leave them in the box? And now you’re telling me there’s a fourth wall between the narrator and the reader? Crash through that wall like the Kool Aid Man. (I mean, when it suits you. Or you’re thirsty for some Red Dye 40.) So, yeah, both in terms of subject and craft, the breaking of rules is so much a part of my daily practice that it doesn’t even feel rebellious anymore—which is kind of too bad, you know?

Now, this book had to break that Big Boundary—the boundary that tells us we’re not supposed to talk about a thing. The boundary that shames and scares and shushes us into silence. This book is about my choice to have a second-trimester medical abortion.

This is my third memoir, written through a nearly twenty-year gestation, a time that ran parallel to me both raising a couple of kids with my poet husband (and, therefore, working in short, frequently interrupted bursts) and falling in love with the essay. So  

The Heart Folds Early started as a memoir (called Mothercraft), split off into essays, spawned a whole separate e-book (Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood) and several essays that ran away from the book and eventually got together with other essays to form a collection (If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays)—all the while growing and shrinking and changing not only outfits but whole forms, shapeshifting between nonfiction classifications and structures like a love child of Proteus and Methis (I’m making this up: they didn’t hook up, even in myth, but just imagine!).

After an initial agent pitch to publishers came back with the news that the subject of dying babies is too depressing, and thus, hard to sell, I read my by that point teenage manuscript a story and put her to bed (or maybe it was the other way around, but in any case, I was done). Maybe, I thought, this was not a book I needed to write. Maybe, I thought, this was a book I had written for myself, and honestly, that’s a pretty good way to live, no writing is ever wasted, and I would move on and write other essays and books and let this one rest in a giant file that was, back then, named Blue Baby Blue.

But then something big happened. Something terrible. Something world rattling. In June of 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, and now, now, I had a new urgent question, didn’t I? What the actual fuck? And so I rewrote the whole book, beginning with a prologue (in which it’s quite possible I curse too much), the moment in an Airbnb in Colorado when I heard the news we’d all known was coming, but now, now, here it was—the news that the right to an abortion in the United States was no longer protected. Spewing from the rageful volcano that was by then a perimenopausal me, The Heart Folds Early took on her final shape.

The book coming out this March from Nebraska is now quite solidly memoir, and even more or less chronological—except for that starting at the end to go back to the beginning bit, and some detours into my youth. One early reader called it a romance. Sexy. Another said she laughed in every chapter, even though she wasn’t sure she should be laughing. Writer and activist Sonya Huber said I had “steel nerves”—so that was something. Steel nerves! Me!

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

I cheated and started answering this question above. (Do you see what I mean about me? I can’t even follow the clear rules of a good interview question.) So you know there was the low of being told that my story was too depressing and wouldn’t sell well as a baby-shower gift (that was an actual thing a marketing department shared by way of telling my then-agent they were taking a pass). And because the book is coming out with the amazing people at the University of Nebraska Press, in the American Lives series, an extraordinary team I’ve worked with before and knew I could trust with this book, well, that’s the actual publication high.

But if I could point to one thing that scared me enough to become a low until I really faced the scariness was how much I worried about the story being received, specifically by other parents who had faced the same diagnosis (or one like it), mid-term, and made a different choice. I deeply and truly respect these many choices. All of them. With love. So one thing that was really different for me—and hard—in making The Heart Folds Early was how conscious I needed to be of my audience in that final two-year rewrite. I was no longer writing the book for me. I was writing about my choice because I understood it was my responsibility to tell the story of my second-trimester abortion. I had the skills to tell my story and the resources to get that story out into the world. (Speaking of boundaries, we cannot let the parameters of the conversation around reproductive rights be defined by those who would—and have—stripped us of those rights. We cannot let these conversations—or any of the big things we’re wrestling with right now in this country—be over-simplified because they’re hard.)

So I was hyper-aware of my many audiences—both actual people I knew or knew of, and whole categories of people—like young people in the United States coming of age in a time when their right to an abortion is not protected. I am always aware that I am writing to my children—perhaps in a time when I will no longer be here. And, as I said, I was aware that I was writing to other parents, mothers and fathers, who had faced the same diagnosis we faced and made a different choice. I wanted to write a book that respected all choices—except, I suppose, the choice to take away somebody else’s choice. As I write this, I realize that another high of this book’s path to publication was figuring out how to tell this story out of love—and not from a place of fear.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Shew! Great question. I edit two magazines—River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative—and our (free!) weekly online magazine of micro-essays, Beautiful Things—and I’ve been teaching and writing nonfiction for thirty years, so let me tell you, I’m full of advice, most of which I footnote with—Or maybe not. Maybe you have a reason to do something else here. So let me try to offer some advice that doesn’t need that footnote. I’ll choose three:

  • Remember that you are not the only one. Not even today. Not even this minute.
  • When you’re working on something difficult? Stay. Don’t leave. Linger in the uncertainty. Slow down when it gets hard.
  • But keep going. You’re doing it. Keep going.

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

Ah! Yes. There’s more advice that doesn’t need a footnote. I’m here for the surprises. On a macro-level, I was surprised by how a book could grow from such hot rage and deep love—at the same time, on the same pages. On a micro-level, so many, but one I sometimes point to is on page 23 of The Heart Folds Early, in a moment where the writing-me returns on Google maps to look down on the intersection where, many, many years earlier, my then-fiancé was killed in a horrible crash along with two of his buddies on the way to get a pizza after work—the jolt of surprise and sadness I felt in my heart from my couch in Indiana, a lifetime away: “Before I was a mother, I never thought about this detail of the tragedy, but now? It makes me so sad to know they died hungry.”

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

As a serial memoirist and someone who’s been teaching creative nonfiction writing for over half my life, there’s a question I hear a lot: How long do I have to wait before I write about [insert hard thing here]. And my answer is always some version of the advice I give for all writing-advice questions: Only you know how long you need to wait. What do you think? But for this one, I usually add that the standard advice that we need to fully process a difficult experience before we write about it has never made sense to me. Isn’t writing how we come to understand the hard things in the world that don’t make sense? We can write the hard thing right away and then three months later and then a decade after that—and each time we put pen to paper from a different perspective, something new will emerge. Last spring, the wise and wonderful essayist Steven Harvey (aka, The Humble Essayist) visited my graduate writing class and when we asked him why he writes, why he’s still writing, he answered: “I write to compensate for losses.”

And the losses keep coming, don’t they? But when we write them, when we write into and through them, we can find something like hope—for ourselves, for our children, for each other, and maybe, you know, for the world.

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

I love this question—because I love food. Oh gosh. I’m trying to think. I ate a lot of clementines during my first pregnancy—and consumed many avocados during the writing of the book. They’re in there, along with a fair amount of kid food. And cookies. In life, I’m a baker—sourdough baguettes and (vegan) banana bread (my daughter is deathly allergic to eggs)—even before the pandemic made us do it—so those are foods that supported The Heart Folds Early. My go-to easy, food-processor (gasp!)baguette recipe is Mark Bittman’s “Easiest and Best French Bread” and the queen of all banana bread recipes was developed by those vegan geniuses, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, in Veganomicon: I always double the recipe, add Penzey’s double-strength vanilla and half again the amount of spice, and bake one standard loaf pan and one pan of those cute mini-loaves for my kids’ dorm freezers. Sometimes it’s hard to make it to breakfast before class! (I can’t find the version from the cookbook online, and it’s always good to point folks towards Post Punk Kitchen, so here’s a recipe for Isa’s Marbled Banana Bread—which is basically the same except, you know, for the chocolate; if you’re not in the mood for marbling, just make this one, but omit the boiling water and chocolate, and add 1/3 c molasses and a 1/3 cup-ish applesauce: moist, fruity perfection.)

Interview with Megan A. Schikora

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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?

When the unnamed protagonist meets Dutch, she believes that he is her Johnny Cash, that she is his June Carter, and that theirs is a great love story. As the novel progresses, it tells a different story, one swirling with the chaos of addiction. It raises questions about our devotion to people who are terrible for us and at what personal cost.  

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

I really enjoyed writing Dutch’s mom, June. She’s a powerhouse. At the same time, beneath all that strength and polish, she’s as vulnerable as the protagonist. I saw and heard her so clearly. I’d like to grab drinks with her. I’d like to be friends.   

I struggled with Tim, one of the protagonist’s romantic partners. Some find him endearing, the obvious “good guy” opposite of Dutch. But even as Tim pledged himself to the protagonist, I’m not sure he ever fully saw her. I’m not sure he was capable.       

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

This road has been a long one. I’m such an impatient person, and before A Woman in Pink, I had only ever written short stories and essays. To give this book the best possible shot, I had to slow down and hone my discipline. Books take time. Thoughtful editing and querying take time.  

I also had to toughen up. This process comes with so much rejection. It’s like drinking from a firehose.

One of the best moments was my first conversation with Jaynie Royal, Editor-in-Chief at Regal House Publishing. She had read my manuscript, and she wanted to talk.  

For context, I had struggled with a recurring comment from early readers: “You have to name your protagonist.” I didn’t want to withhold something readers felt they needed, but I also knew that the omission of the name was critical to the story. Jaynie Royal was the first person who not only understood but appreciated my decision. I felt like my book was finally being seen, and that I was, too, as an author. I signed with Regal House Publishing shortly after that conversation.             

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Those lovely people in your life who tell you how great you are? Don’t share your early drafts with them. Share your work with critical readers who will point out the weaknesses and tell you the truth.

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

The ambiguity of the book’s conclusion surprised me. I didn’t know the protagonist’s precise fate, and I decided that I was okay with not knowing. I didn’t need or want a tidy ending. I wanted to leave some room for interpretation and hope.  

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

I want readers to know that A Woman in Pink is not a romance. It’s not cynical, either. It’s a messy story, one that veers away from “happily ever after” toward lived experience, one I hope will resonate with anyone who’s ever loved an addict.

Interview with Agata Maslowska

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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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.

Interview with Katrina Denza

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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?

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.

Interview with R.L. Maizes

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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?

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.)