Pareidolia by Kelly Pedro
My mother sees my father’s face everywhere. Last week it was in our neighbour’s wilting asters. Then, an angry version in a banana she decided to save. “Maybe it’ll brown into the Virgin Mary, and we can sell it…
Tag: Revision Process
Hybrid Interview: Deborah Jackson Taffa
Essay by Gabriel Moseley • I had the great pleasure of meeting Deborah Jackson Taffa at the Vermont Studio Center in October 2023, where she was the Visiting Writer. It was stick season—the dismal threshold between the time of…
Conversations Between Friends: C. H. Hooks and Kelsey Norris
Kelsey Norris and I spoke in December. She was in Washington, DC and I was in St. Augustine, Florida, two arguably very different spaces to prepare for the holidays. We were also preparing for her to join me at…
Hybrid Interview: Puloma Ghosh
Essay by Ruth Minah Buchwald • What keeps you up at night? For me, it’s genocide, climate change, another epidemic, hopeless politics, something embarrassing that I said in middle school, the finite nature of time, and so on, but…
Pretend by Mary Williams
Pretend I am your mother. Pretend you love me the way you did when you were small, and the world was big, and you could still feel, in some deep primordial way, that not so long ago, my body…
Hybrid Interview: Afabwaje Kurian
Essay by Anna Polonyi • What does it mean to revise a novel? I’ve been doggedly asking this question ever since attending workshop beside Afabwaje Kurian, whose stunningly written debut novel, Before the Mango Ripens, was released on September…
Interview: Sarah Seltzer
In her debut novel, The Singer Sisters, Sarah Seltzer chronicles the highs and lows of a family of musicians, focusing primarily on the matriarch, Judie, and her daughter, Emma. While Judie found her footing in the New York folk…
Twelve by Elissa Lash
One Once there was a hungry woman. Some said she was a giant and some said she was a witch. That woman is me. She might be you. I’ve always been voraciously hungry. Even before the years I starved…
Conversations Between Friends: Kate Schapira and Erika Howsare
Seven years ago, we—Kate Schapira and Erika Howsare—published a collaborative volume of poetry, which no one bought. Kate has published half a dozen other books of poetry and teaches writing at Brown University; Erika has one solo poetry book…
Hybrid Interview: Nora Decter
Essay by Rachel León • I met Nora Decter over Zoom when we were tasked to outline her forthcoming novel, What’s Not Mine. We were both fellows in Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program, paired to work together on our…