“I wrote big swaths of this book operating on instinct, and I had a lot of luck with the instincts later bearing fruit”: Holly Goddard Jones with Danielle LaVaque-Manty on dystopian fiction, Cracker Barrel, and The Salt Line, out this week from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
“I like characters that get in a jam and have to weasel their way out, usually with disastrous results”: Lee Matthew Goldberg talks with Vincent Zandri about his new novel, The Mentor, out now from Thomas Dunne Books.
“I don’t think you can really go home again. I was more interested in what happens if you have to”: Melissa Scholes Young chats with Aline Ohanesian about motherhood, small-town USA, and her debut novel, Flood, out this week from Center Street/Hachette.
“We must lie and lie well in order to make the reader cry, or sigh, or slam their fists on the table in anger”: Neil Connelly and Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith talk about crafting fiction from life.
“That’s how the work gets done. No shortcuts, no strategies to make the process easier than it ever can or will be”: Jack Driscoll chats with Mary Stewart Atwell about his latest collection, The Goat Fish and The Lover’s Knot.
“I didn’t expect the new chapters—the ones from different characters’ points of view—to be so much fun, so interesting to write, so revealing”: David Hicks chats with Emily Nagin about his debut novel, White Plains, out now from Conundrum Press.
Maile Meloy in an interview From the Archives: “I think you have to find an emotional connection to the story, to make anyone else care about it, but I would find writing only what I know to be limiting.”
“A lot of things are inherently funny when there is a conflict and an opposition. We’re not simple people. Everybody is complex”: Nina Buckless catches up with Marvin Cohen, whose strange and wonderful fiction is still finding new audiences 40 years later.
“In spite of the loss that pervades my novels, I hope that readers feel the continual making in the language, the poetry that shores us up against the loss”: Andrew Krivák talks with Shann Ray about family, landscape, and his latest novel, The Signal Flame, out now from Scribner.
“I suppose if flash fiction were a running form, it would be a sprint. One that requires a lot of thinking and training and art to have a good, solid race”: Kim Chinquee with Steve Wingate on her new collection of flash fiction, Veer, out this spring from Ravenna Press.
“Whenever I have 20–30 minutes free, I’m writing”: Keith Lesmeister chats with Barrett Bowlin about his debut collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, out this month from Midwestern Gothic Press.
“The collection, I hope, challenges assumptions about Southeast Michigan, and the people who live here”: Laura Hulthen Thomas chats with Ian Singleton about her debut collection, States of Motion, out today from Wayne State University Press.
