FWR editor Eric McDowell and Barrett Bowlin sit down to talk small presses, the fiction of shitty jobs, and Bowlin’s debut collection, Ghosts Caught on Film, winner of the Bridge Eight Press Fiction Prize.
“You will find yourself returning to these characters time and again, reconsidering the little choices that make your own life what it is.” Sophia Khan on Joann Smith’s debut collection, A Heaven of Their Choosing.
“Like my predecessors, I want to show us grappling, resisting, and (hopefully) healing, to show our full humanity in a country that was not designed with our freedom in mind, and in which those freedoms are still threatened, daily.” Deesha Philyaw talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her award-winning collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
“Despite how powerfully the objects of our lives might obsess us or orient our attention, they are but one aspect of a larger lived experienced.” Costa B. Pappas on Clare Sestanovich’s debut collection, Objects of Desire, out soon from Knopf.
“Writers often get obsessed with a story or character. I can just as easily get obsessed with making pom-poms. I love the feeling of being in the creative world of the project versus the actual world.” Colleen Hubbard talks with Maria Adelmann about her debut collection, Girls of a Certain Age.
“I think the South is worth fighting for, with all its issues. I think it’s worth fighting for change here.” Eleanor J. Bader interviews Kasey Thornton about her debut collection, Lord the One You Love Is Sick, the writing process, and life in the contemporary South.
Edward Hamlin talks with Rachel Swearingen about her debut collection, How to Walk on Water, as well as her roots as a writer and a Midwesterner, challenges women face in harmonizing public and private personas, and more.
“I saw a parallel in the way the body attacks itself in an autoimmune disease to the way guilt attacks the mind. The bodies of many of these characters define, in some ways, the boundaries of their lives.” Alexander Tilney talks with the most recent Prairie Schooner Book Prize winner, Megan Cummins, about her short story collection If the Body Allows It.
“Wortman-Wunder’s stories never completely implicate or exculpate the protagonists”: Hasanthika Sirisena on Emily Wortman-Wunder’s debut collection, Not a Thing to Comfort You, winner of the Iowa Short Story Prize.
“I’m interested specifically in the inner turmoil, the emotional price and weight, of self-betrayal and deception as it is experienced and enacted by queer people.” Lee Thomas talks with Peter Kispert about his debut collection.
