From the Archives: Friendship unraveling around exposed ambition – Jacinda Townsend talks with Melissa Scholes Young about competition, solidarity, and the constraints of the wider world.
From the Archives: Ana Menéndez’s story collection Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves.
“While I admire a good dystopia as much as the next politically disillusioned person, I think the future needs the power of our imaginations to generate hopeful alternatives.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Joy Castro about her new novel, Flight Risk.
“Every time I write a story, I’m writing it as part of a manuscript or a cycle.” Brandon Taylor talks with Melissa Scholes Young about his short story collection, Filthy Animals, as well as story cycles, social codes, and the Midwestern way of being.
“When we busy ourselves too much with keeping up appearances, we might not hold enough space for authenticity, intimacy, and engagement with the world bigger than our own.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Steven Wingate about her new novel, The Hive.
“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.
“There’s plenty of great fiction about belonging to a place and being part of a community—with the opportunities and obligations this brings—but that’s not a state of being I understand well.” Steven Wingate talks with Melissa Scholes Young about The Leave-Takers.
“More broadly, the book, and the short story form in general, is interested in the way that certain choices preclude others.” Danielle Evans talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her new collection, The Office of Historical Corrections.
“In contemporary life, sports are a lot like politics or religion in that they activate these very deep-seated affinities, which we re-enact continuously, and often without examination.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Katherine Hill about her new novel, A Short Move.
“The tension between whether a story wants to be long or short requires us to examine them together.” Melissa Scholes Young thinks about form and story containers by engaging with the work of R.L. Maizes.
