I’m a Writer But – Literary Hub

Kate Brody on Subverting Genre

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 09:01:05 +0000

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.

Today, Kate Brody discusses her literary crime debut, Rabbit Hole, inhabiting and subverting the crime genre, writing sex scenes, writing men, the narrative use of a gun in the novel, what drives us to consume true crime, and more!

From the episode:

Kate Brody: I feel like the book does well with the lit fic people who are closet crime people. […] Story is just so much of who we are as human beings. I was a big crime reader as a kid; I still love a really well-written crime novel. I love the Tana French books, and the writing is beautiful. Any kind of genre fiction [in MFA programs] is the ugly stepchild, but you see books that are doing it really well, and you think, okay, there’s no reason why the quality of the writing can’t be where I want it to be, and also work in this space. I was never going to write a straight down the middle crime novel.

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Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Lit Hub, CrimeReads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut.

Julie Myerson on Her Immersive New Novel

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 09:01:32 +0000

Julie Myerson discusses the immersive structure of her new novel Nonfiction, how her real life influenced her fiction, dealing with intense public backlash and rediscovering her confidence as a writer, Elizabeth Strout, and so much more!

From the episode:

Julie Myerson: I think what I was wanting, only because this is the only way I could write the book, was to write about what this experience does to your head–to the heads of the people who care about someone who’s using drugs. It does a very strange thing to your head. It sends you kind of mad in a weird way. However much you love that person, and however much advice you take, and however much you try to do the right thing, the actual experience is very bizarre.

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Julie Myerson is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Something Might Happen and The Stopped Heart, and three works of nonfiction, including Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House and The Lost Child. As a critic and columnist, she has written for many newspapers including The Guardian, the FT, Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times, and she was a regular guest on BBC TV’s Newsnight Review. She lives in London with her family.

Yael Goldstein-Love on the Impossibilities Captured in The Possibilities

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:01:04 +0000

Yael Goldstein-Love discusses her time- and genre-bending novel, The Possibilities, trying to put motherhood into words, using quantum mechanics to explain the paradox of parenthood, the way parents birth a child’s mind, mom rage, writing humor, her newest project, and more!

From the episode:

Yael Goldstein-Love: [Quantum mechanics] was a very natural metaphor for me to use. [One] thing that was really important to me in writing this book was capturing–in a way that I had not seen captured elsewhere–the incredibly unique form of communication that passes between an infant and a caregiver, and that continues to pass between a caregiver and child even when there’s verbal back and forth. That communication that really is just riding the same vibration.

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Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of the novels The Passion of Tasha Darsky, described as “showing signs of brooding genius” by The New York Times, and The Possibilities, a speculative thriller about the psychological transition to motherhood. A PEOPLE pick of the week (“a powerful page-turner with deep wisdom”) and Good Morning America recommendation for summer reading (“taps into those primal feelings every nurturer feels — and fears”), The Possibilities grew out of Goldstein-Love’s own rocky transition to motherhood as well as her clinical passion for working with people during this fraught and potentially generative period. Her doctoral dissertation examined how mothers experience their anxiety for the unknown futures of their children.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and Slate, among other places. A graduate of Harvard University and The Wright Institute, she lives with her six-year-old son and a very patient cat in Berkeley, CA.

In another life, she was co-founder and Editorial Director of the literary studio Plympton, which aims to make the digital age a golden age for literature.

Andrew Porter on Writing to Discover

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:06:27 +0000

Andrew Porter discusses his new collection, The Disappeared, how his process changes depending on what he’s working on, trying to hold a novel in his head all at once as he’s drafting, moving from writing stories to writing a novel and back again, when and how he thinks about structure, and more!

From the episode:

Andrew Porter: My process varies depending on the story. I don’t have, necessarily, a set process. I’ve always written by instinct, and my stories have always grown out of images–usually they’re images from my life. I start there, and I feel like there’s something in an image or a memory that has a story behind it. And I begin writing in an attempt to discover why I’m feeling drawn to that image, or why it’s been haunting me, or why it’s stayed with me. And usually, a story emerges.

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Andrew Porter is the author of the story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter, and the novel In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, and Ploughshares, and on public radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Athena Dixon on Being a Human Being, Not a Brand

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:01:31 +0000

Athena Dixon discusses her new book The Loneliness Files, the cases that inspired the essays, how social media can help and harm the creative process, writing on her phone, being ghosted for writing opportunities, being transparent in the industry, working without an agent, and more!

From the episode:

Athena Dixon: Social media is such a highlight reel, a lot of times, and it’s such a brand thing for a lot of creatives, that we don’t show what it takes to get to those high points. When I started talking about my writing on Instagram, and talking about the highs and lows, I had people coming to me and telling me not to talk about the bad, because you’re building a brand, and the brand is supposed to be positive. First of all, I’m a human being and not a brand. Why would I do a disservice to writers who are still trying to get to some of the milestones that I’ve been able to achieve by lying to them about how many years I had to write and how many submissions got rejected and the steps that it took to get to having a book deal and all the things that I still want to accomplish? Getting an agent has been on my literary goal list for like four or five years at this point and it still hasn’t happened, so I have to be honest.

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Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is the author of the essay collection The Loneliness Files, out now on Tin House, The Incredible Shrinking Woman and No God In This Room, Winner of the Intersectional Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic and Getting to the Truth: The Practice and Craft of Creative Nonfiction.

Rachel Cantor on the Creative Maelstrom of the Brontës

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 08:11:59 +0000

This week, Rachel Cantor discusses her new novel, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister: A Novel of the Brontës, writing a modern take on historical characters, finding her way to the novel’s innovative form, finding a balance in voice and tone, finding a publisher for this book without an agent, and more!

From the episode:

Rachel Cantor: Their world was such a world of the imagination, and it’s so incredibly important–not just for their books that would come–but for their relationship, because it bound them together. The four surviving Brontë children shared a creative life. They told stories together, they created entire imaginary realms together, they wrote stories which they read to each other or they collaborated on, they illustrated–it was an entire universe that they inhabited, and I found that thrilling to be a part of. I wanted to be in that room where all that creative maelstrom was happening.

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Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels A Highly Unlikely Scenario and Good on Paper. Her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among other publications. She was raised in Rome and Connecticut, and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

E.J. Koh on the Connection Between Her Memoir and Her Novel

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:01:03 +0000

In this truly wonderful and enlightening episode, E.J. Koh discusses her debut novel The Liberators, the magic of dogs, familial relationships, how poetry helped her communicate, magnanimity, how imagination and creativity are essential aspects of apology, her hope for Korea, and more!

From the episode:

E.J. Koh: Susan [Davis] sat me down and said, “You know how to start a poem, and you really know how to fill out a poem, but you don’t know how to do the turn, which is the end of the poem. You’re missing magnanimity. A poem isn’t a poem unless it has magnanimity. At least by the end of the poem, you have to forgive your mother, or the poem has to forgive you for not; otherwise, it’s not a poem.” I rewrote my memoir several times to remind myself that I’m not writing this to say who was right and wrong, I’m writing this to find the magnanimity. To understand what was happening. I wanted to understand the characters in the same way with The Liberators. I think The Liberators is very much a part of [my memoir]. It’s almost an extension in that way.

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E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), which won a Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Koh is also the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State U. Press, 2017), a Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry Winner. She is a translator of Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), which won the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Translation Grand Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation and her PhD at the University of Washington in English Language and Literature studying Korean American literature, history, and film. Koh has received National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, American Literary Translators Association, and Kundiman fellowships. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Kathleen Rooney on the Woman Behind the Fairies

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 08:01:14 +0000

Today, Kathleen Rooney discusses her new novel From Dust to Stardust, which is based on silent film star Colleen Moore and the fairy castle she created, as well as the best kind of weirdos, nailing the unique voice of her protagonist, researching the silent film era, and more!

From the episode:

Kathleen Rooney: I grew up watching Mr. Rogers, and he would always do that thing where, instead of just saying, “we’re going to go see where the crayons are made,” he would say, “we’re going to see the people who make the crayons.” I always thought that was so cool. He always emphasized, like, this is a neat product or object or invention, but somebody put in hours to make it. I would like more of that.

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her recent books include the national best-seller Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.. Where Are the Snows, her latest poetry collection, was chosen by Kazim Ali for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022. With her sister Beth Rooney, she is the author of the picture book Leaf Town Forever, forthcoming in 2025 from University of Minnesota Press.

Chloé Caldwell on Period as Plot

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 08:01:22 +0000

Today, Chloé Caldwell discusses her memoir, The Red Zone, as well as the ambitious decision to center a book around her period/PMDD, periods in pop culture, women’s changing bodies, the euphoria of seeing menstruation depicted realistically, structuring and restructuring her book, and more (about periods)!

From the episode:

Chloé Caldwell: When I became passionate about periods, and thinking about periods, I noticed the way my friends and I talked about our bodies and periods was not being depicted anywhere. [My friends and I will] text each other the grossest things, and this is all in secret, and yet we’re all talking about it in the same way. I thought it would be so interesting to have that captured in a book that is somewhat literary–and contemporary. I thought, oh my God, what if I made the period the plot of the book?

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Chloé Caldwell is the author of The Red Zone: A Love Story (Soft Skull, 2022) and three more books: the essay collection I’ll Tell You in Person (Coffee House/Emily Books, 2016), the critically acclaimed novella, WOMEN (SF/LD 2014), and Legs Get Led Astray (2012). Orphaned Passages: Notes on Trying will release in 2025 from Graywolf Press.

Cleo Qian on the Differences Between Writing Poetry and Fiction

I'm a Writer But — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:05:27 +0000

Today, Cleo Qian discusses moving between poetry and fiction, the inspiration behind some of the stories in her debut collection Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, allowing her book to age as she revised, honoring the privacy of writing, and more!

From the episode:

Cleo Qian: I think that fiction is a form in which you kind of have to organize your thoughts, and there is the expectation that there’s going to be a narrative, which implies some cohesion and some arcs inside. With poetry, you’re allowed to be more explosive. There’s a lot of constraint, there’s so much attention on the line level and on the syntax level, but you’re allowed to be a little more disorganized with–for example–an emotional arc. You’re allowed to explain less in some ways.

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Cleo Qian (she/her) is a fiction writer and poet from California. She received her MFA from NYU. Her work has appeared in over 20 outlets; was a winner of the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Competition; has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, twice longlisted for the DISQUIET Prize, and supported by Sundress Academy for the Arts. By day, she works at a nonprofit and reads self-help articles on how to be happy. Her debut short story collection, Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, is out now.