Work-in-Progress

TBR: The Sky Will Hold by Elizabeth Hazen

2026-04-06T10:11:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

I tend to write my way through challenges – both internal ones and external ones – so a lot of my poems have to do with questions of identity and purpose as well as with navigating complicated relationships. My recent work also concerns parenting a young adult son, helping him find meaning in the world when I struggle to do so myself. I like to play with form, so a lot of my poems adhere to formal constraints of some kind.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why?

I had a lot of fun writing the gloses. This is an obscure Spanish form that takes four lines – a “cabeza” - from an existing poem. Those lines then each become the final lines of four 10-line stanzas. Lines 6, 9, and 10 rhyme. In general, I enjoy working in form – it takes me out of my emotional brain and puts me in that logical, puzzle-solving brain. I think this is good for creating some distance from the subject, allowing me more objectivity. The form also encourages a dialogue with the poem from which the cabeza is taken, and I loved spending time with those works.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The publication process for The Sky Will Hold took longer than expected. Initially, Alan Squire Publishing was going to release this collection in March 2025. They published my first two collections and we were excited to work together on this one, but for various reasons in the spring of 2024, ASP decided to go on hiatus. I was disappointed and discouraged and spent a few months convinced that I would never find a publisher, but ultimately Riot in Your Throat took the book. The delay allowed me to add a few poems to the manuscript that I think make the collection stronger, so it all worked out in the end.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

The older I get, the more I appreciate the advice that many of my teachers have given over the years – and that is simply to have fun with it. I’ve been writing for long enough that I see little reason to continue unless it brings me joy, so I have been trying to get back to that original sense of discovery and wonder that made writing appeal to me in the first place.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I don’t think of myself as a very optimistic person, but I increasingly believe that my purpose in writing is to highlight the beauty and connection I see in the world. When I read through the collection, I am surprised and pleased to see that many of the poems are actually pretty hopeful.

How did you find the title of your book?

Rose Solari, a fabulous poet and teacher and the publisher of my first two books, came up with the title. She was helping me with the order of the poems, and we were chatting about title options, and she suggested The Sky Will Hold. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was the right title.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: Elizabeth Hazen Official – My WordPress Blog

READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK: The Sky Will Hold by Elizabeth Hazen - Riot in Your Throat Press

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: The Sky Will Hold by Elizabeth Hazen - Riot in Your Throat Press

READ A POEM FROM THIS BOOK, “Approximations”: Elizabeth Hazen "Approximations" — THE SHORE

TBR: Bodies in Bags by Jamey Gallagher

2026-03-30T11:56:00.002-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming literary books of interest.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Bodies in Bags is a grit lit/crime collection so visceral you can smell it. A bad cop in New Hampshire dealing with the consequences of shooting an intruder, a drifter who wakes up next to her dead companion in Atlantic City, a veteran fleeing to South Jersey after an impulsive crime: these are stories of desperation and recompense, told in tough and sometimes tender voices. The stories deal with issues of masculinity, consequences, violence, and uncontrollable impulses.

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

Of all the stories in Bodies in Bags, I think “Night Moves” might have been the most enjoyable to write. The setting takes me back to a volunteer position at a hospital I had when I was a teenager. The world feels familiar, and the main character is someone I like a lot, a woman like some of the women I worked with at the hospital: tough but kind. The story “Dream a Little Dream” probably gave me the most trouble. It took me so long to finish. I had the character and the opening scene for years, and I must have started three or four novels based on that opening before finally coming up with a shape and a voice that I’m proud of.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This is the second book of short stories I’ve published in two years. For both books, many of the stories go back a ways. Once I had found the shape for my first collection, I realized that I had a bunch of noir/grit lit pieces that all seemed to hang together. After years of facing rejection, this book was pretty easy to get out there, thanks to the support and faith of Ross Tangedal at Cornerstone Press.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I tend to think all writing advice is pointless, unless it works. As a young writer, I was lucky enough to be in a writing group run by Andre Dubus III. Many things Andre said stuck with me, but I particularly remember him talking about perseverance. “If you put it under a magnifying glass long enough, eventually it’s going to catch fire.”

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The best stories are almost entirely surprises. As a writer, especially when I’m between stories, I’m always listening for voices and waiting to hear one that works. This collection features a lot of voices that surprised me. I have no idea why they feel real to me or where they came from.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

I think readers should know what they’re getting into. This book is definitely not for everyone, but, for people who like things dark, I think it will provide exactly what you’re looking for. It doesn’t flinch.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

I can’t share a recipe, but one of the stories features a bar that serves “chicken barb” sandwiches. Only people in the Merrimack Valley know what a chicken barb is: the most delicious sandwich ever, featuring shredded chicken in warm mayonnaise. Nobody can make it the way Norm’s White Horse used to.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://jameyg0.wixsite.com/jameygallagher

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/bodies-in-bags-stories-jamey-gallagher/477c41adad9df5e1?ean=9781968148355&next=t

READ A STORY FROM THIS COLLECTION, “Bodies in Bags”:

http://www.cowboyjamboreemagazine.com/bodies-in-bags-by-jamie-gallagher.html

TBR: The Marriage Bed by Tommy Hays

2026-03-23T10:19:00.000-04:00

stablished in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy, inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends him to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

They’re one in the same for me. Wendy is the college girlfriend of Mitchell, the son of Asa, who is the main character. She was one of the most difficult to write because she and I come from very different backgrounds and have dramatically different beliefs. She’s conservative and very religious, the daughter of a minister of a small Pentecostal church. However as I spent time with her I discovered how sensitive and compassionate and wise she was. She surprised me a lot over the course of writing and the more time I spent with her and the more I got to know her, the more fond I became of her.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I worked on The Marriage Bed off and on for over a decade, writing several drafts between working on two YA novels. My agent at the time never felt my revisions were good enough to send out to publishers. Finally, much to my hesitation, I had to tell my agent that I had no choice but to look for another agent. That was a hard decision, but it was a very amicable parting. I was grateful to her for all she’d done for me over the years, including selling two novels. And we’re still friends. I found another agent who believed in the novel and after a few months she found a wonderful home for The Marriage Bed at Blair, a small but mighty publisher out of North Carolina. I could not be happier. As long and as hard as I had to work on The Marriage Bed, I’m so glad I didn’t give up.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Lower your standards.

Thirty years ago, I was in a fiction workshop taught by the writer Allan Gurganus. Another student in the workshop had asked what to do about writer’s block and Allan said, “Lower your standards.” As a writer, I was critical of my writing, hard on myself often to the point of paralysis. So the idea of lowering my standards, of settling for something less (for the moment anyway), of escorting the editor out of the room and leaving the writer to his own devices, was liberating.

What surprised you in the writing of this book?

That I finished it.

How did you find the title of your book?

I asked a trusted writer friend if she might think of one. She went to bed thinking about it. The next morning it came to her.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.tommyhays.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: www.malaprops.com

TBR: Amerigun by Anne Marie Macari

2026-03-09T13:24:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

Amerigun brings together the tragedy of my brother’s death and the cult of gun worship in this country, where even children are gunned down in schools. Grief, disbelief, discovery, gratitude and love, are what underpin these poems, as I try to hear my brother’s voice again and make sense of his death.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

I broke my own personal boundaries in writing about my brother’s death. Over the years I have written a few poems that never really captured the grief and shock surrounding his death. I never planned on writing about him, he was buried inside me and I rarely thought of him. But then the title poem “Amerigun” came to me in such a flood that although I was in the middle of doing something, I had to sit down to try to get down what I was hearing, feeling. That first poem began with anger. How could he have done this to our parents? How could he have been so careless? Was there any kind of death wish that led to this tragedy? Suddenly I had so many questions. Over the course of two years I learned what most of my family already knew about his death. As I wrote that first poem, the fact of him shooting himself and the whole horror of our country’s love affair with guns, came together. One seemed inseparable from the other. Tragedy after sickening tragedy and we continue to protect guns over the lives of children, over all Americans. My personal connection to our national shame gave me a way into the subject of guns and helped me tell my brother’s story, helped me find a way of translating, or bringing back, his voice after forty years of keeping him at bay, of not really acknowledging my own grief. The word Amerigun just came to me. I continue to be shocked by how relevant this subject is, now more than ever.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I finished writing Amerigun literally a few days before Trump’s 2024 election. At that moment the poems felt not only personal, but timely. I didn’t expect what was coming, I thought we would finally have a woman president. Once he was elected the poems felt even more pressing and my publisher, Persea Books, agreed to bring out the book rather swiftly. In all, the book, from writing it to its publication, happened rather quickly, especially for me since I can be a slow writer.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My advice for writing is also for living. It’s a practice that writing encourages in me, though maybe it’s harder in everyday life—and that is to rest in the unknown, to let work arise out of mystery, out of questions, and not out of certainty or control. Certainty is a killer of art and it’s not much good in life either, it cuts us off from learning and possibility. It might create a sense of safety, but it is illusory and even joyless.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised that I had any of these poems in me and then surprised that they kept coming. But especially feeling that in some strange way my brother and I were speaking to each other after forty years.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title of my book, Amerigun, simply came to me. I heard the word when writing the title poem, which is also the first poem I wrote. It brought together in one word the personal and communal tragedy.

***

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/amerigun-anne-marie-macari/1147872403

TBR: The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir by Jill Christman

2026-03-02T13:27:00.001-05:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

NOTE: See below for a coupon code for ordering this book and information about finding Jill at AWP26 in Baltimore.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

What I say if someone asks:

The Heart Folds Early is a memoir about what it means to make a choice.

My third-person pitch:

River Teeth editor Jill Christman’s fourth book of nonfiction, The Heart Folds Early, is about what it means to make a choice. Loving, rageful, and often funny, Christman's new memoir centers her decision to end a half-term pregnancy when a routine ultrasound reveals her baby has just half a heart—and asks: As mothers, how do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

As a writer, I am a contrarian. In grad school, they told me No dead grandmothers. But I couldn’t help it. In my first memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, I wrote the hell out of my dying grandmother (Beatrice Coe Ingraham, school librarian and ace poker player, may she rest in peace). Later, I learned that using multiple points of view in a memoir is bad form, but again, sometimes I feel as if I’m looking at my younger self from somewhere near the ceiling or perhaps I need to issue instructions or establish myself as part of a community. Third person, first person direct address, second person (sparingly), first person plural. . . I use them all. Why have tools if we’re going to leave them in the box? And now you’re telling me there’s a fourth wall between the narrator and the reader? Crash through that wall like the Kool Aid Man. (I mean, when it suits you. Or you’re thirsty for some Red Dye 40.) So, yeah, both in terms of subject and craft, the breaking of rules is so much a part of my daily practice that it doesn’t even feel rebellious anymore—which is kind of too bad, you know?

Now, this book had to break that Big Boundary—the boundary that tells us we’re not supposed to talk about a thing. The boundary that shames and scares and shushes us into silence. This book is about my choice to have a second-trimester medical abortion.

This is my third memoir, written through a nearly twenty-year gestation, a time that ran parallel to me both raising a couple of kids with my poet husband (and, therefore, working in short, frequently interrupted bursts) and falling in love with the essay. So

The Heart Folds Early started as a memoir (called Mothercraft), split off into essays, spawned a whole separate e-book (Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood) and several essays that ran away from the book and eventually got together with other essays to form a collection (If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays)—all the while growing and shrinking and changing not only outfits but whole forms, shapeshifting between nonfiction classifications and structures like a love child of Proteus and Methis (I’m making this up: they didn’t hook up, even in myth, but just imagine!).

After an initial agent pitch to publishers came back with the news that the subject of dying babies is too depressing, and thus, hard to sell, I read my by that point teenage manuscript a story and put her to bed (or maybe it was the other way around, but in any case, I was done). Maybe, I thought, this was not a book I needed to write. Maybe, I thought, this was a book I had written for myself, and honestly, that’s a pretty good way to live, no writing is ever wasted, and I would move on and write other essays and books and let this one rest in a giant file that was, back then, named Blue Baby Blue.

But then something big happened. Something terrible. Something world rattling. In June of 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, and now, now, I had a new urgent question, didn’t I? What the actual fuck? And so I rewrote the whole book, beginning with a prologue (in which it’s quite possible I curse too much), the moment in an Airbnb in Colorado when I heard the news we’d all known was coming, but now, now, here it was—the news that the right to an abortion in the United States was no longer protected. Spewing from the rageful volcano that was by then a perimenopausal me, The Heart Folds Early took on her final shape.

The book coming out this March from Nebraska is now quite solidly memoir, and even more or less chronological—except for that starting at the end to go back to the beginning bit, and some detours into my youth. One early reader called it a romance. Sexy. Another said she laughed in every chapter, even though she wasn’t sure she should be laughing. Writer and activist Sonya Huber said I had “steel nerves”—so that was something. Steel nerves! Me!

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I cheated and started answering this question above. (Do you see what I mean about me? I can’t even follow the clear rules of a good interview question.) So you know there was the low of being told that my story was too depressing and wouldn’t sell well as a baby-shower gift (that was an actual thing a marketing department shared by way of telling my then-agent they were taking a pass). And because the book is coming out with the amazing people at the University of Nebraska Press, in the American Lives series, an extraordinary team I’ve worked with before and knew I could trust with this book, well, that’s the actual publication high.

But if I could point to one thing that scared me enough to become a low until I really faced the scariness was how much I worried about the story being received, specifically by other parents who had faced the same diagnosis (or one like it), mid-term, and made a different choice. I deeply and truly respect these many choices. All of them. With love. So one thing that was really different for me—and hard—in making The Heart Folds Early was how conscious I needed to be of my audience in that final two-year rewrite. I was no longer writing the book for me. I was writing about my choice because I understood it was my responsibility to tell the story of my second-trimester abortion. I had the skills to tell my story and the resources to get that story out into the world. (Speaking of boundaries, we cannot let the parameters of the conversation around reproductive rights be defined by those who would—and have—stripped us of those rights. We cannot let these conversations—or any of the big things we’re wrestling with right now in this country—be over-simplified because they’re hard.)

So I was hyper-aware of my many audiences—both actual people I knew or knew of, and whole categories of people—like young people in the United States coming of age in a time when their right to an abortion is not protected. I am always aware that I am writing to my children—perhaps in a time when I will no longer be here. And, as I said, I was aware that I was writing to other parents, mothers and fathers, who had faced the same diagnosis we faced and made a different choice. I wanted to write a book that respected all choices—except, I suppose, the choice to take away somebody else’s choice. As I write this, I realize that another high of this book’s path to publication was figuring out how to tell this story out of love—and not from a place of fear.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Shew! Great question. I edit two magazines—River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative—and our (free!) weekly online magazine of micro-essays, Beautiful Things—and I’ve been teaching and writing nonfiction for thirty years, so let me tell you, I’m full of advice, most of which I footnote with—Or maybe not. Maybe you have a reason to do something else here. So let me try to offer some advice that doesn’t need that footnote. I’ll choose three:

Remember that you are not the only one. Not even today. Not even this minute.
When you’re working on something difficult? Stay. Don’t leave. Linger in the uncertainty. Slow down when it gets hard.
But keep going. You’re doing it. Keep going.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Ah! Yes. There’s more advice that doesn’t need a footnote. I’m here for the surprises. On a macro-level, I was surprised by how a book could grow from such hot rage and deep love—at the same time, on the same pages. On a micro-level, so many, but one I sometimes point to is on page 23 of The Heart Folds Early, in a moment where the writing-me returns on Google maps to look down on the intersection where, many, many years earlier, my then-fiancé was killed in a horrible crash along with two of his buddies on the way to get a pizza after work—the jolt of surprise and sadness I felt in my heart from my couch in Indiana, a lifetime away: “Before I was a mother, I never thought about this detail of the tragedy, but now? It makes me so sad to know they died hungry.”

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

As a serial memoirist and someone who’s been teaching creative nonfiction writing for over half my life, there’s a question I hear a lot: How long do I have to wait before I write about [insert hard thing here]. And my answer is always some version of the advice I give for all writing-advice questions: Only you know how long you need to wait. What do you think? But for this one, I usually add that the standard advice that we need to fully process a difficult experience before we write about it has never made sense to me. Isn’t writing how we come to understand the hard things in the world that don’t make sense? We can write the hard thing right away and then three months later and then a decade after that—and each time we put pen to paper from a different perspective, something new will emerge. Last spring, the wise and wonderful essayist Steven Harvey (aka, The Humble Essayist) visited my graduate writing class and when we asked him why he writes, why he’s still writing, he answered: “I write to compensate for losses.”

And the losses keep coming, don’t they? But when we write them, when we write into and through them, we can find something like hope—for ourselves, for our children, for each other, and maybe, you know, for the world.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

I love this question—because I love food. Oh gosh. I’m trying to think. I ate a lot of clementines during my first pregnancy—and consumed many avocados during the writing of the book. They’re in there, along with a fair amount of kid food. And cookies. In life, I’m a baker—sourdough baguettes and (vegan) banana bread (my daughter is deathly allergic to eggs)—even before the pandemic made us do it—so those are foods that supported The Heart Folds Early. My go-to easy, food-processor (gasp!) baguette recipe is Mark Bittman’s “Easiest and Best French Bread” and the queen of all banana bread recipes was developed by those vegan geniuses, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, in Veganomicon: I always double the recipe, add Penzey’s double-strength vanilla and half again the amount of spice, and bake one standard loaf pan and one pan of those cute mini-loaves for my kids’ dorm freezers. Sometimes it’s hard to make it to breakfast before class! (I can’t find the version from the cookbook online, and it’s always good to point folks towards Post Punk Kitchen, so here’s a recipe for Isa’s Marbled Banana Bread—which is basically the same except, you know, for the chocolate; if you’re not in the mood for marbling, just make this one, but omit the boiling water and chocolate, and add 1/3 c molasses and a 1/3 cup-ish applesauce: moist, fruity perfection.)

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.jillchristman.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://jillchristman.com/2025/12/19/the-heart-folds-early-a-memoir/ (with 40% off coupon code)

READ AN ESSAY RELATED TO THIS BOOK, “The Sloth”: https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/the-sloth/

BONUS: If you’ll be in Baltimore for AWP in March, visit Jill a panel, offsite event, or the River Teeth booth #551: https://jillchristman.com/news/

TBR: A Woman in Pink by Megan A. Schikora

2026-02-16T10:25:00.000-05:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

When the unnamed protagonist meets Dutch, she believes that he is her Johnny Cash, that she is his June Carter, and that theirs is a great love story. As the novel progresses, it tells a different story, one swirling with the chaos of addiction. It raises questions about our devotion to people who are terrible for us and at what personal cost.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I really enjoyed writing Dutch’s mom, June. She’s a powerhouse. At the same time, beneath all that strength and polish, she’s as vulnerable as the protagonist. I saw and heard her so clearly. I’d like to grab drinks with her. I’d like to be friends.

I struggled with Tim, one of the protagonist’s romantic partners. Some find him endearing, the obvious “good guy” opposite of Dutch. But even as Tim pledged himself to the protagonist, I’m not sure he ever fully saw her. I’m not sure he was capable.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This road has been a long one. I’m such an impatient person, and before A Woman in Pink, I had only ever written short stories and essays. To give this book the best possible shot, I had to slow down and hone my discipline. Books take time. Thoughtful editing and querying take time.

I also had to toughen up. This process comes with so much rejection. It’s like drinking from a firehose.

One of the best moments was my first conversation with Jaynie Royal, Editor-in-Chief at Regal House Publishing. She had read my manuscript, and she wanted to talk.

For context, I had struggled with a recurring comment from early readers: “You have to name your protagonist.” I didn’t want to withhold something readers felt they needed, but I also knew that the omission of the name was critical to the story. Jaynie Royal was the first person who not only understood but appreciated my decision. I felt like my book was finally being seen, and that I was, too, as an author. I signed with Regal House Publishing shortly after that conversation.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Those lovely people in your life who tell you how great you are? Don’t share your early drafts with them. Share your work with critical readers who will point out the weaknesses and tell you the truth.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The ambiguity of the book’s conclusion surprised me. I didn’t know the protagonist’s precise fate, and I decided that I was okay with not knowing. I didn’t need or want a tidy ending. I wanted to leave some room for interpretation and hope.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

I want readers to know that A Woman in Pink is not a romance. It’s not cynical, either. It’s a messy story, one that veers away from “happily ever after” toward lived experience, one I hope will resonate with anyone who’s ever loved an addict.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

I cook once or twice a week only because my kid did an intervention. I’m a disaster in the kitchen. But if you invite me to dinner, I’ll bring wine. And if we go to the movies together, I’ll recommend adding Sour Patch Kids to your popcorn. You won’t be sorry.

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.meganaschikora.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK:

https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/a-woman-in-pink/

Brief Hiatus

2026-01-22T15:55:12.402-05:00

TBR should return in February!

Best Books (I Read) in 2025

2025-12-10T13:45:00.000-05:00

A random assortment of some
of the books on my list(s)

Presenting my annual “best books” list, along with the accompanying list of caveats: these are, simply put, the best books I read over the course of the year. I try to narrow things down to 10ish books, which is awfully hard. I definitely read (and ADORE!) books by my writer friends, but I keep those books off this list. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: ALL lists are subjective. In my personal definition of “best,” I mean some magical alchemy of this book at this time that hit me this way. The order is chronological, so don’t spend time parsing out why one book is first, another last. Also, I had to eliminate some VERY EXCELLENT books to keep my list tidy, and YES, I feel terrible about doing so. You’ll see that I cheat a little at the end, but all’s fair in love and books.

DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver

I always nod kindly and knowingly when people mention Barbara Kingsolver, but I’ll confess that this is the first book by her I’ve read, and what a doozy! I was all in from the very first paragraph, though I often resist reading loooong books (you’ll see what an outlier this year was on that matter as my list progresses!). This novel about Appalachia and opioid addiction and resilience moves fast, is smart, and offers a political point of view without turning preachy or predictable. The first-person voice is extraordinary and convincing. Yeah, maybe it’s cheating to rely on a genius like Charles Dickens and swipe the plot of David Copperfield…or maybe that tack is its own genius. I must have recommended this book a zillion times.

WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys

I read this novel back in college and retained only vague memories, which just shows I was assigned way too many books back then because I should have a better memory of this artful book about Rochester’s “madwoman” wife in the attic (definite red flag, Jane Eyre!). Deeply-evoked characters and perfectly evoked landscapes ranging from the Caribbean to that awful attic in England, meant that the minute I finished the last page, I immediately wanted to know everything about Rhys, wanted to reread Jane Eyre, and wanted to study Caribbean history. A hard-eyed look (wrapped in lush writing) at class, money, race, history, gender, and it has to be repeated: money.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: MEMOIRS by John Updike

Because I was lucky enough to be selected by the John Updike Society for a writing residency in Updike’s Tucson, AZ, casita, I thought I should study up. I read a fair number of his books in college (though then he went on to write many, many more over the years and I failed to keep up), so I sort of thought I knew what he was “about.” But these autobiographical essays gave me a fresh view, seeing how his life intertwined with his fiction (not that he called his fiction “autobiographical”) and seeing how he viewed his own career and life. Immense honesty in these pages about his insecurities, his painful and debilitating battle with psoriasis, the chip on his shoulder, his recognition of his failures as a parent. For a writer with such an absolutely dazzling writing style (those sentences! oh, sigh!) and with such a charmed career, he’s as messed up as the rest of us! I’ll confess that I didn’t read the entire book because the last two essays felt indulgent and probably should have been excluded. Does a writing style of such precision, bordering on ornateness translate to our world of TikTok videos? I can’t say—but I can say that when I was focusing on his words, I was transported.

OPEN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Andre Agassi

You ever buy a cheap, used paperback you plan to read quickly and leave behind on the plane? You ever put that book on your “best books list”? For me, now, YES, and YES. What an exciting surprise this book was! It’s not that I care about tennis or Andre Agassi, but I do like an artful, honest memoir, and I’m always fascinated by what celebrity means. Ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, OPEN is beautifully written and well-structured (covering 40ish years) and even suspenseful. The voice is consistent and feels authentic and natural (I mean, of course I don’t know for a fact if this is Andre’s voice, but by the end, I was eager to hang out with him). Apparently, Andre hated playing tennis for most of his life yet he kept playing, and at the highest level. What is ambition? What drives us to success? What is enough? Who are we without that which has defined us for decades? These are the questions that kept Shakespeare awake…here in a tennis book.

THE LONELY CITY: ADVENTURES IN THE ART OF BEING ALONE by Olivia Laing

I absolutely loved everything about this book: its smarts, its bleakness, its bold and honest exploration of what loneliness is and does to a mind. While we get the author’s personal experiences, this is also a book of thoughtful research, as loneliness is examined through a series of visual artists (i.e. Hopper, Warhol, Wojnarowicz) who coped with their outsiderness and loneliness in a variety of (often unhealthy) methods…all the while continuing to create art. This book pushed deep—and uncomfortably—into my brain. While the book reflected New York City, my favorite place, we see here that unsettling aspect of New York City that tourists don’t always witness: the way one might feel utterly, helplessly alone while surrounded by an ocean of people. (Wait, that’s not exclusive to New York….)

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

Who’d guess a novel about an early morning crew of warehouse workers unloading deliveries at a Target-like store would be artful, compelling, funny, and infuriating? I liked how the author melded a strongly narrative story based on seemingly low stakes (which employee will get the promotion!?) with understated (yet biting) political commentary on how American capitalism uses/abuses the working poor. The large cast of characters and mix of POVs worried me a bit, but I adapted quickly and ultimately had no problem keeping people straight. I also liked that this was no sad-sack story: these workers maintained dignity and connection despite the odds perpetually stacked against them by forces beyond their control.

*NINTH STREET WOMEN: LEE KRASNER, ELAINE DE KOONING, GRACE HARTIGAN, JOAN MITCHELL, AND HELEN FRANKENTHALER: FIVE PAINTERS AND THE MOVEMENT THAT CHANGED MODERN ART by Mary Gabriel

Longest title and longest book, at 926 pages(!!), including notes. I think I spent about a month immersed in this book, and what a glorious month it was. Every year I’ve got at least one “girl comes to New York City” book on my list, so this one’s that, but also so much more. I’m a fan of abstract expressionism, but museums mostly show the men (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, etc.), so what a joy to learn about these fierce, independent, brainy, dedicated female painters, forced to wrestle both the muse and misogyny. I’m also a fan of reading about subcultures of artists, and hearing firsthand from denizens of the Cedar Bar was intoxicating (speaking of intoxicating, oh lordy, those artists PARTIED!). And I’m a HUGE fan of reading about New York City, especially the 1950s, so no surprise that all these elements coming together made this my most favorite book of the year. If you read this book (and I insist you do), have your phone handy so you can look up the paintings under discussion. I was lucky enough to get to MoMA shortly after finishing this book, and I about cried to see a real, live painting by Joan Mitchell right there on the wall—as if that’s where it was destined to land all along. *My favorite book of the year

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving

I first read this novel back in the days of yore, probably when I was too young to appreciate it. I remember being bored by the detours into reproducing Garp’s short story and novel chapters, but this time I absolutely adored every detour Irving took us on, admiring how each tangent reverberated eventually. A book ahead of its time, as the reader is presented with questions about women’s rights, sexual assault, and a transgender character who is (IMHO) the most interesting and memorable character in the book (and the movie). (Reminder: this book was first published in 1978.) By making Garp a writer, I felt Irving was showcasing his own theories and strategies on writing and creativity, which was a bonus for me. In the end, the highest praise I have is that this book absolutely is like no other.

THE GALES OF NOVEMBER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD by John U. Bacon

I grew up in Iowa, with relatives in Michigan, and went to college in Chicago, so the Great Lakes stretch through my early days. Yet I knew nothing about the ships navigating these bodies of water and little about the underpinnings of the manufacturing economy that made the industrial north (now Rust Belt) the envy of the world. Yes, yes, there’s a (truly) devastating shipwreck in these pages, but the bigger revelation for me was the compelling and comprehensive examination of the culture of Lake Superior and sailors, iron ore mining and manufacturing, ship-building and captaining a laker. The relentless push of capitalism to get the goods delivered. The vagaries of weather. Luck, good and bad. Finding the way to a mournful hit song that might seem to trade on the misfortune of others. I liked reported facts and research balanced here with the personal recollections and reflections of family members of the dead men, and sailors who worked the Fitz back in its glory days, and other experts and observers. Clear and compelling narrative nonfiction with the emotional pull of a great novel. Plus, excellent maps!

***

Here’s where I’m going to cheat a bit and add some extra material—just like the narrative nonfiction books do!

SOME SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS I ADMIRED:

Goodbye Columbus & Five Short Stories by Philip Roth (OMG! Impossible this is his debut book!)

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Breece D’J Pancake (desperate men clawing through Appalachia)

Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund (complicated contemporary lives evoked with flair)

The Continental Divide by Bob Johnson (dark & artful midwestern violence)

SOME BOOKS BY FRIENDS THAT I READ & LOVED:

Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop by Paula Whyman (memoir; funny & an education about native plants without being “teacherly”)

King of Broadway by Dan Elish (novel; charming and insider-y take on writing for Broadway)

Stay Here With Me: A Memoir by Robert Olmstead (memoir; lyrical & retrospective)

We by Sarah Freligh (short fiction; compact & powerful)

The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place by Andrew Bertaina (essays; brainy & dreamy & Proustian)

Pink Lady by Denise Duhamel (poetry; the sorrow and disorientation as an elderly mother declines)

One Last Ride by Dan Elish (YA; boy at camp & I bet you’ll cry)

POETRY!

At my free-writing dates on Thursday afternoons, I start each session by reading poetry and copying down resonant lines. Here are the books that kept me company in 2025 (to be transparent, I know many of these poets IRL). If you’re looking to add more poetry in your life, I suggest you start here.

Bodies of Light by Susan Tekulve

In Which by Denise Duhamel

Sky Mall by Eric Kocher

Everyone at this Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin

Late Summer Ode by Olena Kalytaik Davis

The Place That Is Coming to Us by J.D. Smith

The Odds by Suzanne Cleary

TBR: Woman : Plant : Language by Agata Maslowska

2025-11-17T10:39:00.000-05:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

The poems in the collection explore my main areas of interest which include ecopoetry, migrant literatures, translation, and experimental writing, among others. I think through the parallels between botany and migration and look at migrant experience through the lenses of the natural world and ecology. I like to interrogate language(s) to see what is possible and how words can point beyond their ascribed meanings to create multi-dimensional, polyphonic connections.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoy writing poems when I am guided by language, when I give myself into the music of language without control or an agenda. I feel that this is how I come up with my freest poems. An example of such a poem is a sequence “Sounding Soil” where I give up using words altogether and focus on sounds to create a soundscape which hopefully resonates beyond the sounds themselves. I also enjoy writing poems in conversation with other poets, artists, and writers. There is a sense of dialogue and being connected to something larger than myself. An example of such a poem is “A Bird in Flight” written after Jane Hirshfield’s poem “A Chair in Snow.” The poems that gave me most trouble are the poems where I attempt to tackle specific topics that are difficult and emotional for me, for example, the poem “Women’s Hell” where I look at the total abortion ban in Poland. I wrote six or seven versions of this poem before I was somewhat satisfied with it. It still feels like it only scratches the surface.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Most of the poems in the collection have been written in the last five years. I started immersing myself in poetry during the Covid pandemic as I could only read and write poetry at the time. I got hooked and have been obsessively writing poems since then. A few years ago, I saw that one of my favourite poets was judging a poetry manuscript competition. While I didn’t expect to win it, I really wanted him to read my poems. I put the manuscript together and sent it. I didn’t win of course, but I had a manuscript ready to submit for publication. I submitted it to Bad Betty Press who accepted it. It was totally unexpected and the opposite experience to submitting my novel manuscript for publication which was rejected so many times I lost count. Working with Amy Acre, my editor, has been one of the most nourishing experiences. I feel Amy understands my poems even better than I do and has helped me make the poems stronger. I’ve been very lucky to have been selected by Bad Betty Press.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Read, read, read. Read as much as you can, particularly writers and poets from other countries.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

What surprised me about writing these poems is how indispensable writing poetry has become in my life. My perception and sensitivity to the world around me has changed completely since I started writing poems regularly. I have fallen in love with it. I still occasionally write prose, but it is influenced by my poetry writing practice.

How did you find the title of your book?

I was initially trying to find a phrase in any of the poems, but nothing seemed suitable. I then thought of distilling the main themes of my book and this is how I came up with Woman : Plant : Language. The colons represent the interconnectedness of these themes in my collection. I also like to view the title as an image rather than a string or a sequence of words.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

One of my poems, “Herbiporous,” talks about how I became vegetarian. Here’s one of my favourite veggie recipes: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/butternut-squash-sage-risotto

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://agatamaslowska.co.uk

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://badbettypress.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/woman-plant-language/agata-maslowska/9781913268763

READ TWO POEMS FROM THIS COLLECTION:

“Sounding Soil,” https://www.propelmagazine.co.uk/agata-maslowska-sounding-soil & “A Bird in Flight,” https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/a-bird-in-flight/

TBR: Burner and Other Stories by Katrina Denza

2025-11-11T10:29:00.002-05:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

The stories in BURNER explore technology’s influence on the way we communicate with each other for better or worse. Some also touch on the ways in which women are compelled to inhabit their own power in a patriarchal society.

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

Burner was so fun to write. Having worked in restaurants in my twenties, I know the environment and the family-like relationships that can develop. I had a great time imagining how my character might try to seduce a man who’s clearly not interested in her, and especially not intellectually. There’s No Danger Here was probably revised the most drastically. In its earliest drafts the story was over six thousand words. I chipped away at it until the narrator’s understanding of what she really wanted revealed itself.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I sent the manuscript out to about six or seven agents and received some positive responses, but the prevailing message was that story collections are difficult to sell. At the same time, I entered the collection into contests and submitted directly to a few smaller presses. Burner was a semi-finalist in a 2023 Autumn House Press contest for fiction and longlisted for Dzanc’s 2023 contest for short story collections. A few months later, Cornerstone Press accepted it for publication.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My favorite piece of advice is from Richard Bausch, and I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially to ground the reader in the story with details. And I also like the more general advice: write the things you’d want to read.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

My surprises show up in revision. The way I revise is probably the least efficient, which is to rewrite the story from start to finish every time, but this method tends to yield the most surprises.

How did you find the title of your book?

Burner seemed to capture the disposable nature of communication that technology encourages or allows.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

The chef in Burner makes a delicious coq au vin, but unfortunately, he’s as tightlipped about how he makes it as he is about himself.

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.katrinadenza.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/burner-and-other-stories/c1fe6bc8563b1165?ean=9781968148126&next=t

READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK, “In These Dark Woods”: https://newworldwriting.net/katrina-denza-in-these-dark-woods/

TBR: Peacocks on the Streets by Michele Wolf

2025-11-03T10:43:00.001-05:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

Peacocks on the Streets explores what is wild and unpredictable in our lives — both what slams us and what uplifts us — and how we find the resolve to triumph after trauma. The poems’ subjects range from pandemic bereavement, hate crimes, and terrorism, to falling in love at midlife, adopting a child, and caring for a parent stolen by dementia. With grit and compassion, Peacocks on the Streets offers an acute sense of the privilege of being alive.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

I broke personal boundaries in that I began to write about some previously self-censored subjects, such as the emotional pain of my infertility and my often fraught relationship with my mother, a tension that peaked in my teens and 20s but always lingered under the surface. This loss got magnified once my mother plunged into dementia. The courage came from the grief I experienced even before my mother’s passing, as I watched her deteriorate cognitively and physically. My mother’s death released me to claim my truths and to see situations, whether real or conjured, with more clarity and a fuller appreciation of multiple points of view. This has led to an even deeper authenticity, strength, and warmth in my work, which I find people relate to.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I spent a bunch of years sending a version of Peacocks to competitions offering a book-publication prize, and I received several finalist or semifinalist notifications. I steadily continued to publish pieces in literary journals and anthologies, and I didn’t give up trying to place the manuscript. I had previously published two full-length books and a chapbook, and I had confidence in the work. My breakthrough came when I began investigating and submitting to independent presses that offered book publication and royalties but not a prize. First I was offered a yes from an independent press whose seven-page contract did not seem author-friendly. Like the vast majority of poets, I don’t work with an agent — there’s not enough of a financial return on most poetry books to be of interest to an agent. So, I joined the Authors Guild and had my contract reviewed by an attorney on the staff. After that consultation, I sent an email to the publisher, requesting several changes to the contract. Via email, they withdrew their publishing offer, saying we were too far apart. That was not my happiest day.

But soon Broadstone Books offered me another yes. That was a hallelujah day. I’ve had a great experience with Broadstone.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My favorite writing advice comes from a one-day master class I had with the late U.S. poet laureate W.S. Merwin. “We don’t write poems,” he maintained. “We listen for them.” Wow. I found that approach to be powerful — that the writing process is not so much that we will a poem into being, but instead that we get ourselves to a quiet place and listen for the words.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

This is something that surprised me after I had written the book. It didn’t occur to me until two people mentioned it that Peacocks on the Streets is rife with animals — five kinds of birds, a coyote, mountain goats, pandas, a hamster, manatees, deer, tadpoles, zebras, a beagle, fish, corals, seals, dolphins, whales, a ladybug, and more — and that I was making a statement about the wisdom and supremacy of animals. Okay, I suppose that makes sense. But it was never my conscious intent to suggest this!

How did you find the title of your book?

The book’s title, which is also the title of the poem “Peacocks on the Streets,” comes from that time during the pandemic when we were in quarantine and the streets were so empty that, worldwide, wildlife ventured out to residential and commercial areas. “Peacocks on the Streets” was always the title of the poem, and I knew, even before the poem was complete, that it would be the unifying, flagship piece and title that spoke for the entire book.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

In the poem “Peacocks on the Streets,” my persona buys a rotisserie chicken. Here is my completely subjective ranking — from “Bleh” to “Meh” to “Scrumptious” — of supermarket rotisserie chickens available in the D.C. area.

5. Costco

4. Whole Foods

3. A tie: Safeway and Harris Teeter

2. Giant

1. Wegman’s—the best!

*****

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://michelewolf.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK (THE 20% OFF DISCOUNT CODE IS POETS24): https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/peacocks-on-the-streets-poetry-by-michele-wolf

READ SEVERAL POEMS FROM THIS BOOK: https://michelewolf.com/poems.html

TBR: What Haunts Me by Bernadette Geyer

2025-10-25T15:42:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

The poems in What Haunts Me examine what is passed down through families and societies – what is inherited, what we take with us as we age, and what we leave behind. How do we process and come to terms with the centuries that have preceded us? The collection interrogates how ancestries and beliefs serve as sparring partners within us as we forge and discover our individual roles in shaping our own lives.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

I broke the mental boundary of believing that my writing path would be linear: I would work on one book, then move on to the next book, then move on to the next book, and so on. Most of the poems in this collection were actually written before the poems that appeared in my first collection, The Scabbard of Her Throat, which was published in 2013. Some of the poems in What Haunts Me are more than 20 years old. I think this change in perspective helped me to allow myself to work on more than one project simultaneously.

I don’t know if I’d call it courage, but more of an acceptance of reality. I don’t put off working on a new project idea simply because I am in the middle of something else. In fact, I use this to my advantage – when I’m stalled in one project, I switch to a different project. That way, I am at least making progress with something.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

When I first started sending the manuscript out in its earliest form as The Inheritance back in 2003, it was a finalist and semi-finalist for several book contests. However, as the years went on and I tinkered with it – adding new poems, removing others, and changing the title multiple times – I think the manuscript lost its way.

Following the birth of my daughter in 2005, I had started writing poems linked by a more cohesive theme that really came together over the course of a few years, and I started sending out that manuscript (The Scabbard of Her Throat) in 2009. It was then that I gave up pitching the first manuscript and set it aside.

Following the publication of The Scabbard of Her Throat in 2013, I moved with my family to Germany. My writing expanded into travel articles, essays, and short fiction. I translated several business books, as well as poems by German poets. I didn’t really look back at my first poetry manuscript until about 2022, when I really reworked it and settled on a new title. I began submitting it in earnest in 2023 – and only to publishers who offered a free open reading period. April Gloaming Publishing was one of the indie presses I sent an excerpt to that year. They requested the full manuscript for What Haunts Me in February 2024 and made me an offer four months later.

The whole experience taught me that there was something the original manuscript had been lacking, and that I needed the long break to really find the order and structure – and title – that the book had been seeking all along.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My favorite piece of writing advice is actually the last two stanzas of the poem “Berryman,” by W.S. Merwin.

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

It’s a little bit depressing, but also freeing at the same time. And so I keep writing.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I honestly did not realize how many ghosts and spirits would show up in it! As I was reading through the final editing rounds with my publisher, I was also struck by how many of the poems were inspired by photographs and how prominently those images imprinted themselves in my mind.

How do you approach revision?

I love the editing process and am always surprised by how many writers believe that if it doesn’t come out perfect the first time, they need to throw it out and start over. I love trying out different word combinations to see what kind of vibe or nuance they bring to the poem. I also love researching word origins and alternate meanings to see how a single word can serve to emphasize a theme or hint at a subversive undercurrent. I also love writing an ending over and over and over dozens of different ways – it seems to break down the inner censor and help me find a totally unexpected image or turn.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

This book is fortified with pierogies, turkey neck soup, and pickled beets. The only thing I remember the recipe for is the turkey neck soup, because it was so simple: put the turkey neck and giblets in a pot with about 2 liters of water, 1 large carrot (sliced), 1 onion (diced), 1 stalk of celery (diced), a couple of sprigs of parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook all morning (from about 8am until early afternoon) as you are preparing Thanksgiving dinner and have it at lunch to tide you over until the big meal.

***

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://bernadettegeyer.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://aprilgloaming.com/shop/what-haunts-me/

READ A POEM FROM THIS BOOK, “A Failed Romanticism”: https://electricliterature.com/after-vacation-id-like-to-come-home-to-ruin/

SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@bernadettegeyer

TBR: Momma May Be Mad: a memoir by Kerry Neville

2025-10-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir is an inventive and striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. Kerry Neville shares the story of how she was caught in the perfect storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism when her children were young and her marriage failing and how she found her way back to joy and hope. Electric shock therapy, hospitalizations, and even an exorcism were desperate, if failed, lifelines. But even in that dark chaos, she held fast to an abiding belief in love and fought to regain her own life and her life with her children.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

The easiest way to answer this question is to quote the opening of the memoir:

“How do you write a memoir when you can’t remember? And how then do you honor and unravel that tangle of time?...Electric Shock Treatments erased years of my linear memory. What remains? Unreliable chaotic approximation. Incomplete jerry-rigged record. Splinters and fragments: a fat file of doctors’ shorthand notes and coded diagnoses, Social Security Disability Insurance legalities, journal entries composed in situ, email correspondence with therapist, and friends who fill in the blanks.

“External documentation functions with the specious authority of a third-person limited narrator. Even my journals, though read as if extemporaneous synchronous records, are always belated after-accounts. We don’t live in time’s flow but in time’s lag. Our brains create a coherent understanding of the world from stimuli that travel at different times and speeds. Auditory processing is faster than visual processing. Starter pistol rather than flash of light. The brain waits for the slowest information to arrive before “making sense” of “now.” An eighty-millisecond lag between what is happening and what we understand is happening.

“When I read my medical records and journals, scroll through photos, and listen to my friends recount who I was and what I was doing and saying and how I was lying and dying and trying and not trying to get myself into sensible order? That “I” stands in strange, estranged proximity. I cast forwards and backwards through lost and found time, never able to catch up. My unruly IIIIIIIIII’s arrive at different times and speeds to these pages.

“I’ve tried and tried to write this happened and then this happened and then this happened and now it’s done, but each attempt was a failed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of my corpse on the dissection table, so I ditched linear plot-forward-in-time.”

Additionally, the memoir is divided into three sections according to St. Augustine’s understanding of time as he outlines in Confessions: “present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation.”

Courage: There was no other way to write this story—except to find a way to represent how I—we—construct ourselves as changing selves every day, how we revise and rerevise our stories of how we have arrived in this moment now. The memoir is an attempt at simultaneity: becoming and unbecoming at the same time. So, linear plot can’t do that on the page with its neat, progressive timeline.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

My agent sent the manuscript out to the big presses, and I received positive feedback but…ultimately, no, no, no, no. I knew the structure would be a difficult sell—but memoirs are, anyway. My agent persevered because she believed the book would find a home, the right editor, at the right time. I know how fortunate I am to have an agent willing to keep on keeping on with the manuscript. Eventually, Kim Davis and her editorial team at Madville Publishing responded with a quick (!) and enthusiastic yes. The right home, the right editor, the right time!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Write from your me-ness”—you don’t have to be decorous, polite, modest, or measured. Write out of your fierceness, unruliness, and daring. Disturb the universe. (Fyi: it took me far too long to realize writing, at least early draft writing, is ferocious and feral. Late draft revision is meticulous and exacting.)

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

What surprised me was how much I learned about what is beyond me—that is, research that brought the world and all its complicated wonders inside my understanding of self-as-world-on-the-page. Biology, neuroscience, anatomy, philosophy, botany, history, geology, religion, mythology!

How did you find the title of your book?

The title is the title of a long-retired blog I kept when I was in my dark, desperate times. Writing that blog about my mental health complications helped me to understand that I wasn’t the only momma, the only human being going through the really effing hard stuff—I heard from many readers who connected to my story (if not to exact facts, then to the ebb and flow of despair and joy). I had a running list of possible titles for the memoir but I kept coming back to Momma May Be Mad—there’s the sound of the M’s, but, too, there’s the uncertainty. Not “maybe” but “may be”—or may not be. And maybe it’s all of is: motherhood, madness, hysteria, wandering wombs, one body creating another body, body-at-hand and body-of-work. We are shapeshifters, phoenixes rising again and again from the ash. What are the forces at work on the inside and on the outside that contribute to despair, give rise to joy, and allow us to redeem ourselves?

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

My story includes recovering from an eating disorder, anorexia, so for the first third of the book, my relationship with food and eating was dark, complicated—I was doing everything I could not to eat. But then, the rest of the book is about finding joy and pleasure again in eating well and good: yes, healthy, balanced eating, but also the lascivious pleasure in what tastes good!

No recipe, but I’ll note two moments from the memoir that blaze white hot:

Evening, and I am on the roof of my riad in Marrakech eating the last tawny, rosy cheeked apricot that I’d bought from the fruit vendor. The call to prayer rises around me. My teeth split the fuzzy skin and my mouth is lit up by the warm, sweet flesh.

Evening, and I am in a small cottage on the top of a mountain in Ireland sitting beside a lovely man who has just brought us tea and KitKat bars. The world is growing dark outside and we are in happy, desiring companionship. We sit quietly by the fire, dunking the chocolate bars into the tea. We know what comes next! And we are happy to wait for it.

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.kerry-neville.com

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://madvillepublishing.com/product/momma-may-be-mad/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:

https://www.amazon.com/Momma-May-Mad-Kerry-Neville/dp/1963695410/ref=sr_1_3?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.JYeasQyAVWKYts7hBTRMHMT1gys6klANEL9X6WjTv7HEfW-YsNsX1wg22Y2JAUvd4kT9rJtROJdQkXhR6i4kTm8Tt-h7bgtZp_kDyu6Lx5yLyUfTR3LvBh2joyFWNnq9w3jsHswl4rHnjQH-nh_jK0wHyB3oE-Tta530Xnx8AtYpr-Z4FezTGXOsNC-aKCJTYeWWL_1vxwUUpbKsdeDBYw.2icBBVomFuUKZvdzBlLh-Jw1OM4sC8ZfijYMrFQJZVQ&dib_tag=se&qid=1754768006&refinements=p_27%3AKerry+Neville&s=books&sr=1-3

READ AN EXCERPT FROM THIS BOOK, “Inis: Water Meadow”: https://panoramajournal.org/issues/issue-6-war-and-peace/war-peace-inis-water-meadow/?srsltid=AfmBOopAxBZozmVidQzo99xOR9mmFmFcZw1IoV2oacsBsEUL1kT0Gswi

TBR: Go Out Like Sunday and Other Stories by Barbara P. Greenbaum

2025-10-13T11:49:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Go Out Like Sunday and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen short stories, featuring a cast of characters facing moments of decisive change. From a bullied boy in high school, to a couple shopping for coffins, the folks in this book face betrayal, loss, violence, grief, and yearning while dancing with the joy of new directions.

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

Of all the stories in the book, I enjoyed writing Park & Ride the most perhaps because that voice came to me so easily. I instantly could hear her. And yes - I too like pickup trucks - so I had a natural affinity. And she was just so much fun!

Several stories in the book took a while to develop. Midnight Swimmer was the most emotionally difficult because it was close to the bone. I left my home in New England after being in CT for almost fifty years. It took a bit to work to get to the psychic distance I needed to tell Cynthia's story.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

For me, the highs and lows collided. I found out the book had been accepted for publication by Main Street Rag the Tuesday after my husband died unexpectedly during an operation. While I was thrilled that I would be working with Scott on the book, my husband's death stopped me for a while. The last story in the book, The Midnight Swimmer, was the last story he ever read for me. I knew the story wasn't yet finished, yet it took me almost six months after he died before I could work on it again. I was lucky enough to attend the Writers in Paradise Workshop in St. Petersburg with Stewart O'Nan specifically to get help with it. It paid off. However, it would be another year before the book felt finished to me and we could go to press. Main Street Rag's publisher Scott, and his wife, Jill, were incredibly understanding about my situation and waited for me. I will be forever grateful for that.

When the book finally appeared, with the cover designed by my artist friend Randy Gillman, I felt just joy that it finally happened. There is no better feeling that seeing your work in print and so beautifully done.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

This one is simple for me though there are days when I don't get there. Write every day. When I was working full time, I somehow convinced myself that I had to find an hour or two to write successfully. Then, while moaning to a friend that I could never find the time, he looked at me and said - fifteen minutes. From then on, whether I had to set the clock a bit earlier, I would write every day for at least fifteen minutes. Most often I would write before work with my first cup of tea. But I was almost immediately amazed at how much I could do in such a short period of time. And even when I had to stop, the stories and voices would often spill over into the day and those thoughts would add to the story for the next day. This helps me stay in that creative stream.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I hadn't realized until the collection came together how much I enjoyed playing with voices and genres. Each story in the book is very different and yet I can't help but really like these folks. I'm so glad I got to spend time with them.

How did you find the title of your book?

I am very bad at titles. The title story of the book had a different title originally. (It's honestly too embarrassing to name here.) The editor of the Louisville Review wrote to me to say she loved the story, hated the title. I confessed my title deficits, and she suggested Go Out Like Sunday. I loved it immediately. When I was searching for titles for the collection, I knew immediately that's what it would be. It just felt right.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Evie makes pot roast in Dishes and as it happens, I make Dutch Oven pot roast with root veggies that is so easy it's criminal. Secret - deglaze with Port Wine. And it's amazing!

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.barbaragreenbaum.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/go-out-like-sunday-barbara-p-greenbaum/

READ AN EXCERPT FROM THIS BOOK, “Dumb Ass”:

https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/go-out-like-sunday-barbara-p-greenbaum/

(click on “sample”)

TBR: Outside the Lines: A Memoir by Helen Fremont

2025-10-06T09:54:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Outside the Lines is a queer love story between a young public defender and a married mother of two, who meet in a writing workshop in Boston in the 1980s. Drawn together by surprisingly similar family secrets, hidden identities, and a deep connection to the Holocaust, they fall in love. Subsequently, a terminal illness changes and intensifies their relationship with each other and with their families.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

By the time I got around to writing this memoir (my third), I’d inadvertantly become something of an expert at family demolition. After my first memoir (which I thought was pretty tame) was published, my family disowned me and declared me dead.

It took twenty years for me to get up the ovarian fortitude to write a second memoir, in which I told the rest of the story, including many of the gory details I’d tactfully left out of the first book. (My parents had died in the meantime.)

I think the need to write these stories as memoir stems from the need to claim one’s own voice and one’s own truth, when the writer’s reality has consistently been denied or disavowed. Family secrets manipulate and mess with one’s sense of self, which is why they are so potent.

In my new memoir, Outside the Lines, the two main characters died many years ago, so I feel a little less anxious about writing my story as it relates to them. Once again, I’ve changed names and details, and omitted scenes in order to protect the privacy of surviving family members. But of course, I worry a great deal about how family and friends will feel. I don’t think it’s particularly “courageous” to write memoir; I think it’s compelled by a need to speak your truth when it has been consistently denied.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time, but apparently I wasn’t ready to dive into the material until a few years ago. Writing the scenes set loose a flood of memories, both exhilarating and agonizing. So as with all writing, the highs and lows are always built right into the daily work. I write something one day and think it’s brilliant; I look at it in the morning, and it’s turned to garbage.

Perhaps my greatest high with this book came from my writer buddies, who never cease to amaze and inspire me with their own poetry and prose, and who never pretend something is working when it’s not. Every time we’d get together to talk about our work, I came away on fire to fix the things they’d suggested, and excited about the whole impossible project of bringing a bunch of words on the page into a completed book for publication.

It was also thrilling when my agent (whom I adore and revere) read the manuscript and liked it. Her belief in this little book was so powerful, it made the first slew of rejections from publishing houses less painful. Of course, when the next slew of rejections came in, and the ones after that, my mood descended in direct proportion to the rise in rejections. Needless to say, it was wonderful to find a publisher I admired who liked this book enough to want to publish it. Working with her and her team has been a blast.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

“It’s all draft until you die.” The poet Ellen Bryant Voigt said that. Just conjuring her name makes me happy. She is the founder and mastermind of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, my alma mater. Ellen is all about process, all about doing the work, without letting yourself get distracted by anything else—the market or the critics, or your own inner judge. She reminds us that we can keep fiddling with a draft as long as we like, long after it’s been published, or long after we’ve given up on it. Writing is not just our work; it’s our play, it's what reminds us we’re alive.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised when I wrote a sentence I liked for more than twenty-four hours. And I was surprised—well, more like embarrassed—to discover how incredibly immature and clueless I was at the age of thirty. It’s sort of amazing to see the effect that thirty-plus years of perspective had on my memories and feelings—even sensory perceptions—that came back to me when I was writing. So as you see, self-absorption really does have its own rewards.

How did you find the title of your book?

I am terrible at titles. Prolifically terrible. I must have scribbled down hundreds of titles, one worse than the other. For a while, I was convinced that if I just found the right Leonard Cohen lyric, I’d have my title.

Fortunately, my wife pretty quickly came up with the title, Outside the Lines. I liked it immediately, and then went on to brainstorm another couple hundred awful titles. But I kept coming back to this one, because it’s about coming out, and it’s about the complications of navigating a life outside the norm. The title lasted through all my mood changes, so it’s a keeper. (So is she.)

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

I am a low-brow baking fiend. I usually need to bake cookies and brownies and other easy-to-handle platforms for the delivery of chocolate, sugar and fat. I baked my way through a lot of this book. There are way too many recipes for me to list here, but they all basically boil down to butter + sugar + flour. Usually 72% bittersweet chocolate is involved.

Here's an easy one:

Chocolate Chip Rye Caraway Cookies

(Credit: Sycamore Kitchen)

¾ c (1 ½ sticks) butter, room temp

½ c brown sugar

½ c sugar

1 c all-purpose flour

1 + c dark rye flour

½ tsp + baking soda

¾ tsp baking powder

¾ tsp kosher salt + for sprinkling

½ + tsp caraway seeds, some ground

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla extract

8 oz. dark (70%) chocolate, chopped into chunks smaller than ¼ inch

Pre-heat oven 350 degrees.

Beat butter & sugars till light and fluffy – 3 – 5 min

In a separate bowl: whisk flours, soda, powder, salt & caraway seeds.

Add egg & vanilla to butter and beat till fully combined.

Add dry ingredients, beat till almost incorporated. Add chopped chocolate.

Scoop dough onto parchment lined cookie sheets. Sprinkle with salt. Bake till crisp edges, soft in middle ~ 15 min.

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.helenfremont.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=outside+the+lines+helen+fremont

SUBSTACK: https://helenfremont.substack.com/

TBR: Angels at the Gate by Sheri Joseph

2025-09-29T10:38:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

At a remote Southern university in the late 1980s, student Leah Gavin becomes obsessed with a classmate’s unexplained fall from the bell tower, then begins to realize the mystery might implicate people close to her. It’s a literary thriller and heartfelt coming-of-age story with a kick-ass mixtape soundtrack.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

My most enjoyable character, a frat boy named Quinn Cooper, was intended to have only a minor role in the story: a sort-of friend Leah doesn’t trust who has some information to deliver. But he showed up with this outsized personality and rapacious desires and a vestigial conscience, and he just kept demanding more space, until he became my Iago—which, in John Updike’s terminology, is less the villain than the character who pushes all the other characters around. He completely took over the book, in large part because he was so much fun to write. I had the most difficulty with Leah, who is not me but is very often standing in my place, within my emotional experience. So it was hard to keep her vividly and precisely herself.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The less said about that, the better! My agent sent it out to editors for years, but what happens to most writers who have published a few books without selling any great numbers is that no one not already attached to the writer will read the book. Editors just let the manuscript sit on their desk until they have the pressure of another offer to compel them to pick it up. Even if they do read it and love it, “the numbers” don’t support taking the risk. So I took the book to a wonderful small press, Regal House, which has more freedom to avoid the really destructive business model of bigger publishers and can just publish good books.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

As a teacher of writing, I have a few hundred go-to favorites! Most of them require a whiteboard and a weird approximate drawing of what a story looks like inside my head, just as a starting point. Maybe that’s more instruction than advice. The best advice I’ve ever received about my own work was “Be more forthcoming.” That’s one I’m often repeating to students who overvalue mystery. And my evergreen, bedrock advice is read. Reading is the best teacher. Read widely at the level of quality you hope to achieve in your own work.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I’m with you on that advice! Almost everything I write surprises me because I start from a compelling situation I don’t fully understand, then I write to discover what’s going on. In this book, that included about 80% of the central mystery. Also, most of Leah’s love life and several key friendships got pulled in directions I did not expect. And some of my favorite scenes came from just asking myself a question mid-draft like “What’s Leah’s most intense relationship with a professor?” then writing toward that.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

The campus setting, Rockhaven, is very closely based on my alma mater, as will be obvious to anyone who knows and loves Sewanee. I renamed everything only to give myself the smallest room for fiction. My goal was to write a memoir of emotion and place, a novel in which everything is true except all of the characters and all of the events. Rockhaven as a place is so very Sewanee in the 80s that I worry it’s going to be hard for some alums to avoid thinking it’s a code pointing to real people and events. So I’m here to declare that 1) none of this happened and 2) (almost) no one I know is in this book! The exceptions are my late, great professor Douglas Paschall, who is dropped into the book as I remember him with only a name change, and two of our presumably late horses, Jojo and Matchless, who are playing themselves.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Leah is a poor college student and thus fairly obsessed with food. There’s a scene in which she attends a dinner at a professor’s house and eats a whole menu of food that’s new to her (lettuce from a garden! cheese from a goat!). But her true love is the greasy pub food she generally has to watch others eat, like the local delicacy known as the Granger (I kept the Sewanee name for this as well as for our go-to cheap beer, which was literally and meaningfully Falstaff).

The Granger

Plain bagel, toasted

½ inch of cream cheese

Bacon, cooked

2 slices of Swiss cheese

Nuke it

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.sherijoseph.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/angels-at-the-gate-sheri-joseph/22326772?ean=9781646036530&next=t

TBR: The Place That Is Coming to Us by J.D. Smith

2025-09-22T10:43:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

This collection addresses our troubled relationship with the non-human world, from which we cannot separate ourselves; as others have noted, “Nature bats last.” While this book can be seen as a twenty-first century addendum to the work of Robinson Jeffers, it also records an attempt to view nature—Creation, if you will—through lenses other than those of appetite and ambition.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

Besides breaking through the usual writerly boundaries of self-doubt and procrastination, I claimed new intellectual territory for myself and began to find ways to describe it. In short, I have moved beyond the fraying narrative of endless technological progress fueled by cheap energy. As others have noted, we’re not getting our jetpacks, and that’s just the beginning. We’re in for a bumpy ride, and denial can only make things worse, especially for the vulnerable.

Expressing these concerns and publicly grieving for the human and natural world may entail a degree of courage, but I will leave that to others to decide. At any rate, people who share or come to share those concerns should know that they are not alone in having them, and that we are finding a language to address these issues.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

One version or another of this collection has been circulating for about ten years, so there have been a great many lows—many undoubtedly deserved when the book hadn’t yet taken the right form. There were plenty of flat-out rejections, and the manuscript never placed as a finalist or semi-finalist in a competition. Along the way, though, I did get a couple of rejections with encouraging words, and I kept revising the manuscript.

In June of 2024, I finally got the “yes” I was looking for. I had ordered a couple of collections from Broadstone Books and liked their editorial judgment and their attention to the physical quality of their books, so on a whim I sent them the collection. To my surprise and delight editor Larry Moore accepted the manuscript, which roughly fits in the category of ecopoetry and probably nowhere else. For most of that summer, and occasionally since then, I’ve been reminded of the Iron & Wine-Fiona Apple track “All in Good Time.”

Since I’m retiring from my day job at the end of September, there will be time to give this book the support I think it deserves.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1992, William Matthews told me, “You’re still finding out what you can do. Go home and write your ass off.” I can’t improve on that.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The poems in this book were written over a span of more than twenty years, so I probably can’t remember all the times I’ve been surprised. A poem’s coming to mind is always unexpected, as are the moments of arriving at a final version after years of being stuck on one or another detail.

Compiling and arranging the poems had further unexpected results. The persistence of various themes and perspectives reminded me of how the collection could only have come about after decades of education and experience, with a few major shifts along the way. I was also taken aback by seeing how much I’d been thinking about salamanders.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title comes from the last line of “Introit,” the collection’s first poem. The line sets up the collection’s concerns with a strange and troubling world that we do not have to go on great voyages to discover. It is finding us, whether we like it or not, even if our lives take place within a tiny radius. In a changing climate, weather is more unpredictable, and extreme events are occurring more frequently. The ranges of wild plants and animals, and the hardiness zones for agriculture and gardening, are changing accordingly. Whether I look at the Chicago area, where I was born and raised, or Washington, DC, where I went to college and have lived as a working adult since 2000, I no longer see the places I once knew.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

Food appears at several points in the book, though most of it is of the kinds consumed by other species and not very appealing to homo sapiens. Scavenging is important, but I can’t do it. The book does, however, include ingredients: sugar, fish, coffee, sea jellies (for the somewhat adventurous), and blue crab, to which I am apparently allergic. My previous books have touched on more appetizing choices, and books to follow will probably do so as well. Even if I can’t provide the rapturous passages of Thomas Wolfe or Jim Harrison, there will be nibbles.

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.jdsmithwriter.com

ORDER A COPY OF THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/the-place-that-is-coming-to-us-poetry-by-j-d-smith

~~~~Note: Use discount code POETS24 for 20% off!~~~~

READ A POEM FROM THIS BOOK, “Dream with Policy”: https://www.harvardreview.org/content/dream-with-policy/

SUBSTACK: https://jdsmith3.substack.com/

TBR: The Belles by Lacey N. Dunham

2025-09-08T09:11:00.002-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Deena Williams is an outsider with a secretive past who will risk everything—including her life—to fit in.

At secluded Bellerton College, Deena is desperate to join a powerful clique of wealthy girls anointed the Belles. She’s welcomed into their group with the gift of a black velvet ribbon, and the comfortable life she’s always dreamed of is within reach.

But Bellerton hides a sinister history, and soon Deena is caught in a web of secrets, lies, and dangerous games in this chilling Southern gothic dark academia debut mashup of THE SECRET HISTORY, BUNNY, and HEATHERS.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I loved writing so many of my characters, it’s hard to pick! Ada May was a character who conjured herself, which is appropriate to her character’s genteel sinisterness. I hadn’t originally envisioned her in the book, but she quickly became the foil to my protagonist, Deena, and with her presence the book became a better, more interesting story. I also loved writing Fred, an iconoclastic young woman who is utterly unapologetic about who she is. Fred might be my favorite character in the novel.

Mary’s character was more challenging to write than I expected. I knew her background and her role in the story’s plot, but figuring out how to put her on the page while revealing the bits of mystery surrounding her at the right moments was difficult.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Publishing is a journey of highs and lows! I’m very lucky and privileged to have landed with an editor, the terrific Laura Brown, who understood my vision of the book and worked with me to elevate it to the greatest version of itself. And Atria has been terrific, the whole team there has been wonderful to work with.

One aspect of the publishing journey that isn’t talked about as much as the agent query process is the submission process. Writers are immensely focused on getting an agent—an important thing, especially if you’re interested in publishing with Big 5 and prestige indie presses like Graywolf or Algonquin—but for every book an agent has sold, they have five books from clients whose died on submission. I was, again, very lucky that this didn’t happen to The Belles—but it could have!

I think it’s important for writers to know that the journey doesn’t stop with getting an agent. There are no guarantees in this business. The journey continues for a long time beyond the agent, and it’s an emotionally challenging and difficult journey with no security at any point. Your book, and your career, face numerous hurdles every step of the way. And again with the next book. And again beyond that.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Stay connected to your creativity. The writing is yours; publishing is a business, and it’s a brutal one. There’s so much romanticization around book publishing. I encourage writers to stay grounded. Write for you, first and foremost. Not towards trends. Not towards what you think you “should” be writing. Not to the critics in your head. Not to the readers in your head. Write for you.

Then, worry about all the other stuff later. It becomes all-consuming and gets in the way of the creative work.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I have a drawer novel that I labored over for a decade. That novel was a book I wrote out of shoulds. It was not a book I wrote out of my own interests or obsessions, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. When I decided to write The Belles, I had two rules for myself, and the first one was that I wanted to write a book I would enjoy reading. A book that was wholly composed of things I love. What surprised me most was how much I enjoyed the actual writing process of The Belles once I followed my own obsessions, tastes, and interests rather than someone else’s ideas of a book.

How did you find the title of your book?

I’m terrible at titles! I think most writers are. The working title for The Belles was awful for a long time. I can’t remember when I decided on The Belles, but it’s perfect. It’s a title that references the group, and the consequences of conformity are a major theme in the book. The novel is set in Virginia, and the word “belles” is evocative of Southern Belles, a deeply complicated heritage that the young women in my book would be emerging from. The word “belles” also means “beauty” in French, and toxic white femininity is one of the core themes of my novel.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

The young women of Bellerton College love drinking sweet iced tea on the shaded porches of their dormitories. I personally can’t stand sweet tea—I drink unsweetened tea only.

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.laceyndunham.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-belles-lacey-n-dunham/22287589?ean=9781668084861&next=t

SUBSTACK: laceyndunham.substack.com

TBR: Doll Parts by Penny Zang

2025-08-25T10:19:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Doll Parts is a dual-timeline suspense novel about two best friends whose past at an women’s college—and a secret club obsessed with Sylvia Plath—comes back to haunt them. It’s also about grief, friendship, and the culture’s obsession with beautiful, dead women.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoyed creating my character Nikki, a college freshman who is grieving the loss of her mother. She listens to loud music (lots of Courtney Love), wears dark, smeared eyeliner and dresses she stole from her school theater department’s costume room. Every time I thought I knew what she would do next, she surprised me on the page.

Characters like this, who are at transition points in their life, are especially fascinating to me because those are periods of my life that seem to linger the most in my memory.

The most challenging character for me was writing Nikki’s daughter, Caroline, who appears almost twenty years later in the novel. I wanted Nikki and Caroline to feel and sound different but be similar enough (the ways mothers and daughters often are) that it echoed across the two different timelines. It took a lot of revision!

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The lows: all the rejection and insecurity that came early in the process. It never ends. Even once you have an agent, even after you have a book deal, there are rejections at every stage.

The highs: getting the news of my book deal will forever be the best memory because it was the most ordinary day (work, my son’s swim practice, making dinner), but suddenly my world changed. I also got to sign a copy of my book at ThrillerFest in NYC this summer before the book’s release. Such a surreal experience!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My favorite writing advice is to step away. Pause. Take a break. Any version of that advice is what I tell my students and constantly have to tell myself. Things unlock when I walk away, and I know I’m not alone. Also, it isn’t healthy for anyone to sit for too long, staring at a computer screen. We need to move our bodies and tend to our other hobbies, our families, our pets. Every time I find myself getting frustrated with my writing, I remember that walking away, even for five minutes, always helps.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised by how little of my research actually made it into the book. I did so much research on Sylvia Plath, obsessively reading every biography (including the really big ones). It all added to the story in its own way in terms of tone and mood, and Plath’s legacy is very much part of the story, but the actual content of that research is hardly mentioned in the novel at all.

How did you find the title of your book?

I originally had a different title for this book, and I didn’t think anyone could sway me to change it. When my editor came to me with the title Doll Parts, which is also the title of a song by Hole, I emailed my agent the following sentence: “I kinda love it.” Not only does it feel a little creepy, but it brings forth images of girlhood and resonates with one of the larger themes of the novel: the romanticization of dead women. And for readers who know the song, the 90s vibes are strong.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Well, my characters as college students eat a lot of sour candy and drink a lot of Dr Pepper. If you want an informal recipe for their favorite drink (which was, embarrassingly, also my favorite drink when I was much younger), mix Dr Pepper with coconut rum. It’s that simple. Bonus points if you drink it out of a TGI Friday’s kid’s cup with a lid so you can sneak it into concerts.

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.pennyzang.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/a/83168/9781464228148

SUBSTACK: https://pennyzang.substack.com/

Brief Hiatus

2025-07-03T11:23:00.001-04:00

TBR is on a brief hiatus. Looking forward to featuring new books and authors in the fall!

TBR: The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins

2025-06-09T11:25:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A mysterious phenomenon called ‘the unmapping’ causes city streets and neighborhoods to entirely rearrange each day, leading to broken down power grids and other such chaos. Our two main characters, Esme Green and Arjun Varma, work in the New York City Emergency Management Department; Arjun is in love with Esme, but Esme has a fiancé, who disappears on the first day. The book is about climate change, about disasters, and ultimately about humanity. Also, lucid dreaming cults.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I loved writing from Arjun’s perspective. He tries so hard—at his job, at friendship, at love—and fails in ways that are endearing to me and generally brings levity to this disaster story with his particular brand of neuroticism.

As for the one that gave me trouble, each chapter features a brief perspective from an unnamed character, and the hardest one to write was one of these side characters known as ‘the wife’. Her husband is a disaster prepper yet he himself goes missing the first day, and the wife, meanwhile, stays locked up at home, full of fear, until she gets pulled into a strange lucid-dreaming cult. At one point, I realized I didn’t know very much about her—who she was before all this. That bothered me, the not-knowing. Then I realized this missing sense of self was actually perfect for the story—that’s the type of person who would get swept away in dangerous ideas. I thought her story was about fear, but I learned it was about a missing selfhood.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Three years elapsed between when I finished the book and when I got the book deal. In that time, as I secured an agent and my agent pitched out The Unmapping, I kept writing madly, finishing two more books: a novel and a novella collection. When I heard that Bindery had put in an offer to publish The Unmapping, it was both a high and a low, because I went back to my draft and realized how much I had changed as a writer, and how much I wanted to change in this book. I’d really grown in three years! Luckily, they were responsive to my wishes to make some pretty massive edits, which were in line with what they wanted, too, so I said yes, then embarked on an utterly insane two months of rewriting. It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, and very difficult, but also wonderful, with my mind always at least one foot in the dreamscape of the novel. Since then it’s only been high after high, working with an amazing team on editing, choosing the cover, and everything else that goes into turning a book from words on a page to a physical reality.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I am a diehard reader of George Saunders’s Substack, Story Club. In many of his essays he talks about the importance of finding and following the energy of a piece. Basically, when you read back what you wrote, what is it that gives off little sparks? Follow that. Let that energy lead the story. Take it as far as it can go.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Writing this story involved discovery on every level. In a broad sense, when I was first working on this years ago, I didn’t realize I was writing a slanted analogy of climate change. I work in climate change advocacy, but considered my fiction as an escape from reality. Nope. It’s a disaster story very much about our own reality, even as it’s based on an unreal premise, and once I realized this, a lot clicked into place. On a smaller scale, when I was reviewing the book for copy edits I laughed out loud at a joke I’d included in the penultimate chapter—one I’d completely forgotten about. I took that as a good sign that I’d created characters with a life of their own.

How did you find the title of your book?

I initially called it “Sidewalk n.” I graduated undergrad with a degree in statistics, so this is a super nerdy math reference, because in statistics, instead of solving for “x,” you work with “n,” which is the number of observations in your sample. The idea was that if all the sidewalks rearrange (along with everything else), the one you’re looking at is “n”: it could be anything. Also, the name sort of rhymes with “sidewalk ends.” My husband also loved this title because he’s also a big math nerd, but I secretly knew it was too esoteric, that no one would get it, and right there on the first page people were talking about cities becoming “unmapped,” so it just became obvious that I should name it after that.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

Oh, lord. In this book, people are mostly eating to survive. There are microwaved pizzas and American cheese sandwiches and Oreos and granola bars. Actually, there is one strange scene involving a table full of smoked fish. So maybe make a good bagel with cream cheese and lox while you eat this. That would probably taste better than the cheese sandwich.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://denisesrobbins.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-unmapping-denise-s-robbins/21660442?ean=9781964721064

SUBSTACK: https://deniserobbins.substack.com/

TBR: Behold the Bird in Flight, A Novel of an Abducted Queen by Terri Lewis

2025-05-27T11:59:00.002-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Behold the Bird in Flight is a coming-of-age story and a royal love triangle filled with danger and longing and inspired by real historical figures—Isabelle d’Angoulême, her fiancé Hugh de Lusignan, and King John of Magna Carta fame. Set in a period that valued women only for their dowries and childbearing, Isabelle has been mainly erased by men, but the medieval chronicles suggest a woman who developed her own power and wielded it.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Isabelle was an absolute delight. I imagined her as a stubborn young girl with romantic tendencies and let her loose. That stubbornness served her well in a world where women were disregarded; the romantic fantasies got her into trouble. I loved watching her grow into a strong woman capable of acting to save herself and even others.

Isabelle’s betrothed, Hugh de Lusignan, was the most difficult. He came to me as a dreamer, not a doer, and under the thumb of his powerful father, but somehow Isabelle had to love him.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I started the novel in 2009 and began to query in 2014. Several agents mentioned a problem with Isabelle’s youth, but she was a real historical figure and I couldn’t just make her older. I set the novel aside to marinate. When I picked it up again, I decided to show how a medieval girl prepared for the world earlier than a modern girl. After another round of queries (87 in all, with seven requests), a friend suggested I try another route. The novel was accepted by She Writes Press two months after submission, a nanosecond in publishing time.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Editing is not rewriting. Polishing the prose won’t fix structural or character issues. Your words may seem engraved on the page, especially if you’ve lived with them for years, but be brave: cut, write new, merge characters. That lesson took me a long time to learn.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised how entertaining I found King John. His reputation as the worst English king is probably earned, but in person he was growly, full of excuses and complaints, oddly insecure, but when he got mad, he let loose. Not the kind of character I’d written before. I mean, swords and threats and swearing. As I wrote, I became convinced he really loved Isabelle and only treated her badly when he felt she didn’t love him alone. Which of course, she didn’t, at least in my telling.

How did you find the title of your book?

My title came late. Because religion resonated through the middle ages, I had given each chapter a quasi Biblical quote. Curse Not the King. Suffer the Little Children. Also, Isabelle always noticed birds, not only in the sky and woods, but the hawks men carried, a little chicken she took into her heart. After several misfires, my subconscious handed me Behold the Bird. I added in Flight for her curiosity about the world and her need to flee danger. Voila!

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Isabelle has a sweet tooth and loves honey balls. (She uses them to bribe a skinny guard…) She also loves eels which look like a ball of black string licorice. I doubt a modern audience would like the latter, but here’s a recipe to the former, baked not deep fried for ease: https://www.almanac.com/recipe/baked-honey-balls-italian-struffoli

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://TerriLewis1.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Behold-the-Bird-in-Flight/Terri-Lewis/9781647429102

SUBSTACK: TerriLewis1.Substack.com

TBR: ARE YOU HAPPY? by Lori Ostlund

2025-05-12T14:54:00.001-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

The nine stories in this collection explore class, identity, loneliness, and the specter of violence that looms over women and the LGBTQ+ community. For personal reasons, I spend a lot of time with characters who try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. I often say that I write sad, funny stories, and I think that is true of this collection.

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

The answer to both questions is the same: the final story, which is a short novella entitled “Just Another Family,” gave me the most trouble and the most pleasure, probably for the same reason. That is, when you struggle for a long time with a story, as I did with this one, the pleasure of finally figuring it out is considerable. I don’t know when I started the story, but my records indicate that I got my first rejection in 2015. I kept rewriting and sending it out, and it kept getting rejected. I set it aside finally for around five years, and when I returned to it in late 2022, the voice just kicked in and pulled me along, and the story nearly tripled in length. In the process, the story became more hopeful, the humor darker, the main character more dynamic.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

During the pandemic, my former agent went out with a novel that was not quite ready. She was struggling with the pressures of the pandemic, as we nearly all were, and the submission process fell apart. We had always had a good relationship, so it was with some sadness that I parted ways with her. By this point, I had stopped writing, a fallow period that lasted a couple of years. I wondered whether I would ever write again, but then one day something turned back on, and I sat down at my desk and opened up the novella that I mentioned above. I wrote several more stories, and these combined with stories that I had written and published in journals earlier formed the basis of ARE YOU HAPPY?, which meant that I found myself in the awful position of having to query agents with a story collection. I was lucky enough to secure representation by an agent I had long admired. The process of selling the collection in some ways went smoothly, and in other ways was stressful as hell. I got an offer from Emily Bell, whom I had nearly worked with on my last book. Since then, she had moved from FSG to Zando, and shortly after I accepted the offer for a two-book deal, she moved to Astra House, ultimately taking me with her. There were lots of twists and turns along the way, but that is the tame version.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to write for an audience of one. The advice, on the surface, seems counterintuitive, but the most unusual voices—which is what I am always drawn to—details and observations evolve out of this advice, I think. In my case, if my wife—who is my first and usually only reader—laughs or understands the nuance, I go with it.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Oh, lots of things surprised me, but one of the things that surprised me only later, when a reader pointed it out during the galleys process, was that there were lots of cats in the book and they were all named Gertrude. I have never had a cat named Gertrude, but I thought it was a funny name for a cat, I guess, and somehow the joke just kept getting retold.

How did you find the title of your book?

When I submitted the book to my now agent during the querying process, I had tentatively titled it JUST ANOTHER FAMILY, which was the name of the novella. The title works for the novella, but felt flat as a book title, not memorable. Another story was entitled “The Peeping Toms,” and I had toyed with that as a title also, since some of the stories deal with themes of voyeurism and being or feeling watched. When my agent and I had our first conversation about the book, he said, “Why not call it Are You Happy?” That was the name of another story, yet somehow I had never considered this as a title, but as soon as Henry said it, I knew that this was the title.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

In “Clear as Cake,” several of the scenes take place in a dive bar that I spent a lot of time in during college, and the only food available came from a huge jar that sat on the counter. It was filled with pickled gizzards, which I occasionally sampled. In the story, I went with pickled eggs.

*****

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:

https://www.loriostlund.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: Either your favorite independent bookstore or Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/are-you-happy-stories-lori-ostlund/21741930

READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK, “The Gap Year”:

https://electricliterature.com/the-gap-year-by-lori-ostlund/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ_GixleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFhVmRRTVROd2ZKNmRaSkRNAR6-H4MdyotRY5R41hpOPgBGlEQ_p1fSFIibs7GQObHcrEP28_GPH1WB2LsAlg_aem_b__YCipHXPXDOl6kzDlSlQ

TBR: Duet for One by Martha Anne Toll

2025-05-05T16:16:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Duet for One is a lush and rewarding love story that follows the journey from grief to love within the world of classical music.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoyed creating three members of the supporting cast. The first is Thaddeus, a cellist who looks and sounds more like a lumberjack. Thaddeus is a person who calls it like it is. He’s an important counterweight to Adam Pearl, as Adam pushes through/and avoids grief following his mother’s death.

I also loved fleshing out Yvette, a professor of Caribbean studies at Penn who is humorous and grounded, in contrast to Dara’s tendencies toward seriousness and self-absorption. The same is true for Dara’s old friend Lydia, a fierce pianist whose cynicism masks a compassionate person whose life is filled with struggle.

I have worked hard to bring Adam Pearl to the page. Over time, as he’s moved to center stage, it’s been a challenge to render him with nuance. He’s a gifted violinist, who needs to know himself a lot better. He can be angsty but also kind and generous. He’s conflicted, like all of us.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This book took twenty years to get born. There were a lot of lows. Too many rejections to count, including an agent in the distant past. Highs include my yearly revision of Duet for One, a book that is close to my heart and that has grown and thickened with time. Another high has been trying to render music on the page, which will always be a failing proposition, but brings me great joy!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Get your tush in the chair and ignore all writing advice.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I don’t know if it counts as a surprise, but if you would have told me in 2004 that this book was going to be published in twenty years, I would have been surprised on all fronts—that it was getting published and that it would take so long!

How do you approach revision?

For me, revision is the heart of writing. Everything happens there. I revise a lot as I am in process. I do multiple entire-book revisions where I review character arcs, nuance, interior life, plot, dialogue, and structure structure structure. My last revision is the one where I put every word under a microscope to ensure it has a purpose. Otherwise, that word has to go!

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

I wouldn’t say there are foods associated with this book (other than coffee, there is a lot of caffeine!), but I love to cook and bake and so I commend you on this question!

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.marthaannetoll.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646036004

TBR: The Odds by Suzanne Cleary

2025-04-21T11:55:00.000-04:00

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

I usually write a narrative poem that, along the way, dives into single moments and/or explores associations that arise as I write. I like poems that think-on-the-page, and find those especially fun to write.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoyed writing “For the Poet Who Writes to Me While Standing in Line at CVS, Waiting for His Mother’s Prescription” because the subject welcomed a wide range of material and emotion. It’s about those early months of the COVID quarantine, when I compulsively surfed the Internet for both information and distraction, which is how I got to reference both the royal family and snack food. It’s also one of the poems I most enjoy having written because it’s found a wide readership, especially in England and Ireland.

I most struggled with writing “At the Feet of Michelangelo’s David.” The ending originally included lots of facts about the statue’s long trek to the museum, and lots (and lots) of speculation on my part as to what that might have looked like to passersby. Eventually, I realized I needed to look again at the statue itself in order to find the poem’s final lines.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

First, the low: For four years I submitted The Odds manuscript to all the best publishers and competitions, where sometimes it was a finalist or otherwise near-miss. I found this mostly encouraging, until the day that my dream publisher told me that The Odds had lost publication to one other book, essentially because my poems “sound too much alike.” This observation felt damning, and too accurate for comfort. So I gave up on The Odds. I turned my attention to a new-and-selected manuscript I’d begun a few years earlier; maybe that manuscript, instead, might be my fifth book. When, slowly and grudgingly, I returned to The Odds, I reordered the poems to highlight variation of subject, length, and form. I added poems I originally thought hadn’t fit. When Jan Beatty selected the revised The Odds as winner of the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, I’d won the jackpot! Not only did a fabulous and accomplished poet select my work, but I had “grown as a poet.” Ultimately, the struggle was good for me and for my book. As a bonus, that new-and-selected manuscript is nearly complete, which also feels good.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

“Follow the poem, don’t lead.” I’m all about discovering as you write, about welcoming unforeseen ideas, associations, images, sounds. If I begin a poem knowing where the poem will end, the poem hardly feels worth writing; it feels restricted to the conscious mind, closed to the subconscious. Discoveries add resonance and depth to the poem, and—really important for me—add fun to the writing process.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Every poem includes something that I did not foresee, but, overall, I didn’t expect that the pandemic, either overtly or covertly, would appear so often in this book. I knew that I’d write about the passing of time, since I often do, but with The Odds I found myself feeling as if I were a historian, responsible for recording the quarantine years.

How did you find the title of your book?

I like a short book title because it’s easy for readers to remember. The Odds is my fifth full-length poetry collection and the odds were against this happening. The odds were against my living this long. Not coincidentally, I am drawn to writing about odd things, things that are unlikely subjects for poems. Also, I love the iamb, love it.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

A figure in one of the poems eats a granola bar. Salted cashews also appear. As for recipes, sorry. I’m better at recommending restaurants.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:

www.suzanneclearypoet.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://nyq.org/books/title/the-odds