I met Donnaldson Brown when she joined the 2020 cohort of Bookgardan, the low-res writing program that I direct for Craigardan artist residency center. She’d already finished her first novel, and while she worked on her second she generously shared her unique, largely non-textual method for developing fully-dimensional fictional worlds and characters, likely informed by…

Caroline Cole had a nickname for the days when she ditched school to sneak into the public library and snatch a book or two: Stay Gone Days. Little did she know the nickname would soon reflect her relationship with her sister, too. Haunted by secrets and by the death of their father, Stay Gone Days…

In his debut novel, The Man with Wolves for Hands (Southeast Missouri State Univ Press), Juan Eugenio Ramirez creates a layer of stories within the narrative where inanimate objects become autonomous and the mundane becomes significant. Demonstrating a truly original imagination, a vivid backdrop is developed for a man living with wolf’s heads where his…

Caitlin Horrock’s second short story collection Life Among the Terranauts follows her debut collection This is Not Your City and her novel The Vexations. With stories set mostly in the western part of the United States (Arizona) and the Midwest (Michigan), Horrocks explores lives in locked away places—in small towns, in communes or compounds, biodomes,…

Photo by Heidi SellJaye Viner and I used to pass each other in the eighty-year-old corridors of Arts and Sciences Hall at the university where I taught and she was earning her second graduate degree. That was five years ago, and while we said hello to each other, we never crossed paths in an actual…

I’ve loved Michelle Ross’ writing since I first encountered her stories during our MFA fiction workshops at Indiana University. Since then, Ross has published There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award, and her second collection Shapeshifting, winner of the Stillhouse Press Short Story Award, was published in…

I was introduced to Louise Marburg and her writing via the rejection contest my friend Reneé Bibby runs. The contest started out as a way for Tucson writers to encourage each other to submit, as well as to lessen the sting of rejection, by awarding a trophy to the writer who earned the most rejections…

Photo: David WakelyI met Ron Nyren in the early 1990s when we worked together in the marketing department of a midsized architecture firm. I knew his passion was fiction and was happy for him when he went to an MFA program. When he returned to the Bay Area, he received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.…

Sadie Hoagland and Maria Kuznetsova first met in 2008, when they were studying fiction writing at UC Davis under Yiyun Li, Lucy Corin, Lynn Freed, and Pam Houston. Each has a second book out this spring — Kuznetsova’s second novel, Something Unbelievable, from Random House, and Hoagland’s debut novel, Strange Children, from Red Hen Press…

Erin McGraw’s seventh and most recent book Joy (Counterpoint, 2019) is a collection of flash fiction or “short-shorts.” Despite its cheerful title, Erin McGraw’s Joy is about anything but. In fifty-three pieces of sudden fiction, characters find joy hard to come by. A fifteen-year-old girl hears a news report of a local rape and knows…

In his new story collection, Claire, Wading Into the Danube By Night, Jeffrey Condran’s fiction once again shines a light on places where the personal meets the political in the age of anxiety, and where characters who feel battered by life have no choice but to look for hope in the small intimacies that sometimes…

Steve Wingate is a Colorado man. His first novel, Of Fathers and Fire (2019), was set there, and his second, The Leave-Takers (2021), was supposed to be, too. But when Wingate moved to South Dakota — not the usual order of operations; my home state is a place people generally leave — he said the…