Receive a message from your cousin saying that a book about your father’s hometown of Barre, Vermont, includes a photo of a family with your surname. They must be your relatives, he says.

In the spring of 2023, I was working diligently through the second semester of my MFA. Every three weeks, I sent my advisor a new packet of work, containing a short story or two, a craft essay, and a letter.

A fluctuating, unstable choral voice narrates Directory, an experimental, interlinked collection of flash fiction. The “we” governs the pages until the final story, whose revelation I won’t spoil.

Where do books come from? Maybe from puddles. Or from livery drivers sent to transport you to an undisclosed destination. They come from dark places and light places — and often they arrive in disguise although you are certain you are expecting them.

With a new job and a busy household, I needed a place where I could disappear into a manuscript for a few uninterrupted days, and I found it at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Donna Miscolta writes about Ofelia and Norma from Regal House. + I was a science major in college. I won’t explain why. Suffice it to say it was a case…

Much like Colin McAllister, the narrator of my new novel The Shitbird, I arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts on a raw gray day in October of 1993 to begin my first assignment as a lowly seaman apprentice in the U.S. Coast Guard, at the very bottom of the pecking order aboard a 270-foot cutter.

I discovered Berkeley Springs because I had it in my mind to visit some hot springs within a few hours drive of Washington, D.C.

In all the years I’ve lived as a writer — which is to say, all the years of my adult life — that moment of facing a blank screen or a blank piece of paper and typing the number “1” never got any easier.

An Essay wherein an Author of a Chapbook of Very Smol Stories muses on the 12 micros and flash fictions in the Collection to see if any “Research” took place.

My first novel started with a practically unknown historical person. To bring her to life, I researched the few available references, envisioned her in a scene from my developing plot, and watched her personality emerge.

I set the stories in Toledo because that was where I started my legal career. With Toledo as the backdrop, I could summon the emotions and anxieties of a young associate.