All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere is a short story collection years in the making, and months in compiling. I wish I could say that I had some grand plan when writing the stories in this collection, but I did not.

Did you always want to be a writer? people often ask. But for most of my life, writing was  something I steered away from. I still have a tape somewhere, from an astrology reading gifted  by a friend, in which the reader asserts that everything in my chart points to writing, while I  insist that…

The night after receiving mass shooter training at my university, I woke from a dream of four people attacking a shooter who’d breached the door of their classroom. They grabbed his arms and legs, as I’d been taught in training. Someone else sunk their fingers into his eyes, as I’d been taught. But it didn’t…

On January 1, 1984, Robert “Peanut” Griffin, a petty criminal on trial for murder, broke out of a Mississippi courthouse jail and, during a standoff between him and my father on the courthouse roof, threatened to kill my pregnant mother, my unborn sister, and me, two years old at the time.

Country of Under is my first published book, but the first book I worked on, in different forms for seven years, was a memoir. That memoir revolved around my relationship with my father, a pilot who became a quadriplegic in an accident when I was ten, a year after my parents divorced, and his years…

Confession: I’ve never played an instrument. Was never held hostage by a purse-lipped piano tyrant. Never regaled the quad with the thick-skulled tabs of “Smoke on the Water” or “You Really Got Me.” Never even had the devilish pleasure of driving my parents insane with atonal bleats from a school-issued recorder. 

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Nicole M. Wolverton writes about A Misfortune of Lake Monsters from CamCat Books.

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Mindy Friddle writes about Her Best Self from Regal House Publishing.

My research process goes in reverse. I write, that is, before I know anything. During those initial stages, I stay studiously far away from real research on the things I’m writing about. 

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, William Walsh writes about The Poets from Erratum Press. + Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified four kinds of readers:  I am all four kinds of reader, and, I suppose, all four kinds…

I was in the car on a road trip with my husband in 2014 when we heard a story about children with past life memories on National Public Radio. The story centered on a research program at the University of Virginia and the work of neuroscientist who explored the phenomena of young children with past…