An Interview with Amy Lee Lillard

Amy Lee Lillard has been writing for a long time, for herself and for other people. She’s worked as a marketer and copywriter for over twenty years, but she’s also placed her own work—both fiction and nonfiction—in Atlas and Alice, Barrelhouse, Epiphany, LitHub, Off Assignment, Entropy, Electric Lit, and more. In addition, she was “shortlisted…

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An Interview with Keema Waterfield

Debut author Keema Waterfield had a different sort of upbringing: she was born in a trailer in Alaska and then chased “music with her twenty-year-old mother on the Alaskan folk festival circuit, two small siblings in tow.” But the story she tells of that upbringing in her debut memoir, Inside Passage, which released in May,…

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An Interview with Gordon Bonnet

Gordon Bonnet and I would have a lot to talk about should we ever meet in person. He’s a former science teacher and a runner and “is never without a piece of fiction in progress.” Kindred spirits, I tell you! All that writing has been fruitful—he has nineteen published novels, and two of them, Descent…

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Do the Math!

October has always been a month of reflection for me. A time when the leaves fall, the days become cooler, and the moments in my head spin endlessly as I assess where I am in life and where I’m going and if what I’m doing is working for me. Part of that assessment this year included looking at my Author…

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Are You Out There?

Years ago in graduate school, I discovered the wonder of Dar Williams. All of her songs resonate with me on some level, but the lyrics from one song in particular have stayed in my head for years. That song? “Are You Out There?” In it, Dar questions if someone can hear her and mentions that…

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An Interview with Lindsay Merbaum

Debut author Lindsay Merbaum released The Gold Persimmon, her queer feminist horror novel, just in time for Halloween. Paul Goat Allen wrote that the book is “a nightmarish vision quest through alternate New York City hotels that ultimately leads both characters and readers to enlightenment,” and it landed on a list in Harper’s Bazaar as…

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Always a Teacher

Her name is tucked between those of two friends in the acknowledgment section of my debut novel. If you don’t know to look for it, you might miss it. But I know her name is there. Diane Dougherty and I met only once in person over twenty years ago on one of my first visits…

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