Amy Shearn discusses her new novel, Dear Edna Sloane, as well as unplugging, being a woman writer of a certain age, the notion of creating content vs. making art, working with an indie press vs. a bigger publisher, her “saucy” upcoming novel, and more!

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here, as well as two forthcoming novels. She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, The Resort LIC, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Amy's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or @amyshearn.

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Juli Min discusses her debut novel, Shanghailanders, as well as starting with place, working toward the backward-in-time structure, writing sisters, writing “mean” characters, the notion of home, the work of writing historical fiction, how becoming a mother made her fearless as a writer, the Shanghai lit scene and more!

Juli Min is a Korean-American writer based in Shanghai. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson, and she studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard University. Her novel Shanghailanders will be published in May 2024 by Spiegel & Grau (US) and Dialogue Books (UK). Translations are forthcoming in Japanese, German, Spanish, and Norwegian.

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Julia Hannafin discusses their debut novel, Cascade, as well as the research she did into the Farallon Islands, writing from life, bird shit, grief, working with Great Place Books, the difference between writing for TV and writing novels, and more!

Born and raised in Berkeley, Julia Hannafin now lives in Los Angeles. They have written episodes for television. Cascade is her debut novel.

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Clare Beams (The Garden) discusses the fascinating medical history behind her new novel, writing a “ghost story,” crafting a sympathetic villain and an unlikable main character, finding inspiration and darkness by re-reading The Secret Garden as an adult, and more!

Clare Beams’s new novel, The Garden, will be published by Doubleday in April of 2024. It has been longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize and featured on anticipated lists at LitHub and Bookshop.org. Her novel The Illness Lesson, published in February of 2020 by Doubleday, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was named a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle and a best book of February by Time, O Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, was published by Lookout Books in 2016; it won the Bard Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Story Prize, and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, Conjunctions, The Common, Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has received special mention in The Pushcart Prize and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, MacDowell, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. Clare lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters and currently teaches in the Randolph MFA program.

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Daniel Sweren-Becker discusses his new novel, Kill Show, as well as using the oral history format, finding the right balance of red herrings to tantalize but not torture the reader, true crime, the way truth can be shaped and manipulated, white man’s fragility, and more!

Daniel Sweren-Becker is an author, a television writer, and a playwright living in Los Angeles. He graduated from Wesleyan University and received an MFA from New York University. His play Stress Positions premiered in New York City at the SoHo Playhouse, and he is the author of the novels The Ones and The Equals. His new novel is Kill Show.

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Katya Apekina discusses her new novel, Mother Doll, as well as using humor as a coping mechanism and a vehicle for intimacy, sex scenes, giving a ghost a voice, being inspired by her grandmother’s memoirs, generational trauma, time as something stacked rather than something sprawling, ambiguous endings, and so much more!

Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, LitHub and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German and Italian. She has published stories in various literary magazines and translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film New Orleans, Mon Amour, which premiered at SXSW in 2008. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Boston, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and dog.

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Brandi Wells talks about their debut novel, The Cleaner, and discusses the Muppet Babies, writing a character who’s inventing her own world, what constitutes “real work,” what they love about teaching, revising by listening to their book be read to them over and over, weird coworkers, and more!

Brandi Wells is the author of the novella, This Boring Apocalypse as well as a full length chapbook of stories, Please Don't Be Upset. Their fiction appears in Puerto Del Sol, Mid-American Review, Tri-Quarterly and many other journals. A native of Georgia, they teach creative writing at California State University, Fullerton. 

Their new novel is The Cleaner, an offbeat, darkly clever tale about a night cleaner who discovers a toxic secret about her company’s CEO—and decides to take matters into her own hands.

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Sarah Kain Gutowski discusses her book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar, the way she’s made space for her Extraordinary and Ordinary Selves, figuring out how to market herself and her work, finding the meaning in darkness, collaborating with Texas Review Press, and more!

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of Fabulous Beast, winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry and a 2019 Foreword Indies Finalist. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It’s All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review, and her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx, and New York Journal of Books.

Her new collection is a book-length narrative in poems titled The Familiar, which explores female mid-life existential crisis through two characters, the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self, who send a single household into chaos as they vacillate between the siren call of ambition, the necessity of the workplace, and responsibility to love and family.

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Today, John Cotter (Losing Music) discusses writing a memoir by accreting details, revision, being a gusher or not, reinventing the wheel with every project, considering the reader, how his memoir is actually a mystery, the inhumanity of the medical industry, and more!

John Cotter is the author of the novel Under the Small Lights, and the memoir Losing Music, which Oprah Daily calls, “as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it.” The Millions calls Losing Music, “a powerful addition to the memoir canon–hard-hitting, beautiful, profound.” And The Wall Street Journal says, “Evidence that Mr. Cotter’s ear is still keen for the melodies of language sings from every page.” 

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Today, Abbott Kahler (Where You End) discusses the true story that inspired her novel, how her writing process changed as she pivoted from nonfiction to fiction, outlining, the unique world of twins, working with her longtime group of readers, starting all over, and more!

Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her next nonfiction book, Then Came the Devil, is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the host of Remus: The Mad Bootleg King, a forthcoming podcast from iHeartRadio about legendary Jazz Age bootlegger George Remus. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in New York City and in Greenport, New York, where she is at work on her next novel.

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Today, Kate Brody discusses her literary crime debut, Rabbit Hole, inhabiting and subverting the crime genre, writing sex scenes, writing men, the narrative use of a gun in the novel, what drives us to consume true crime, and more!

Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Lit Hub, CrimeReads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut.

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