Summer 2026 Author Mini-Interviews
To give authors a chance to talk more about their process and craft, or just to give us a little more insight into their piece, we provided them with a list of questions from which they could pick one to answer. We hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain!
Mathieu Parsy
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: My wife was sick for a few days. I was trying to take care of her and I wasn’t sleeping well. I started having nightmares about the house being surrounded by insects. I wrote it down when it was still half-dream, and then I started asking myself what kind of person would be out there fighting something like that, and why it would matter so much to him. The giant beetle came first. The shame arch came second.
Peter Ward Brown
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: It feels like I go to the store a lot in my life. I work from home, and in some weeks, going to the store is the only time I leave the house. When the kids are coming home for a visit, it’s not unusual for me to make several trips to the store in one day.
Not long ago, on a trip to the store, I ran into a woman with two full carts of groceries waiting for a ride outside the store. She was still there three hours later when I returned on another trip, and I tried (unsuccessfully) to see if she needed some help. We had a super-unusual conversation that stuck with me for several days. At the time, I was working on a story about an empty nesting couple at odds over their kids being gone, and I dropped the conversation into the middle of it. Somehow, it started to make the dots connect and helped me get into something about my main character that had been eluding me. You’ve got to pay attention to the weird moments in your life.
Becca Stickler
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: I read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing earlier this year and one piece of advice that stuck with me was that non-writing jobs can make for excellent material. The minute details add texture to a story, and people tend to enjoy a peek behind the curtain into environments they’ve only encountered on a surface level.
I’d never considered the three years I spent working at a chain gym during college a potential source of “inspiration,” but I jotted down some notes on what it was like: scrubbing tanning beds, smelling other people’s sweat for eight hours straight, and growing fond of the strange characters that came in every day. Spending some time in that corner of my brain turned up the memory of browsing Craigslist posts with my coworkers, mostly from men cruising in the gym’s showers. So shoutout to them, actually—they sparked a story idea I was excited to follow.
Jacob Dimpsey
Q: What’s something you’ve read lately that you really loved/found inspiring?
A: I recently read The Sound and the Fury. It was my first William Faulkner novel and it blew me away. His prose is beautiful and absorbing. I love how he gives his characters such rich interior lives that you feel like you’re inside the minds of his narrators. In my writing, especially in longer pieces, I tend to focus on exterior actions and descriptions, leaving my narrators to inject thoughts and commentary here and there. But Faulkner inverts that. The interior is the foreground, the exterior is the background. And it inspired me to focus on the interiority of my characters. To draw out their internal monologues and daydreams and hauntings. To let their thoughts and visions intrude on everyday things. In the novel, Quentin is physically at Harvard but his thoughts never really leave home. He is haunted by Caddy and his father. And isn’t that what real life so often feels like? Sure, I’m physically mowing the lawn or driving to work. But really, I’m elsewhere. Others have come to visit me.
Ava Schmidt
Q: How did this piece begin, and what was its seed idea?
A: The story began as an assignment for an Introduction to English Studies class I took about a year ago. We had spent a unit reading the phenomenal book, There, There by Tommy Orange, an author who has a unique way of presenting characters as composite images: what has come before for them is never forgotten but is, instead, always rhyming with or differentiating from prior experience. Our professor asked us to write an original mimic capturing some important element of There, There’s style. What I sought to do was to take a character at a low point — out of a job, commiserating with barflies — and make sense of it through snippets of memory. Descriptions of the character’s past and her present circumstances tell the stories of endings, be it the ending of a job, of a sexual pursuit, of a vital organ’s function. What I want to ask is, “What are the similarities in the introspection accompanying these endings, these failures?” Whether it’s an ending due to the body or a failure due to marginalization, I believe that there’s an underlying feeling beneath these instances that we’re all familiar with. Comparing each individual person’s failures to one’s own experience has taken precedence, at times, over the inclination to try and understand one another at our lowest points.
Suzanne Hicks
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: This story contains themes I write about often, including childhood and chronic illness, although usually not together. It began as separate pieces. One about the kids, the cat, and the raspberries. The other, about the tick. Alone, both were lacking. When I began to edit, I realized that I was likely writing about the same kids. By merging the two stories and adding additional details, I felt I was able to establish the closeness of these two, who do everything together, and the devastation experienced by the narrator as they feel their sibling being taken away from them by a chronic illness.