Winter 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!
J.M.C. Kane
Q: How did you land on the title for this piece?
A: The title selection was somewhat autobiographical. I work remotely as an attorney. My firm is headquartered in Houston, but I split my time between Georgia (Eastern Time) and Louisiana (Central Time). True to the story, I keep my computer on Central Time so that I always have one foot in the time zone so that when work e-mails come with a request accompanied by a submission deadline, I note the time in the lower right corner of my desktop. Always Central Time.
Marie Buck
Q: What’s something you’ve read lately that you really loved/found inspiring?
A: Sara Jaffe’s short story collection Hurricane Envy (Rescue Press), especially for the mind-blowing and beautiful work with plot and quotidian events—a song stuck in your head, for instance. Also, thinking more about the everyday, Dalmacia Ruiz-Rosas Samohod’s Red Lip Peril, poetry recently translated by Judah Rubin and published as a chapbook (Ugly Duckling Presse).
I’ve admired, in different registers, a sort of intense maximalism at the level of the sentence in Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Penguin) and Caren Beilin’s Sea, Poison (New Directions).
I’ve been reading a lot of older popular page-turners, too, and Stephen King’s The Body really hit me. A perfect little book about class, I think.
Bethany Bruno
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: “Good Grief, Florida Man” began with my interest in Florida’s Sunshine Law and how it produces the endless stream of “Florida Man” headlines. I kept thinking about what those stories leave out. The private moments. The context. The pain that gets flattened into something meant to be laughed at.
The real seed, though, was personal. A family member, deep in grief, did something completely out of character and ended up in minor legal trouble. Watching that unfold made me think about how grief can hijack judgment and how quickly a vulnerable moment can become a permanent public record.
The story grew from that tension. Private loss versus public spectacle. In Florida, grief does not always stay private. It can be documented, archived, and reduced to a headline. I wanted to write toward the human story inside that system and ask what it means when the worst moment of someone’s life becomes public property.
Camille Pirtle
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: I first envisioned this story in a pharmacy, where it begins. In front of me in the checkout aisle, two women were talking. By the time they reached the register, the cashier was complimenting them, saying how cute of a family they were, such a beautiful mother and daughter. They accepted the compliment, and as soon as they walked away, started laughing. From there "Mother Talk" formed.
The setting of rural Tennessee is based on my own childhood, where I'd visit often, and the emotional landscape between Cass and Vivian mirrors that of my own relationships. The invention in this case came only in the details.
Trent Lewin
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: This piece is about intersecting crises, the personal and the global. I’m an environmental engineer and work in the climate change space, and interact with college and university students. I find it disheartening to witness climate anxiety and how it’s taken root amongst young people, a personal crisis created by a global one. It’s a problem for which I don’t have a solution, as much as engineers like to solve things.
This story was born of a desire to try and weave those pieces together. It’s a way of reconciling the divergence, problems that unfortunately are likely to get worse as the movement in the world bends away from climate action towards various political indulgences. The challenge is heightening. This does not mean that many people aren’t rising to face it. We are. The good news stories are missing from the world, though, and that’s a next literary pursuit.
I think a trip to Venice also influenced me. It’s a wonderful city, and imagining it gripped by a climate event of unexpected proportions – that propelled this piece. Five bridges – that’s all that it takes to get lost in Venice.
Edith Patterson
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: “Nothing Ever Happens” was inspired by two very different sources, the first being a piece of Shakespeare criticism. Shortly before writing this piece, I reread “The Mousetrap” by Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, which discusses whether or not Hamlet’s overwhelmingly material fixations really symbolize something. Hamlet wants to divorce everyday objects from their rich symbolism, but this creates a world that is purely utilitarian, “caught up in unending cycles of renewal, strikingly figured by the recycling of leftovers.” I wanted to write a piece addressing this classic literary question: is symbolism really rooted in something material, or are we just making it up?
As an experiment, I tried to immerse the characters in materiality — telling stories back and forth, constantly reciting new details — without real belief that these things symbolize anything. My second source of inspiration was Pavement’s album Slanted & Enchanted. Over the summer, I listened to this album while driving in the country outside my hometown. In “Shoot the Singer,” Stephen Malkmus says, “Someone painted over painted wood,” which sparked the idea for the furniture abandoned in the garage. I wanted to create a portrait of these objects without any ideological meaning and see what happens, if anything.
Jess Peng
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: The seed idea for this story was its central premise (and unofficial tagline, in my mind): Young woman tries to rehome her deceased mother's pet vampire. Only once I loosely connected the ideas of bloodletting and skin lightening did I realize this would be a story equally, if not more so, about Eastern vs. Western culture, and about cultural disconnect within a family. The mother and daughter characters were built from there. I liked Emil as a silent third party, a bridge and a barrier, a problem and a solution (and charming in his own right!). Vampiric skin lightening plays a minor role in the final story, but it also serves as a cue to race and the different, macabre ways that race and color are valued, or fetishized, in China and in the U.S. The backdrop of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was decided because I had recently visited there—and both the Starbucks and the pizza joint mentioned are places that my friends and I ate at.