In this interview, Alissa discusses exploring close-knit relationships with her debut literary suspense novel, With Friends Like These, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Alissa Lee
Literary agent: Michelle Brower and Danya Kukafka at Trellis Literary Management
Book title: With Friends Like These
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release date: November 4, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Suspense
Elevator pitch: Five former Harvard roommates have played a secret game for decades, but when the stakes rise and the friends agree to play one last time, deadly consequences emerge from old lies.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I started this book at a time when I was trying to keep up with a busy job, raising kids, and maintaining the important relationships in my life. I remember running into friends who seemed so accomplished and put-together, but once we dug below the surface, I was surprised to hear about their struggles. I started thinking about how good we had become at erecting these facades, what happens when they break down, and how they don’t serve us in our relationships as well as we think. That experience really focused my attention on how important a few key friends have been to me. I love a twisty plot, and while this book is meant to be suspenseful, it’s really about the friendships that carry us through our lives. 

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I’ve been working on this story for at least eight years, but I stopped and started more than a few times. The story has always centered on a game the characters play, which was my way of exploring close-knit relationships and the limits of friendship, but there was a version where the main characters were men. Beta readers wanted to see these guys taken down hard, and I realized that didn’t leave much room for the story I wanted to tell. 

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The traditional publishing process is a unique one with its own pacing. At times, it can feel like everything is moving so slowly, but then you get notes and deadlines come quickly. The biggest surprise though has been how generous my agents, editor, and other writers have been. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that others are invested in a project you’ve been carrying alone, and that kindness is something I’ll always remember with such gratitude. 

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the revision process, both with my agents and my editor.I think because they’re such smart women who came to me with a clear and resonant vision for how the book could be improved, I trusted them early on. As a result, I felt like every note was given in the spirit of making the book better, and this made the revision process a pretty smooth one.  

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope that this book gives readers an opportunity to think about the friendships that really matter to us and whether we’re making the investments we need to so that those relationships can keep growing. One of the most rewarding moments so far in this process was a note I got from one of my college roommates after I’d sent her an advance copy. She felt like the book spoke to the phases of our lives, the struggle and rewards of keeping friendships going, and the emotional vulnerability that is hard to expose when you’re young, but you can lean into based on years of our lives being intertwined. That was what I was going for, and to have her experience that, well, it felt like the warmest hug. 

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

The process of getting a book out into the world can sometimes feel like an interminable climb, so when you find yourself losing faith, remember that so many gains can be made by just showing up. Revising that problematic chapter one more time, sending out the next batch of query letters, or turning up at your local bookstore to support a fellow writer—all of it counts. If we just keep showing up for ourselves and for others, good things will follow. 

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In this interview, Catherine discusses returning to a familiar fiction family in her new novel, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Catherine Newman
Literary agent: Jennifer Gates
Book title: Wreck
Publisher: Harper
Release date: October 28, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Previous titles: For adults: Sandwich; We All Want Impossible Things; Catastrophic Happiness; Waiting for Birdy;  For kids: What Can I Say?; How to Be A Person; Stitch Camp
Elevator pitch: This is a book about uncertainty: Rocky, a woman in her 50s, worries about a spreading rash that eludes diagnosis at the same time as she becomes obsessed over a tragic local accident that may be closer to her than she realizes. (But it’s mostly just conversations with her husband, grown daughter, and elderly dad.)

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What prompted you to write this book?

I have had a personal interest in the deeply unnerving experience of diagnostic uncertainty. Very, very personal, if you know what I mean. Also, I am a person who relates intensely with Rocky’s preemptive grief or rubbernecking grief—whatever it is that this should best be called. I wanted to write a book that would examine these two sides of the same fundamental question: How do we live now when we don’t know what happens next?

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It’s hard to quantify this process because it involves a long period of something I call “wool gathering”—this is me writing down thoughts and funny things and snippets of conversation while I try to figure out what the obsession is that’s tying it all together. So, in that way, Wreck started while I was still working on Sandwich—just two different stages of work. Then there’s the writing itself, which I do quickly—in under a year—because momentum is the only thing that can carry me to the end of a project.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I worried that my agent and editor would be unhappy that it was the same family from Sandwich. I had thought about making it a different family but, in the end, it just didn’t work that way for me. These characters had more to say, and so I let them have at it.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Many, many of the conversations that Rocky has with her dad are conversations I’ve had with my own father in real life. But then it is almost uncannily easy for me to make up conversations between them—I can hear it in my head, exactly what my dad would say, what I or Rocky would say back. And I think he was genuinely confused when he read the book about whether some of the scenes were fictional or not. It’s always creepy and weird for writers to talk about channeling or whatever—as if it’s not all just coming out of their own brains. But sometimes I have this weird dreamy feeling that the words are somehow mine but also coming from some other place. Ha ha ha! Someone get this girl The Complete Works of Carl Jung!

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Oh, I always want the same outcome. I want people to laugh, AND I want them to feel less alone. When people write me and the vibe of their message is “OMG same!” I feel like I’ve done the thing I hoped to do. With this book, it has a lot to do with a certain kind of anxiety, also with the crazy medicalized experience of a weird diagnosis (e.g. endless lab work, specialists, insurance nightmare, bizarrely inscrutable results dinging into your patient portal). And also, as always, grief, and also the unwavering love inside a family.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

This is not good advice for everyone, of course, because we all do it differently, but it’s this: Do not discount the power of momentum. The forward and urgent movement of the story forward toward its conclusion. I write a book beginning to end—without skipping any scenes or difficult parts—and only then do I go back in to mull and revise and edit and rethink parts that might not be working. I feel like this is what pulls me out of bed to the computer every morning. Forward movement.

The post Catherine Newman: Do Not Discount the Power of Momentum appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(How to Keep Your Story Moving.)

Yet despite—or perhaps because of—their deep or bizarre characteristics, the unhinged and weird women from the contemporary literary fiction scene are mirrors to modern womanhood. They often double as catalysts for surreal plot lines and symbols of the struggles of femininity. Take, for instance, Monika Kim’s serial murderer in The Eyes are the Best Part, who cannibalizes men’s eyeballs in both a gory body horror plot and an indictment on the fetishizing male gaze. Or Ainslie Hogarth’s narrator Abby in Motherthing, whose descent into madness leads to a Shakesperean murder sequence but is also, symbolically, an allegory for the ways in which we relate to motherhood, from fertility struggles to inter-generational trauma.

But in a landscape where the “weird girl” or “unhinged woman” is trendy and proliferating, writers need to differentiate themselves, and their characters, to add something new to the literary niche. Recently, several novelists have used innovative narrative structures to stylistically differentiate their unhinged female characters. These strategies include the use of metafiction, intertextuality, embedded narratives (a story within a story), and shifting points of view, all of which dynamize unhinged women narratives and offer new angles and subtexts through which we understand the trope.

Take, for instance, Alana Saab’s Please Stop Trying to Leave Me, in which the author moves deftly between metafictional short stories, essay-type narrative nonfiction, and fever dream style hallucinations to evoke Norma’s “Oblivion” (her depression and derealization). Saab’s constant shifts in genre, and her frequent shifts in perspective, complicate the very essence of the unhinged woman narrative by asking, perhaps, the most important question: Who is actually the unhinged one here? Is it the struggling fiction writer who produces the short story sections of the book, or is it the version of Norma who suffers through each therapy session? Or, in a metafictional nod, is it “Alana Saab,” the author of a book which is mentioned in one of the stories? By destabilizing genre and perspective, Saab’s “unhinged woman” narrative also becomes a question about who tells which stories, and whose stories we understand as “fictional” or not.

Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing deploys a similar shift in perspective, especially as Abby descends further into madness as she is haunted by her dead mother-in-law, Laura. As Abby’s grip on reality loosens, she begins to refer to herself in the third person, using [brackets and italics] to denote those scenes which she experiences as an omniscient onlooker. To further emphasize this dramatic shift in perspective, Hogarth writes these scenes as one might write a screenplay, with characters denoted clearly (Abby: or Laura:) followed by their line of dialogue. These punctuation choices pronounce the jarring change in perspective; Saab uses a similar detached, screenplay-esque perspective to narrate the therapy scenes in Please Stop Trying to Leave Me. This stylistic detachment represents possible derealization—the fracturing of the “unhinged” woman narrator from herself, as she moves from the first-person perspective to an uncanny omniscient purview.

Such shifts in perspective can add more gravity to certain scenes, as can the use of literary intertextuality, in which the author nods to another piece of literature or art, whether implicitly or explicitly. Meredith Hambrock uses intertextuality throughout her recent novel She’s a Lamb!, a book about ruthless and obsessive ambition in which Jessamyn, a young actress blinded by her desire to play the lead role, begins to conflate reality with a musical theatre performance. Hambrock uses intertextual allusion throughout the novel by writing an unhinged narrator who is herself fixated on another fictional woman: Maria from The Sound of Music. A sense of irony arises when the reader, but not Jessamyn, becomes aware of just how dissonant the narrator is from her image of the ideal female figure in the caretaker Maria. Additional irony emerges throughout She’s a Lamb! through an unstated but evident literary parallel—that of the book’s allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Like Macbeth, Jessamyn’s initial crime leads to a succession of rapid and manic murders which become her own undoing.

Something similar happens in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, in which Macbeth also emerges as a subtext: While June enjoys literary fame after she steals and appropriates Athena’s unfinished manuscript, she sees the ghost of Athena in the audience at a major public book event—just as Macbeth is haunted by the ghost of Banquo at a dinner party. Like Macbeth, June’s unhinged narrative is catalyzed by the appearance of a ghostly figure who returns for vengeance and destabilizes the sanity of the protagonist. Evoking other works of literature or art—as in, for instance, The Sound of Music or Macbeth—can call attention to a body of work which engages with similar themes as the contemporary novel; intertextuality, however, can also differentiate contemporary literary fiction from its predecessors by highlighting how timeless themes emerge in the contemporary world

In my own work, I’m interested in the use of stories-within-stories and how we can use multiple points of view, including omniscient narrators scattered amongst first-person speakers. In my debut novel The Gilded Butterfly Effect, the main character Stella tells a story-within-a-story as a means to describe to her new friend Penny, and the reader, her traumatic experience with a fraternity brother the prior year. Her embedded story therefore becomes omniscient in the midst of her usual first-person narrative, giving readers a broad remit of the scene and its several characters. Her story-within-the-story serves several purposes. First, it gives her the chance to claim the story for herself and tell it however she wishes—rather than as dictated by a third-party or a fraternity brother. It also allows her to omit certain key information from Penny, enabling dramatic irony—the reader now knows more about the true story than Penny does. These point of view shifts create miscommunications and misunderstandings amongst characters, which lead to discordance, and eventually contribute to their undoing.

As writers, I think we tend to restrict ourselves when it comes to points of view—but embedding stories within broader narratives can fracture and complicate the plot in important ways. Such fracturing, whether through an embedded story, a change in perspective, or an intertextual nod, can deepen the work’s overall sense of irony and gravity, and heighten the stakes for characters. These literary techniques in turn complicate the “unhinged woman” trope in several ways. Intertextual allusion can locate contemporary fictional women within a broad literary history, recalling the unhinged demises of similar but different characters. Embedded stories can give characters agency and can heighten the readers’ awareness, whilst ironically confusing the perspectives of other characters. By shifting perspective, a book can ask more than “what” might happen to an unhinged female character—it might interrogate who, exactly, she really is at all. In a crowded literary world, in which fictional women seem to be getting increasingly unhinged, stylistic and structural choices can differentiate characters and plot lines, and can keep an “unhinged woman” from falling into the trappings of an overused trope.

Check out Heather Colley’s The Gilded Butterfly Effect here:

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The post The Fracturing of the Literary “Weird Girl”—How Women Authors Use Innovative Structures to Get Inside Unhinged Characters’ Minds appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this interview, Jaquira discusses writing from a place of communal love with her debut novel, This Is the Only Kingdom, her hopes for readers, and more.

Name: Jaquira Díaz
Literary agent: Michelle Brower at Trellis Literary Management
Book title: This Is the Only Kingdom
Publisher: Algonquin Books / Little, Brown and Company
Release date: October 21, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction / Popular Fiction
Previous titles: Ordinary Girls: A Memoir
Elevator pitch: Set in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, This Is the Only Kingdom is a novel of a family wrestling with the aftermath of a murder, an exploration of generational grief and the legacy of colonialism. A multi-generational novel told from the perspective of shifting protagonists, it confronts systemic poverty, racism, addiction, and LGBTQ coming of age: the story of Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, who must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming; and her mother, Maricarmen, who struggles to make a home for herself and her family, until one fateful day changes everything. 

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What prompted you to write this book?

This Is the Only Kingdom is a project that came out of love—for the community where I learned all about storytelling, for the ways we tell stories, make music, raise families, work, take care of each other, and dream. But also, out of a deep respect for the ways we allow each other (and ourselves) to fail, to fail and fail again, and get back up and keep trying. For the ways we are not always our best selves, the ways we are flawed and complicated, and yet we continue to love each other and the place we call home. 

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

This Is the Only Kingdom took six years to write. It honestly feels like it’s the story I’ve been writing my whole life. I’ve been thinking about Rey (one of the major characters) since I was a child growing up in Puerto Rico, when the story was passed down by my father.

Out of that small part, the novel grew. Over the last six years, the characters evolved, took on lives of their own. I was very interested in characters that were flawed, who were not villains or heroes, who were imperfect in the ways they lived and loved. I wanted to capture something human, something about the ways we are capable of both cruelty and compassion, of loving and hurting each other in ways large and small.  

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

This is my novel debut, but since I had already published a memoir, I was prepared.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Most surprising is how much the story grew out of that one small piece that was passed down. I created a fictional family, and it seemed that the characters were each demanding their own story, a life of their own. But it came to me in bits and pieces, so at times it seemed I was making a kind of collage rather than a chronological, multi-generational story, which is what it turned out to be. When I sent off the first completed draft of the manuscript to Kathy Pories, my editor at Algonquin, it was an unwieldy fractured mess. It was a labor of love, and I’m proud of what it turned out to be.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

This Is the Only Kingdom is a novel about a family during the aftermath of a murder, but it is also about so many other things: about music and labor and community, about how Queer folks make our own families despite how much we are forced to endure, and about the history of my hometown in Puerto Rico. It’s about forgiveness and redemption, about love and family estrangement, and about mothers and daughters.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Remember why you love books, how you became a reader in the first place. Write what you love, not what you think the market is looking for. Remember that you’re making art, not a product. What would you write if there was absolutely no money in it? And finally, read. Read widely and diversely, everything you can get your hands on. Surprise yourself. Challenge yourself. All these things will make you a better writer.

The post Jaquira Díaz: You’re Making Art, Not a Product appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this interview, Sonora discusses writing about love in a time of loneliness with her new novel, Intemperance, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Sonora Jha
Literary agent: Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts
Book title: Intemperance
Publisher: Harper Via
Release date: October 14, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Previous titles: The Laughter, How to Raise a Feminist Son, Foreign
Elevator pitch: A 55-year-old woman decides to hold a swayamvar, a ceremony to make men compete for her affections by performing feats of strength and will. Along the way, she has to reckon with public outrage, with myths and goddesses from her Indian culture showing up to thwart her plans, with a generational curse in her family, and with her own cynicism about love.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I wanted to tell a story about the search for love in a time of increasing loneliness and alienation. I was drawn to the idea of a woman choosing a mate on her own terms in middle age, a woman quite like myself, but wilder and a little unhinged. I wanted to set the story in Seattle but bring in her culture’s ancient traditions, mythology, and family dysfunctions.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It took around two years. My publisher bought the book just two chapters in, and then I spent around a year and a half immersed in the writing. The idea deepened as I wrote, and I developed the story into not just the spectacle of the swayamvar, but about the journey toward it. The woman has to decide what feat she must make the men perform on the day of the swayamvar, and the story is of the people she meets along the way who help her decide. It grew into a story about friendships and community and wild ancestral blessings.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I was anxious about how my editor, Rakesh Satyal at Harper Via, would receive the rest of the novel, having only read the first two chapters. I was pleasantly surprised that he appreciated the twists and turns the story took. He nudged me to keep the cadence and structure taut, for which I am thankful.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Yes. I was surprised when I had the urge to travel to my father’s ancestral village in Bihar, in India. I hadn’t been there since I was two years old. And yet, I felt that there was a story that would take shape there, and I had to follow my instincts. When I was there, with three generations of women in my family around me, a story came to me that involved an inter-caste, queer love between the protagonist’s great uncle and a young man who worked for him in their litchi orchards. This story surprised me and landed beautifully into the novel.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I want readers to be delighted, I want them to surrender to a dream-like state that I wanted to craft in the storytelling, and I want them to have conversations around love, the bliss of female solitude, and the celebration of a fiendishly playful feminism.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Surrender to the surprise in your story.

The post Sonora Jha: Surrender to the Surprise in Your Story appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Writing Humor That Bites.)

I was born in 1978, so TV was my caretaker, my babysitter, my deity, and my best friend. I grew up in that glorious confluence of TV old and TV new, where manic Hanna-Barbera cartoons ran side by side with sitcoms about working class families and black and white shows featuring hilarious women in less hilariously gendered relationships. And I learned everything you need to know about this life through watching television: how to relate to an alien, why the dinosaurs went extinct (seriously), how to talk to the dead movie star haunting your house if you are a teenage boy, and what would happen if you could grant wishes but also had to be sexy and live in a bottle. 

But the most important thing I learned from TV? Never be sad when you can be funny instead—unless you can be funny and sad, which is even better. Slipping on a banana peel? Hilarious. Slipping on a banana peel while already downtrodden? Art.

Back then, I wanted to be an actress, and my role models were easy to find: depressed, snarky Lydia on the Beetlejuice TV show; depressed, snarky Peter Venkman on the Ghostbusters TV show; sardonic Darlene on Roseanne; and of course, selfish, sarcastic, and glamorous Peg Bundy on Married with Children. 

I also watched a lot of silent films with my mom late at night on AMC and studied the sad clowns closely: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton. Later, I’d watch MTV and idolize Daria, the cartoon embodiment of everything I wanted to be for real: witty, depressed, and cool. (It never occurred to me until much, much later that wanting to be depressed meant you probably already were.) These characters were never pitiful, never pitiable; they made unhappiness seem like a natural state, and anything else seemed artificial by comparison. Their outlook was existential, world-weary; nothing was off limits and death was the biggest joke of all. 

When I began writing plays, and later, fiction, I carried that same sensibility into my work. So many of my favorite playwrights, like Christopher Durang and Tony Kushner, dared to write humor around the darkest of subjects. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety while getting my degree in philosophy (lols all around, right?). And so I found the WHY—why I’d always been so drawn to the dark, funny stuff. It made me feel less alone, paradoxically, and made it easier to cope with what essentially felt like a hostile and often meaningless world. Humor was a rational response to the void!

Yet, though I learned about existentialism, I could never lean into it too much; like my humor heroine, Dorothy Parker, I had a deep cynic’s abiding belief in activism and the ability to change the world, even if you couldn’t change yourself. (Which is kind of funny, too.) And like Dorothy, I always felt that “you might as well live”—and do it wittily. There are plenty of places for pure pathos in art (like literally any Russian novel) and I love a good cathartic cry as much as the next reader or viewer. But there’s something incredibly, if paradoxically, comforting about a good joke about The Horrors. (Russian novels are full of those, too.) 

Breton coined the term ‘black humor’ as he was attempting to classify a type of writing where the humor comes from cynicism, often on bleak topics like death. He came up with the term in 1935, when this type of writing was nearly the exclusive province of men—or at least was believed so. And yet I would have been shocked to learn that as a cynical teenager in the 1990s, when so many of my role models were funny, sad women.

If I’d thought about it too long, I probably would have guessed that women were just born that way; our lot in life predisposed us to a kind of hopeless hilariousness. And so many of the writers I adore now for their sharp, sad, funny humor are women: Muriel Spark, Jenny Lawson, Stella Gibbons, Erin Somers, Lindsey Hunter, Barbara Comyns, Miranda July, Kristin Arnett, Sam Irby, Alyssa Nutting, Marie-Helene Bertino, Melissa Broder, Ottessa Moshfegh. So many sad and funny women, railing or not railing at the world from the proximity of the gallows. 

Now, I’m just glad no one told me that women weren’t supposed to be funny like that; I never learned any better. And just to prove it, I’ll tell you a joke I like: 

Woman says to her friend: My grief counselor died last week. 
Her friend says: Oh my god, I’m so sorry! 
Woman says: That’s okay. She was so good at her job that I’m already over it. 

Ba dum ching. 

We “give birth astride a grave,” says Pozzo in the play Waiting for Godot. And that’s sad. But in that same play, Estragon says, when asked how his carrot tastes, “It’s a carrot.” And that’s sad and funny: sublime. 

Check out Amber Sparks’ Happy People Don’t Live Here here:

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Raised in rural Louisiana, Laura now lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her first novel. Follow on Facebook and Instagram.

In this interview, Laura discusses the difference in writing vs promoting a book, pulling unrelated stories together into a coherent novel, and more.

Name: Laura Venita Green
Literary agent: Chad Luibl, Janklow & Nesbit
Book title: Sister Creatures
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Release date: October 7, 2025
Genre/category: Southern Gothic
Elevator pitch for the book: Sister Creatures follows four women from the same small town in Louisiana, and a supernatural entity that looms over their lives.

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What prompted you to write this book?

Though I’ve lived in New York City for six years and Austin, TX, for 18 years before that, when I sit down to write, my imagination always takes me back to rural Louisiana, where I grew up. I wanted to write a book that captures the place, the people, the culture, and the attitudes. I wanted to write a book that feels true even as it utilizes fantastical elements. I wanted to write something that I could feel proud of and that made me excited to return to my desk day after day.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Six years. It took about four years to write the book, and another two years to learn how to query, find an agent, get a book deal, go through rounds of edits, and finally get it out into the world. I’m not a writer who sets off with a plan, so everything—the idea, the story progression, the themes—came together over time in the process of drafting and revising.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The biggest surprise for me is the difference between being a “writer” and being an “author.” A writer sits alone for years, engaging in a regular, largely solitary practice of shaping words into something good and hopefully even breathtaking. But then, once you have a book deal and turn into an author, you need to switch gears and put yourself out there to advocate for your book. For me this includes posting on social media, writing companion essays, listicles, pursuing media training so that I can talk engagingly during podcasts and other interviews, event planning, pitching my book to reading series, bookstores, libraries, reaching out to everyone in my contacts list to gin up support in advance of publication date, and attending as many author events as possible to expand my community. I’ve really enjoyed it all—I love learning new things and getting outside my comfort zone—but promoting a book is so very different from writing one.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The book started out as a handful of unrelated stories—a high schooler crushing on her older co-worker, a woman confronting her doppelgänger, two sisters with diverging lives, a shapeshifter in the woods, a mother whose daughter is obsessed with a creepy 19th century children’s book. I had no idea how to complete a book-length project, so I took what I already had and treated them like puzzle pieces. I worked out how these stories were related and how the characters were connected, shifting things around, expanding, and filling in the blanks from there. It felt almost like working out a math problem (something my brain very much enjoys), and over a lot of time and drafts it all came together like magic.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book? 

I hope readers bring their unique experience and interpretations to this book and make it their own while also feeling surprised (and maybe even gleeful!) at certain connections and events. What I take from Sister Creatures is that every single person contains entire worlds, worlds that can be partly unveiled through a creative practice. Also, we all contain a sort of wilderness in our souls, and we each need to find our unique way of coping so that we can stay connected to the ones we love.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Don’t think about your mother when you’re drafting your book! In other words, don’t censor yourself. We want readers eventually, but if we write worried about how some real or imagined person might eventually react, we’re in danger of writing something less—less weird, less racy, less ambiguous, less impolite. Less interesting. I don’t think our goal in creating art is making something that no one can complain about. (By the way, my mother is one of my primary readers, but I do need to get a draft down with her out of mind before I send something her way.)

The post Laura Venita Green: Promoting a Book Is Different From Writing One appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(See the winning entry list here.)

The Memory Eater

by Eric Reitan

Malachi, who delivered mail for forty-seven years, stands at the screen door clutching a letter. He pictures the route he’ll have to take: north, west, and north again, stair-stepping through Tulsa’s tangled highways.

The branches of the old oak are their own kind of tangle, ice-coated, gleaming like quicksilver in the streetlamp’s glow. Behind the tree moves something large, dark, and shaped all wrong.

“Dad?”

The voice startles him. He shakes his head, looks at his fist. There’s an envelope in his grip with an address in blue ink, Claire’s precise handwriting. No stamp. And words scrawled in his own hand: Important. Remember.

Remember. He blinks and shakes his head again.

“Dad? Close the door. It’s cold out there.”

As if on cue, wind rattles the door. Ice-coated branches crackle and chime. A black shape behind the oak shifts into view.

“Dad!”

Why is he standing at the door? He looks at his hand. A letter. Important. Remember. The ink of those two words looks fresh. Not like the address. He can almost remember writing them.

He needs to ask Claire. She’d know. “Take me home.”

“This is home now, Dad. You live with us now.”

“How can I live with you? There’s no room.” Claire can’t handle more than a few hours with Dan’s wife. What’s her name? Something with an H.

He likes how the ice coats each blade of grass and shines on the wooden stairs. Not on the street, though. Too much heat from the day. He lifts the envelope.

Important. Remember.

“Oh God.” It’s almost too late. His heart thuds. He grabs the doorframe. Outside, multi-jointed black limbs settle like tapping fingers on the oak’s trunk. “I have to go! I need to ask Claire.” He shakes the envelope at Dan. The contents stir: the slip-slide of a necklace chain. He pictures a garnet pendant resting below Claire’s collarbone.

“We can’t go anywhere, Dad. Roads are slick as snot.”

“The roads hold the heat. They’re only wet.”

“Except where they’re not!” Dan sighs. “What you got there, anyway?”

“Claire told me…” He shakes the envelope at Dan again. He pictures his route: through downtown, past the Greenwood District. Up to a stranger’s door.

Dan squints. “Is that something from before Mom—” Dan closes the distance and tries to take the letter, but Malachi jerks it back, pressing it to his chest.

Dan sighs again. “It’s got an address on it. We’ll put it in the mail when the weather clears.”

“It’ll be too late. Little Danny will be cursed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know!” Tears form in his eyes and he blinks them back, swallows them back, refuses to cry in front of his son. “Claire knows.”

“I’m sure she did.”

There’s a pressure in Malachi’s chest, a pressure he can’t allow. He swivels back to the ice-glazed night. Something large and black moves through the freezing rain: a dozen insectile limbs with too many joints; a massive, sagging body the color of tar or black oil; a mouth that…a mouth that…

It opens wide. He sees. He screams.

*

The living room furniture doesn’t suit the house. He knows these beautiful old two-story homes, built in the 1920s with their creaky floors and built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace.

He’s holding a mug, but what’s in it isn’t coffee. It smells like coffee but it’s darker, oilier, moving in a way coffee shouldn’t move.

“You feeling better?”

Malachi looks at Dan. His boy. When did his boy grow a beard? It looks silly on him. “I need to go home.”

“Dad—”

“It’s close. You should let Danny walk by himself next time. You’re overprotective.” He tries to picture his grandson Danny, but all he can see is Dan, his little boy Dan who’s got a beard now and is staring at him with sad, angry eyes. How can eyes be sad and angry at the same time?

“Danny started walking to your place when he was eight, Dad. Walked there almost every day before—” Dan shakes his head. “What’s the point?”

Malachi tries to picture little Danny walking by himself. “How old is he now?”

“Fifteen tomorrow. We’ll have a party if the ice melts.”

Malachi lurches to his feet. “Fifteen.” He looks around. “Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“The envelope! I—”

The black thing oozes from the mug until a spidery limb breaks free.

*

Malachi wakes in the night and reaches for Claire. His hand closes on emptiness. He sits up, back protesting. Enough light seeps through the curtains to show this isn’t his bedroom. But one of Claire’s paintings is on the wall: a boy squatting by Swan Lake.

“That’s what our boy will look like, don’t you think?” Claire says. She’s toying with her garnet pendant, the one he gave her, the one she never takes off except to shower.

“Not right away.”

“Of course not, silly.”

“He’s got a beard now. Why does he have a beard?”

Claire doesn’t answer. He looks for her but she’s gone.

He gropes for the bedside lamp, struggles to find the switch. Finally light spills over the rocker, the one they could never part with despite the missing spoke. Why is it here? The world’s all wrong, all sideways. Malachi lurches up and looks for something to wear. The clothes in the closet hang neatly alongside a creature made of oil, with limbs like multi-hinged sticks and a sack-like body with a mobile mouth.

He doesn’t scream because then Dan will come and stop him, and Danny will turn fifteen and the curse will consume him. He grabs clothes and throws them on over his night shirt, slides into the loafers by the rocker, turns his back on a dozen black legs reaching through a gap in the rocker’s spokes, and staggers into the living room.

What’s he looking for? His eyes scan the hutch, stop on the envelope. He snatches it and studies the address. For forty-seven years he delivered mail. He knows where this is.

Outside, everything is crystalline. Tree branches creak under the weight of ice. The landing and steps shine with slickness, but if he can reach the grass he’ll be fine. He grips the black iron railing. He’s stiff but strong. Walked miles every day of his life.

He can do this. Across Utica, through Swan Lake Park, north on St. Louis.

He shoves the envelope into the inside pocket of his tweed coat and starts down the steps. The railing moves beneath his fingers: flexing, unfolding. He flings himself forward. The lawn crunches under him, a hundred blades of grass turned to tender icicles.

*

A bronze sculpture of a trumpeter swan spreads its wings, preparing to take flight.

The Trumpet of the Swan. One of his favorite books. He read it to Dan and then Danny. Have they finished reading it yet? Danny will want to know how it ends.

A crack like a gunshot. A crash. A car horn starts to bleat.

He looks towards the aftermath: across the street, by a house built with oil money, a house with columns and pretensions and too many rooms. A tree limb has surrendered to the weight of ice, branches splayed over an SUV’s roof, one limb pushing through the glass.

He has to get home. Dan is waiting for him to finish The Trumpet of the Swan. But Swan Lake Park has become a wonderland of glittering slickness. And the tree limb across the street, tired of tapping the horn, rears up, its body a flaccid sack of tar-coated fat, its limbs crackling like the ice as it straightens dozens of knobby joints.

The body heaves and twists to expose a gaping mouth, a mouth full of fire and gunshots, rage and terror, the blackened skeletons of houses, and blond-haired women darting from the ruins, golden prizes in their fists.

Malachi flees, falling by the statue of a mostly-naked youth scolding a swan.

“I need to get home,” Malachi says. “Claire will know.”

“Home is gone. Claire is gone.” He doesn’t know who says it, but it sounds like Dan’s voice when he’s cranky and condescending.

“My house is just half a mile that way!” He flings his arm toward the path he knows, a path written in his bones.

“Where did you kiss her first, Malachi?”

This sounds nothing like Dan.

Malachi rises, turns in a circle, trying to remember the last time he kissed her. Was it here? Claire loved Swan Lake.

“The first kiss,” Claire says. “Not the last.”

He looks for her, but his eyes land on a massive bulk heaving incrementally across the street, piston legs hauling and straining, maw swiveling towards him, releasing the sound of bombs and bullets and the last cries of the dying.

*

They always go through the kitchen door, the family door. The front door is for strangers and guests, for dinner parties that stretch into the night with candles and Claire’s bright laugh.

The door is locked. He pats his pockets for the key, then looks for the rock under the holly hedge where they hide the spare. There’s no rock, no hedge. Everything is wrong and the black thing is moving in from the side, limbs skittering, bulk-sack body swinging so its mouth flops towards him.

He pounds on the door. “Claire!” He keeps pounding until lights turn on inside, and then the light over the door. A man yanks it open. “What the fuck!” He’s huge and black-bearded.

Malachi flees, skids on a slick patch but somehow keeps his feet. He was always good at that, keeping his feet, but it’s harder now and a monster is chasing him and a strange man shouts after him to wait, come back, come inside.

“Where did you kiss her for the first time?”

*

They were seventeen when it happened, but they’d always known each other. Malachi never had a sibling. What he had was the girl next door. While war tore the world apart, they played in Woodward Park. When Claire’s brother came home without a leg and everyone called him a hero, Malachi and Claire used their allowances to buy candy cigarettes at Sipes. When the river flooded Riverside Drive, they rode their bikes there to see the spectacle.

But the first kiss happened on a hot summer night outside the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, two weeks before their senior year. They’d been to a choir concert and were waiting at the base of the broad church stairs for Claire’s father to pick them up.

That was when Malachi gave her the garnet pendant. Of course he fumbled with the clasp, and of course she giggled at his clumsiness. She asked him how it looked and he said beautiful.

*

He clutches the black rail that bisects the concrete stairs, his neck aching as he looks up at the church’s art deco spire: sweeping lines of limestone and terra cotta sculptures that resemble Incan gold. His body shivers. His hip aches and his chest lances with pain. He wonders if he’s broken a rib.

“Claire? Why are—”

“Where’d you get it?” she asks, lifting it from its resting place on her collarbone. The garnet’s facets catch the moonlight.

“Mom,” he answers. “She gave it to me on my fifteenth birthday. Said to give it to the right girl when I found her. ‘I don’t have a daughter, and I don’t want it anymore.’ That’s what she said.”

He never asked why she didn’t want it. His thoughts were anchored to the first part: When you find the right girl. He knew it would be Claire, even though it took two years to build up the courage to give it to her.

“Why are you giving me a family heirloom?” Claire asks.

“Because you’re the right girl. You’ll always be my family.”

Tears fill her eyes. She rises to her tiptoes to kiss him, and his feet slip out from under him, and he falls onto icy concrete. Pain shoots up his tailbone.

“Claire?”

She was here, and it was a summer night, and the stored heat from the day still poured from the church’s limestone walls. His eyes rove up along the spire. The thing perched on top looks like it’s impaled, but then the legs begin to move, and the body slips like liquid through the spire’s blades.

It scuttles downward with a clacking like a hundred metal legs, or a thousand, or the sound of icy tree limbs snapping and crashing all around.

*

An old man huddles over a trash can lid where paper cups, catalogues, and plywood bits are starting to catch fire. The man’s grizzled face breaks into a smile. He shakes the lighter at Malachi in triumph before settling back to stare into the flames.

Malachi smells garbage, urine, and something sweet, like apple pie. He eases closer to the fire. A glance around shows him he’s in an alley. The black thing is framed by the buildings at one end, but it stays just beyond.

The old man nods to himself before looking back at Malachi. “New here,” he says. “Bad night.”

“Cold,” Malachi answers.

The old man nods.

“I can’t do it myself, Malachi. I wish I could, but I can’t anymore. Just…please, it isn’t ours. It never was.”

He blinks at Claire, flat on her back in the bed. Claire always slept on her side, her knees pulled up.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying it’s stolen!”

Malachi shakes his head. Anger rises in his throat. Why would she say such lies? “My own mother put it in my hand.” He shouldn’t snarl at her, not when she’s sick, but how can she speak such lies?

He turns away, his body trembling. He slips, grabbing the dumpster’s edge to slow his fall. Still, he lands with a crack on the cold concrete. The pain surges up his spine.

“I saw it in a picture,” she says from the bed. Malachi blinks back tears, because she’s dead and he’s so angry with her, and her voice is so weak and the pain is shooting up his back and the old man’s face is hovering close.

“I know, I know,” says the old man. “Slick as snot.” His words cover up Claire’s voice, but her words remain, words about the picture in the library display and the throat of a beautiful woman. “Like a Black Mona Lisa,” Claire whispers. “The same smile.”

The old man helps him back to the fire.

“That’s not proof of anything!” he declares. “There could be more than one like it, right?”

“Of course,” says the old man.

“My family. We were never racists.”

“If you say so.”

But Claire isn’t done. Her voice comes from all around now, echoing in the bricks, gliding across the ice and up his spine: “Looters.” Malachi’s eyes rake towards the end of the alley. He sees them, the looters, running in and out of ruined homes—and the tarry black thing there with them, its maw open and its spider-legs clicking against the alley’s walls.

Malachi weeps.

“How long has she been dead?” the old man asks.

“I don’t know! How can I not know?” He slams his fists into his legs. And then, because the pain feels good, he does it again.

“If you can’t remember, sing. A song she liked.”

“Blue Moon.” Malachi rocks back and forth. The tune slips through his head, swirls out from the little fire in the alley, over the gleaming ice until it touches a single, multi-jointed leg.

“Please, Malachi. I’m too tired to fight. Just…please.” The monster heaves itself up, pushing its bulk between the buildings. Malachi knows what it is. He knows.

“I have to go,” he says.

*

He kneels in a ring of ice-filmed bricks. “Where am I?” His voice becomes a chorus, flung back to him from every direction.

“Of course there could be more than one,” Claire says. “But there’s a name. Inscribed on the back. I always thought it must be some relative of yours I didn’t know.”

“It’s yours, Claire!” His voice returns to him like the voices of a dozen men, a hundred, a multitude gathered round to stone him for his sins. “I gave it to you.”

“I know, Malachi.”

“Because I love you!” He staggers to his feet despite the ice, defying the accusers striking him with his own voice. “It’s always been you, Claire, and now you’re going to die and you want me to…to….” He stops because he can’t make his voice work, because the sobbing is too deep in his throat.

All her life she wore it. Always that gift from when they were kids in love, kids who never stopped being in love. How rare is that? How rare and perfect and caught up in the shine of a garnet pendant. And now she’s dying, and he knows what he has to do: hold onto it until Danny turns fifteen. Give it to him then. Give it to him and tell him how his mother gave it to him on his fifteenth birthday, an heirloom to give to the woman he’d marry. Tell him how Claire wore it every day, all her life, more precious than a wedding ring, and now it goes to him, to beautiful Danny whose head is just as full of dreams and yearning as Malachi’s own, a boy more like Malachi than Dan would ever be, who’d choose his own Claire, his own beautiful bride, the pendant weaving through the generations like a thread, tying them to one another so tightly Claire couldn’t die, she’d live on every time Danny saw the pendant at his lover’s throat.

“I can’t do it.” The words return to him like a blow. He’s afraid his ears will bleed. He covers them before he cries again, “I can’t!”

The spider legs reach over the wall’s lip. The body heaves up and over, slapping onto the footbridge. The mouth opens. Screams pour out, and the looters laugh. He sobs.

When Claire hands him the envelope, he shakes his head but takes it anyway. And then he leaves her there, leaves her with that uncertain look on her face, uncertain because she doesn’t know what he’ll do, because he doesn’t know, because he can’t lose her, because everything is dark and he can smell the smoke of countless bonfires pouring from the monster’s maw.

*

He stands on a street corner. A highway to his left is empty of traffic. Of course. The bridges and overpasses will be slick, slick as black oil, and maybe the monster isn’t coated in oil at all, maybe it’s black ice, invisible in the dark, and it’s a wonder he’s standing, held up only by his hand on a street sign’s pole.

He knows where he is. A mail carrier knows his city.

Did someone drive him here? Is he supposed to wait for someone to pick him up? Maybe Dan is on his way. Or Claire. It’s strange that he’s out on a night like this, the ice making the branches hang heavy and the power lines sag. It must be something important.

Important. Remember.

Fifteen.

“What are you doing?” he asks Claire.

She’s pale and thin, and her eyes are red. She sits at the computer, typing, leaning in, moving her mouth as she reads. Finally she looks at him. “I’ve known for a year, Malachi, and I did nothing. I always thought there’d be time. But there isn’t any more time.”

He turns fifteen today. “Don’t say that.”

“But it’s true. I’m dying and…and I’ve got to do this.”

Fifteen? That can’t be right. Danny’s little. He was only nine when Claire died.

The cold aches in the hollow spaces of his head. It intensifies and he tips back his neck, his eyes taking in the night sky. The darkness has shape. It slides free of the gaps between the stars. He tries to run but falls on his knees at the edge of the street.

He has no way of knowing how close it is. The thing’s size could mean it’s a monster to fill the heavens or that it’s close, that its maw is about to splash hot breath down his neck.

He scrambles on all fours, heart thumping, hands scrambling for purchase, and the darkness has a voice, and the voice is bullets and fire, and the voice is Claire ripping all his fantasies apart, asking him to give it up, to give her up, to forget about nostalgic threads and knots and Danny’s fifteenth birthday because it’s not an heirloom, it never was an heirloom, it’s always been a curse, and there are still things we can fix, even if it’s only garnets and a bit of gold.

*

He’s sprawled in the street. White light shines through his closed lids. He blinks and lifts his head. Flashing red and blue behind the white, and a shape, a man in a uniform like the one he used to wear.

But no. This is no postman.

The officer squats next to him. “Are you hurt? An ambulance—”

Malachi shakes his head. He reaches into his tweed jacket and pulls it out. “Here.” He beats at the address with his fingertip.

The officer squints at the lettering, at Claire’s precise hand. “That’s right around the corner. Is that where you live?”

Malachi pushes himself to his knees. No ambulance. They can’t take him away in an ambulance when he’s so close. His whole body aches. He imagines broken ribs, a fractured hip. The pain is everywhere but still he rises without wincing, rises to his full height. “I’m fine,” he says.

He put it in a drawer. All it would’ve taken was a stamp, and instead he put it in a drawer. His will over hers. His dreams over her sense of justice. Stowed in a drawer for Danny’s fifteenth birthday.

“Oh, Malachi.” Her voice is kind, too kind for a man like him. “You know that isn’t true. You never took it out of the envelope.”

He blinks as he turns to the officer. The sky is paling. Almost dawn. “I found it two weeks ago,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“If you could just…” He gestures at the address.

The officer helps him to the cruiser. He sinks into a seat. As the car lurches forward he turns and sees his oily black monster scampering alongside, its gut heavy with stolen memories.

But then it stops. Malachi cranes his neck, watching it recede into the glittery dawn.

As the police car pulls into the drive of the small green house, Malachi takes in the gray shingles and overgrown junipers. Dawn light splashes the white garage door.

“I know this place.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s light,” Malachi answers, pointing to the dawn.

*

Dear Baker Family,

I’ve worn this pendant most of my life. I thought it was an heirloom of my husband’s family. In a way it is, but a cursed one, heavy with crimes.

The inscription on the back—R.A. Brown—matches the name of one of your ancestors killed in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Ruth Ann Brown. Last year I saw her picture at an exhibition about the massacre. She was wearing this pendant. Maybe one of my husband’s relatives stole it in the looting.

Its return can’t undo history, but maybe it can do something. I don’t know. But in your hands it becomes what I always wrongly took it to be: a family heirloom.

I hope it brings some measure of joy to you and yours to have something that was taken, restored.

Sincerely,

Claire Jacobs

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In this interview, Tamar discusses how fulfilling one life dream helped lead her to another—writing her debut novel, Restitution—her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Tamar Shapiro
Literary agent: Dani Segelbaum, Arc Literary
Book title: Restitution
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Release date: September 30, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction; historical fiction
Elevator pitch: After the Berlin Wall falls, German American siblings, Kate and Martin, are faced with a difficult decision: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled in the 1950s? But a house is never just a house, and the family secrets they discover drive Kate and Martin apart just as divided Germany is coming together. 

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What prompted you to write this book?

Like my narrator Kate, I grew up in the U.S. with a German mother. Also like her, I have spent my life moving back and forth between both countries. Restitution is not autobiographical, and yet the story very much grew out of my experience of always feeling a little torn between these two homes, of always wanting to belong in both.

My mother came from West Germany, and I had no connection to the East until the early 1990s, when my parents moved to Leipzig. I absolutely fell in love with the city over decades of visiting them, so much so that at the end of each trip I loudly bemoaned that I might never live there myself. Then, in 2017, my husband, kids, and I finally made it happen. We moved to Leipzig too, albeit only for a few years. Having achieved one dream, I decided I would grab the chance to fulfill another: I would use the time in Leipzig to write a novel.

I already knew what I wanted to write about. During the decades I spent visiting Leipzig, as well as a stint living in Berlin, I had witnessed first-hand the way the scars of Germany’s division into East and West, as well as its flawed reunification, persisted to this day. I wanted Restitution to tell the story of one ordinary family shaped by these losses, disruptions and hopes across generations and continents. I believe the questions Restitution asks are as urgent today as ever: What remains when people leave entire lives behind? What happens when personal histories are erased? And what—if anything—can heal these wounds?

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I remember the exact moment I decided I would write a novel about these themes. I was in Iowa City for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Program, sitting at a picnic table in North Market Square Park, shortly before our move to Leipzig, when the idea first hit me. I began writing right there at that bench, and despite years of revision, some of those early Iowa seeds are still recognizable in the book. I signed my contract for publication six and a half years later in December 2023.

I knew early on how I wanted the book to begin and end, but the details in between changed countless times. I completed the first draft while living in Leipzig, so I had the opportunity to do first-hand research, including many conversations with friends who had grown up in the East, as well as with their parents and neighbors. I also read as much as I could—novels, histories, legal treatises. Everything I learned informed what I wrote, so I was always updating and refining. But the core of the story—the relationship between Kate and her brother Martin—remained constant throughout.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Absolutely everything about the publishing process has been a learning moment. I came to writing later in life after a long nonprofit career. I’d finally gotten to the point where I felt completely comfortable with who I was professionally, and then I was crazy enough to jump into this new world I knew nothing about. I’ve loved every moment, but it has definitely been an adjustment. The hardest thing to learn was how to let go. I could have kept working on this book forever, and I am very grateful to my publisher for prying it out of my hands. The best surprise along the way was discovering how warm and supportive the writing community is. Sharing writing with others is such an intimate and vulnerable act, and I am grateful for the new friends I’ve made who are not only willing to treat my writing with care and love, but also to share their writing with me.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I’d often heard writers say that they wrote because they couldn’t not write. Before I began working on my novel, this never made much sense to me. There were so many alternatives to writing. After all, I’d loved my nonprofit work on housing and community development. If the novel didn’t work out, I thought, then I’d just stop writing. So, I was very surprised to discover, halfway into my book, that I, too, could no longer imagine not writing. I’m now well into a draft of my second novel, and writing has become my daily joy. I love the challenge of crafting sentences such that every word feels just right. I have fun puzzling my way through roadblocks and figuring out how to get unstuck. And I learned that I particularly love revision, because it’s through the process of rewriting again and again that I finally discover exactly who my characters are and what it is I want to say.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Restitution is a family story, and I hope that readers will be drawn in by the family dynamics, especially the complicated sibling relationship that is at the heart of the book. It is also a novel about belonging, about the desire we all have to feel at home in a place and about the many ways this can go wrong. Of course, Restitution is specifically focused on the lingering impacts of Germany’s East-West division and its subsequent reunification. When I look around at what’s going on in our world today, I am convinced there’s still so much to learn from this period in history, especially the way political decisions can breed personal resentment and create societal divisions that are extremely difficult to repair. But Restitution ends on a hopeful note, mirroring my hope that our broken world will see better days.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Don’t give up! There is so much rejection in the writing world, and I know how awful it can feel to be sending queries into a black hole. One way I dealt with this rejection was by setting little goals for myself. For example, every time I received a rejection, I immediately sent out another query or submission on the very same day. That way, I could go to sleep focused not on the rejection but on the fact that I was moving forward. The good news is that there is very likely someone out there who is interested in your story. You just need to keep trying to find the right person while at the same time continuing to find joy in the writing itself.

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In this interview, Lauren discusses what inspired her debut novel, the copyediting process after it was accepted for publication, and more.

Name: Lauren Morrow
Literary agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler           
Book title: Little Movements
Publisher: Random House
Release date: September 9, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Elevator pitch for the book: A page-turning, tenderhearted debut about a Black woman who is finally given a chance to pursue her dream of becoming a renowned choreographer, only to find that it comes at a tremendous personal cost.

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What prompted you to write this book?

In the summer of 2020, I was dealing with a whole-life upheaval. I’d left a great full-time job at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York to get my MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program the prior fall. My then husband and I were doing long distance, and I was overwhelmed with being alone in a new place, examining new ideas, inspirations, and theories.

Notably, one of the first courses I took was an examination of African American literature and what makes something so—does it need to tackle “African American” themes or does a book fall into that category by virtue of the author’s identity? We also discussed how and why certain books succeed, and the issue of slavery came up—up to that point, nearly every book by a Black author that had won a National Book Award centered on slavery. Bleak!

These ideas were still floating around my mind in 2020, when my world turned upside down—everything had been canceled, the next school year was in flux, and oh, my marriage had imploded weeks before the pandemic hit. So, I had some time on my hands. While things were going pretty awfully in my life, bigger things were happening in the world, so I also felt like I couldn’t complain. Instead, I wrote.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The process was about five years in total.

Draft one was a glorified journal about a woman in an MFA program in Illinois—I thought that would throw them off. It was bad. I wrote it in a frenzy that summer, then returned to it in the fall, when I thought I might shift my plan and submit a novel for thesis workshop in my final semester, rather than a short story collection as I’d planned. I’m so glad I never showed that version to anyone—it wasn’t even interesting. But I needed to get it out, and it gave me the groundwork for Little Movements.

So much of those early feelings remained. But I wanted to move the narrative away from the writing world, and I’d always wished for more fiction about the modern dance world. When I left Ailey, my dear colleagues gifted me with a framed Toni Morrison quote: “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” I looked at it one day and thought, Damn. Here we go.

There have been at least six different drafts of this novel, not including the rough draft journal version. Each round of revision has reshaped and tightened the novel. I’m so grateful for every single person who’s laid eyes on this book to help bring it to life.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I work in the publishing industry, as a publicist, so I was relatively prepared for what the process would involve. Still, I think there were two things that aren’t typically a part of my professional work that surprised me as a first-time author.

The first was landing on the cover. Some people have a clear vision of what they want for their book cover, but I didn’t. The one thing I felt quite certain about was that I wanted some sort of figure on the cover, given that it’s a book about dance. But when I started getting designs, none of them felt quite right. I didn’t want to telegraph what the protagonist looked like, but it was difficult not to do that with a body on the cover, even without a face. But in the last batch, after encouraging them to ignore what I’d said and just go for it, the cover that ended up being the final was sent. There’s no figure, but there’s beautiful movement, and I think it’s perfect.

I was also struck by the copyediting process. I thought it was going to be all typos and grammar fixes, but there were some pretty big timeline issues that came up and sort of knocked me off my center. I spent a lot of time over the weeks of that process remapping things, researching cultural references (because some of the ones I’d included didn’t line up in terms of age, time, etc.), and hoping I could pull this off. These edits required something different of me than the plot/character/setting notes I was used to. It was a somewhat mathematical process.

My copyeditor and designer saw so much in the book that I didn’t, and I’m so incredibly grateful to both!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I think I was surprised that I was able to do it!

For so long, I’d written introspective 20-page short stories. Crafting an entire novel felt daunting, and a lot of the early feedback I got from queries was that the book was a little “quiet.” This is the same word that was used to describe me for much of my life. But when I found myself at the center of a rather dramatic event in 2020, my creative voice opened up.

Much of the work I did with my agent involved adding additional layers of conflict and tension. So many things have to happen in a novel. The early drafts were so much feeling (along with a comical number of scenes of the character eating various cheeses), but I was surprised at how, with a little prompting, I was able to activate the characters and the world.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

This is, in many ways, a book about starting over. It can feel like a risk to make a big change when you’ve settled into your life—whether that means moving to a new place, leaving a relationship, making a major career shift, or something else. But on those rare occasions when you feel something in your bones, you can’t ignore it.

Also, I hope this book inspires people to move! Take a dance class, hit the dance floor at a wedding, or just shake it in your living room. Whatever feels good.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Create a writing schedule for yourself and stick to it. I write first thing in the mornings, before I even have a chance to reconsider, and before anyone could possibly need anything from me. Building that time into my routine has been a game changer, as has giving myself a word count minimum while drafting. This pushes me to get to the end of a project rather than dwelling too much on details early on that may end up getting chopped anyway.

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