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.

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(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, Jessica discusses how her decades-long admiration for one author’s work led her to write her new literary novel, Fonseca, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Jessica Francis Kane
Literary agent: PJ Mark
Book title: Fonseca
Publisher: Penguin Press
Release date: August 12, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction; historical fiction
Previous titles: Rules for Visiting; This Close: Stories; The Report; Bending Heaven
Elevator pitch: A British novelist makes a difficult trip to Mexico with her young son, seeking money and inspiration, but nothing goes to plan. Based on the mystery surrounding Penelope Fitzgerald’s real journey in 1952.

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What prompted you to write this book?

A combination of my abiding love for Fitzgerald’s nine perfect novels, which I’ve been reading and rereading for two decades, and my curiosity about her trip to Mexico. It was such a desperate journey! She was 36, pregnant, and on the brink of bankruptcy. She had not yet published a book but wanted to. She traveled with her young son and stayed three months. What was she doing there, and what might have happened that informed her later work? These were the questions I wanted to try and answer.

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

I started work in 2017 and the book is coming out this year. So, very specifically, eight years. But you could also say 26, counting from when I was living in London in 1999 and read Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore. My obsession dates to that time. The idea for Fonseca—what if I write the Mexico novel Fitzgerald didn’t—remained remarkably close to the original pitch.

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

This is the first book I’ve written that uses Spanish, a language I do not speak. I loved having the manuscript read and vetted by Spanish speakers, two of them. What I learned from them changed a few scenes in lovely ways.

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

Yes. A huge one. A few months into writing, I got a letter from Penelope Fitzgerald’s literary executor, her son-in-law Terence Dooley. He said the family was aware of the novel and wanted to be in touch. I immediately stopped writing. I emailed the family; in fact, I began emailing fairly regularly with Fitzgerald’s son, Valpy, and elder daughter, Tina, which was a delight, but work on my novel had ceased. I was terrified. For six months I worried that I would not be able to write the novel, and then one day I asked myself what kind of novel about Fitzgerald I would want to read. The answer was: I would want to see some of this amazing correspondence with her grown children. So, what had almost derailed the project ended up becoming part of it.

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

If they have not read Fitzgerald, I hope they will immediately want to read all her novels. If they are already Fitzgerald fans, I hope they will appreciate the portrait I’ve made of her. And Fitzgerald aside, Fonseca is a story about how far someone is willing to go to secure a dream. I think we all have such a place.

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

Follow your obsessions. It feels lonely and crazy sometimes, but if you believe in them other people will too, and you will create something enduring.

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Yet when I bring up the horror elements in these stories, my students rarely bite. To them, “horror,” at least in fiction rather than film, is something else. In the movies, it’s splatter or doomsday, psychological or supernatural. In print, it’s the fear of being unseen, misunderstood, or fundamentally othered in a world of conformity. For many of my English majors, literary horror speaks to intergenerational trauma, cultural dislocation, and existential unease. Especially couched in frightening stories, these elements fascinate my students. 

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And if you’ve browsed a bookstore lately, you’ve seen it. Horror is back. Blood is everywhere, but this time the authors are wearing new masks. Writers like Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians) and Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Silver Nitrate) are redefining the genre. Their work isn’t driven solely by gore or shock, the way post-Vietnam horror often was—with Stephen King’s Carrie setting the tone for decades. Instead, today’s leading horror voices combine cultural insight with literary experimentation, using fear as a lens through which to explore identity. And I mean fear in all its psychologically agonizing forms, the kind of horror that Edgar Allan Poe was an early master of. 

Take Jones’s use of indigenous sweat lodges and spiritual reckonings or Moreno-Garcia’s blending of occult horror and fascist history via cursed reels of Nazi-era film. These aren’t just eerie premises; they’re cultural commentaries. They stand apart from horror fiction of the 1980s and ’90s, where the thrills were visceral and the body count was the point. There’s still a place for that kind of fiction, but my students crave horror that innovates, stories that twist form, shift point of view, and give voice to perspectives long overlooked. They want horror that experiments with narrative structure, that blurs boundaries between genres, that confronts real-world fears with poetic grace. I know this from the books they bring to class, the themes of the papers they turn in, and what they discuss with classmates and me. 

For them, identity isn’t an add-on. It’s central. Literary horror, to feel urgent and alive, must reflect the complexities of gender, culture, and memory. And the authors my students admire understand this. One student, an aspiring writer, updates me on his ongoing correspondence with Jones, who is, like me, an English professor. 

Jones has said he writes horror “to figure things out,” with scaring readers as a bonus. He respects his influences—Stephen King, Wes Craven—but he’s not afraid to subvert them. In The Only Good Indians, Jones switches abruptly to second-person narration (“you”) during a chapter narrated by a character who’s dead. The effect is eerie and intimate, drawing readers into the consciousness of a vengeful entity. This is horror not just as entertainment, but as literary experiment. 

My students notice these choices. They seek them out. They want horror novels that feel fresh and personal, stories that risk something formally, emotionally, sociologically. They don’t just want to be thrilled by a story about slowly freezing to death or being eaten by zombies. Granted, my students are English majors, which makes them sophisticated in terms of literary tastes. But not every author they enjoy reading is an academic. 

For example, Mercedes M. Yardley, is here in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her Bram Stoker Award-winning collection Love Is a Crematorium and Other Tales showcases what she calls “whimsical horror.” Others describe her work as “poetic horror with a broken heart.” Yardley, who has visited my writing workshops at UNLV, crafts characters—often women—scarred by grief, trauma, and abuse, yet never defeated. Her fiction balances darkness with hope. Her voice adds another necessary dimension to the evolving horror conversation. Sure, the discussion might not be familiar to those of us who grew up reading grisly mass-market paperbacks that we picked up and traded in used bookstores decades ago. But genres must be reinvented if they’re to continue.  

Writers like Yardley aren’t just innovating. They’re building on a tradition, while reshaping it to meet our moment. Literary horror resonates because it reflects the anxieties of a new generation of readers—readers like my students—who want stories that unsettle them not just through terror, but through truth. 

In the end, the reason we turn to horror hasn’t changed. We want to confront what haunts us and find release. But today’s readers expect more. They want horror that reflects who they are, how they live, and what they dread becoming. 

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Enough ink has been spilled explaining why the British Empire was an oppressive, tyrannical regime that I will not repeat all the evidence here. Though history is vast, complex, and sprawling, in this case it can be boiled down to a fairly simple representative statistic: that when the British arrived in 1600s, India produced over 20% of the world’s economic output; by the time the British departed India in 1947, it had dropped to 3%.[4] The UK experienced a nearly exact opposite trajectory in growth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine what happened, and yet British academics and politicians appear to disagree:

• Andrew Roberts, Professor at King’s College London, 2021: “I don’t agree with the automatic assumption that the British Empire was evil. . . . In fact, I think it was very helpful for the development of the native peoples of the Empire.”
• Michael Gove, soon to be UK Education Secretary, 2009: “There is no better way of building a modern, inclusive, patriotism than by teaching all British citizens to take pride in this country’s historic achievements. Which is why the next Conservative Government will ensure the curriculum teaches the proper narrative of British History – so that every Briton can take pride in this nation.”
• Niall Ferguson, Senior Fellow at Harvard University, 2004: “Without the British empire, there would be no Calcutta, no Bombay, no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and built by the British.”
• UK Foreign Minister Mark Fields on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 2019: “I feel a little reluctant to make apologies for things that have happened in the past. There are also concerns that any government department has to make about any apology, given that there may well be financial implications to making an apology. I feel we debase the currency of apologies if we are seen to make them for many, many events.”

It doesn’t matter how much one rebuts every detail: India had strong industrial sectors before the British arrival,[5] India had its own education system before “Western” education,[6] Indian taxpayers funded the railroads while British shareholders received guaranteed dividends covering any investment and a hefty bonus.[7] Nearly a third of the British populace still thinks the empire was a good thing to be proud of, while half thinks it did no harm to colonized countries,[8] and many Americans think the worst of British colonialism was taxation of the thirteen colonies. Historical revisionism presents an easy, engaging narrative: Britain saved India, Britain deserves its bounty, Britain has no reason to make amends. The problem is not the facts. It is the story. And stories are best fought by stories.

Ten Incarnations of Rebellion flips this script, using alternate history to showcase the horrors of colonialism in a world parallel to ours. If history has been bogged down by a mainstream whitewashing of colonialism, alternate history cuts through those narratives by tweaking key details, showing the moral rot at the empire’s core. The story was inspired by a simple what-if. After their failures on the Indian subcontinent, the British Empire innovated new methods of oppression. They used these “improved” tactics to fight anti-colonial movements in their other colonies around the globe, from cutting off entire cities to imposing long-term curfews to placing dissenters in punitive prison camps. So, what if the British had used those tactics to prevent Indian independence?

Check out Vaishnavi Patel’s Ten Incarnations of Rebellion here:

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The book’s timeline branches from real history in the 1910s, with increased violent crackdowns on political parties, freedom of speech, and protest movements. By the 1930s in this world, the major figureheads of independence and their followers have been killed. Over the coming decades, this alternate history India is subjected to militarized rule, constant surveillance, language erasure, and cultural suppression. The main events of the novel take place in a fundamentally altered version of the 1960s, in a city robbed of its young men, where a group of young women take up the torch of rebellion. This is not alternate history done in the apologist way—that is, without tether to reality. While the events of the book are fictional, inventing subjugation does a disservice to the billions who have suffered under colonialism. In Ten Incarnations of Rebellion, every act of brutality, every tactic of oppression, every traitor and martyr, is inspired by real-life events that took place either in India or elsewhere.

The same is true not just of the sins of Empire, but of the struggle for freedom. India’s freedom movement is credited with being a nonviolent, inclusive movement. But there were also many freedom fighters who undertook violent operations, and their successes in terrorizing the British helped pave the way for the nonviolent movement’s victories. And while Indians of all creeds took part in the struggle, there were great rifts and injustices within the movement, on religious, caste, and geographic lines. In the West, where this history is often sanitized to the point that one must struggle just to show that colonialism is bad at all, it is nearly impossible to examine these nuances. How can you discuss fair criticisms of freedom fighters when the need for the fight itself is being attacked? By moving into an alternate history space, the protagonists of this story can face the same questions as their real-life predecessors—How do they reconcile the caste and religious divides within their people? Can they work with the British to improve their condition? When is violence justified?—without delegitimizing the struggle for freedom.

From India to Ireland and everywhere in between, the British left a trail of genocide, famine, engineered sectarian violence, cultural repression, and theft. And through programs like Operation Legacy, they have put records of their crimes into literal bonfires, hiding the truth from the light of day. It is this erasure that allowed them to build a new narrative for themselves. But this erasure also provides an opportunity: rewriting history to highlight and honor freedom movements. The fights of freedom movements and the legacies of colonialism are not confined to history. Even today, millions live under physical and economic colonialism—as but one example, the United States has “territories” that pay taxes but are unable to meaningfully participate in the election of the government taxing them. And billions continue to be affected by the laws and actions of their former colonial masters, suffering from centuries of deindustrialization, looting, divide-and-rule, and more.

There is no easy answer to healing the ills of colonialism. But until those of us living in the west can grapple with the true cost of our wealth and status, we will be the ones living in an alternate history.

[1] Tombs, Robert. “In Defense of the British Empire,” The Spectator, May 8, 2020. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/In-defence-of-the-British-Empire/

[2] Jordanna Bailkin. “The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.2 (2006): 463-494.

[3] Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005: 39, 359.

[4] See Tharoor, Shashi. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. London: Hurst, 2017; Broadberry, Stephen, Johann Custodis, and Bishnupriya Gupta, “India and the great divergence: An Anglo-Indian comparison of GDP per capita, 1600–1871,” Explorations in Economic History 55 (2015): 58-75.

[5] Clingingsmith, David, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Deindustrialization in 18th and 19th century India: Mughal decline, climate shocks and British industrial ascent,” Explorations in Economic History 45, no. 3(2008): 209-234.

[6] Dharampal (2000). “Introduction,” The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. Goa, India: Other India Press. The availability of such pre-colonial education was extremely divided along lines of caste and class, but the British were not particularly active in fixing these—or indeed, any—forms of discrimination.

[7] Bogart, Dan, and Latika Chaudhary.  “Regulation, Ownership, and Costs: A Historical Perspective from Indian Railways,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 4, no. 1 (2012): 28–57.

[8] Matthew Smith, “British Attitudes to the British Empire,” YouGov Jan. 29, 2025. https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/51483-british-attitudes-to-the-british-empire.

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In this interview, Danit discusses the 16-year journey from idea to publication of her new novel, Television for Women, on the differences and similarities in short story writing versus novel writing, and more.

Name: Danit Brown
Literary agent: Sorche Fairbank
Book title: Television for Women
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Release date: June 24, 2025
Genre/category: Fiction
Previous titles: Ask for a Convertible
Elevator pitch: Television for Women is about one woman’s search for the person she used to be as she navigates the aftermath of childbirth and the way it unravels relationships, expectations, and even her sense of self.

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What prompted you to write this book?

Television for Women began with curiosity. Early in my teaching career, a colleague was dismissed for faking his Ph.D. While everyone else focused on the scandal, I couldn’t stop wondering about my colleague’s wife, who had recently given birth to their first child. They’d met around the time he’d received tenure, so how much did she know?  How did his lies affect her? Did she feel betrayed, or trapped, or both?

At the same time, I was new to both marriage and motherhood, which didn’t come naturally to me, and discovering that the transition was much messier than depicted in shows like “A Baby Story.” Why hadn’t anyone warned me about this? I wondered. Does everyone else know something I don’t?

Television for Women was my way of exploring what happens when the stories we tell ourselves about our life—stories like, “Of course I want a baby” and “I’m happily married” —fall apart. It’s about love, identity, and the lies we tell others and ourselves along the way.

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

This is my first novel, and when I started writing it back in 2008, I suspected I was a short-story writer at heart and would never be able to write anything as long as a novel. The solution, I thought, was to game the system—even if I couldn’t write an actual novel, I could write something that could pass for a novel. I had, in fact, tried doing this with my first book, a collection of linked short stories, although I’d ultimately fooled no one. This time, I told myself, I would fake a novel by splitting my main character, Estie, into two. One character would be married to a professor who loses his job and befriends the old lady across the street, and the other character would be pregnant and ambivalent about motherhood and have a grandmother with Alzheimer’s. Fast-forward several years: My agent at the time didn’t like the project and decided to part ways with me. After a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth, I realized I had nothing to lose by just writing the novel as I’d originally envisioned it without worrying about filler. I went back to having just one main character, lost the old lady and the grandmother, and suddenly everything made a lot more sense. By then, 10 years had passed. It would take another four years of revisions before the novel found a home, and another two years after that to get it ready for publication.  All in all, then, this novel took a whopping 16 years from idea to publication.

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

After a couple of years of on-and-off querying, I had more or less given up on finding a home for Television for Women. I had spent 14 years on this project, I told myself, and I had nothing to show for it. In a last-ditch effort, I signed up for an agent meeting through Grubstreet’s Muse and the Marketplace conference, which is how I met Sorche Fairbank, who would eventually become my agent. Soon after—before Sorche even had a chance to review my work, in fact—I received an email from Michelle Capone. Michelle had read the manuscript when she interned for another literary agent I’d queried, but now she was working as an editor at Melville House Publishing, and was the novel still available? I had heard other writers say that you never know how or when something will shake loose in terms of publication, and my experience with this novel seems to bear this out.

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

I was surprised to discover that time away from the novel was often as important as the time I spent with it. At times, I’d read a draft and conclude that I was a literary genius only to return to it a couple of weeks later and realize how much more work needed to be done. The opposite was also true, and infinitely more important: I would walk away from a draft in despair, and then weeks or even months later, I’d finally realize what needed to happen next. That thing inside you that compels you to write is always churning, even when you’re far away from your desk.

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

This novel was my way of exploring what happens when the stories we tell ourselves about our life—stories like “Of course I want a baby” and “I’m happily married” —fall apart. I hope that Estie’s experiences will resonate with readers and, if they’re struggling with the transition to motherhood, help them feel a little less alone.

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

You’ve probably already heard this, but I’m sharing it here because, if I’d only followed this advice, I would have avoided years and years of frustration: Trust your instincts and write the book you want to write. There will be plenty of time to worry about publication and finding readers later.

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In this interview, Nussaibah discusses how imaging a conversation with her teenage self sparked the idea for her debut literary novel, Fundamentally, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Nussaibah Younis
Literary agent: Allison Malecha, Trellis Literary Management
Book title: Fundamentally
Publisher: Tiny Reparations, Penguin Random House
Release date: February 25, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Elevator pitch: Fundamentally is a darkly funny novel about heartbroken academic Nadia who accepts a UN job in Baghdad—where she’s tasked with deradicalizing ISIS women. After an absurd and chaotic start to the role, Nadia becomes engrossed by one of the women in her care, forcing her to make a radical choice.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I wanted to write something really funny and entertaining—as well as thought-provoking‚—based on the career I’ve had as a peacebuilding practitioner in the Middle East. There’s a tendency to treat the UN and international NGOs as rarefied institutions, but the reality is chaotic, dramatic, and often hilarious, and I’ve rarely seen that reflected in fiction. The topic of radicalization is one that has long fascinated me, but I wanted to explore it through rich and relatable characters that you enjoy hanging out with. I firmly believe novels should be engrossing and joyful, even if they tackle serious issues.

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

The idea for the novel came when I imagined having a conversation with my 15-year-old self. It was immediately funny yet confronting to think about what my devoutly religious and precocious teenage self would say to my 30-something self, who was no longer a believer. I spent one solid year writing, and once I’d finished, it took me only a couple of weeks to get an agent, and within 48 hours of going on submission in the U.K. I had my first pre-empt offer for the book and my first offer for the TV option. The U.S. deal came a few weeks later. I know this is not the norm and I am extremely fortunate to have had such a smooth ride.

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

I have befriended many authors who are at different stages in their careers, and I’ve found it extremely sobering to learn how difficult it is to build a sustainable career as a writer—even if you’ve had one major book deal. The pressure can be debilitating to creativity, and I definitely miss the naivety I had when I wrote my debut novel.

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

The Ernest Hemmingway adage is spot on, “Writing is rewriting.” My first draft was truly abysmal, but I rewrote it and rewrote it until it worked. I didn’t realize that you could edit your way to success even if the first draft is really bad, but you can!

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

I want readers to snort so hard with laughter that fellow commuters will move away from the adjoining seats.

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

Give yourself permission to write a terrible first draft. You need to start by getting words onto the page. Take the pressure off and just write badly. Trust that you can make it better later. 

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In this interview, Susan discusses the movie that left her stunned and inspired to write her new literary horror novel, Old Soul, the decade that went into the process, and more.

Name: Susan Barker
Literary agent: Aitken Alexander Associates
Book title: Old Soul
Publisher: G.P. Putnam and Sons.
Release date: January 28, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Horror
Previous: The Incarnations (published 2015, Simon & Schuster)
Elevator pitch: In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they’ve both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since. Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades, until he tracks this woman down…

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What prompted you to write this book?

I’d recently returned to London in 2015 after living in China for several years. One evening, I went to see the horror film, It Follows, which is about a sexually transmitted curse passed amongst a group of teenagers—a curse that manifests itself as a shape-shifting demon that stalks the latest victim to death. It was incredible. Heart-thumpingly terrifying and visually stunning. I left the cinema buzzing at midnight and had a very fitful night’s sleep, but the idea of an inescapable curse, which moves from person to person, had seeded my imagination. The premise I eventually developed for Old Soul turned out to be very different. But It Follows was the first spark of inspiration of many to come.

I’ve always had elements of the supernatural and fantastical in my previous novels—and they were the parts that were the most exhilarating to write. So, deciding to make Old Soul explicitly horror was really fun. It gave me permission to send my readers into that terrifying, spine-chilling realm that, as a horror fan, I so adore.

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

Old Soul took about eight years to write. Add on another two years between acquisition by my publisher and scheduled release date, and that makes it a decade from idea to publication.

Old Soul changed a lot during the eight years of writing. The antagonist is a mysterious woman-of-many-aliases who takes photographs of her victims (who span many decades and continents). But for the first several years of writing the antagonist was a man, who painted portraits of his victims—it was very Dorian Gray. I wrote a full draft of the book with this male antagonist (his name was Erskine), but something wasn’t working. I wasn’t getting the voice and tone right. When I decided to flip the gender from male to female, everything just flowed. I had a much stronger sense of who the woman was, and her gender made her predatory nature more unexpected, and the dynamic between her and her prey more interesting, as she herself was vulnerable in various ways.

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

One thing I’m continually learning in the publishing process is that, as the author, I don’t always know what’s best for my book. I can be very protective and proprietorial over my novel, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

My agent gave me some excellent feedback when she first read the manuscript, but in the first instance it spun me out! The changes she suggested seemed so radical. Then my husband read through her notes and said, “She’s absolutely right about X, Y and Z,” and I began to consider how to re-draft to take the advice on board. And it’s a stronger novel because of it.

Ironically, I’m a creative writing lecturer. I give my students feedback on their fiction all the time.

Another thing I initially dug in my heels over was the title. This novel’s original title was, In Perpetuity (because my anti-hero must do the evil she does, in perpetuity). I loved this title. I thought it was perfect. But my editors explained why it wouldn’t work, so I (grudgingly) spent a month or so desperately trying to come up with another title, before deciding on Old Soul. I like the dark and twisted irony of it (as “old soul” usually means someone has a wisdom and depth of empathy beyond their years, which doesn’t exactly describe my central character…). And now Old Soul is the perfect title. In Perpetuity, in retrospect, seems completely wrong.

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

After spending six years writing my third novel, The Incarnations, I decided my fourth would be a simple, straightforward, linear narrative, and I would spend two or three years on it, tops. The surprise (or maybe this isn’t too great a surprise, as I’ve always written multiple-narrative novels) was how the scope of Old Soul kept expanding to encompass more and more times and places: communist-era Leipzig and Budapest, rural Wales, Kyoto, London, NYC and the badlands of New Mexico. The narratives kept multiplying, and so did the years.

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

My North Star while writing Old Soul was to make readers feel the way I did when first encountering books like Salem’s Lot or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves; jittery, disturbed and utterly beguiled. My hope was to craft a novel of morally complex characters with emotional resonance and depth, but also for Old Soul to be an exhilarating ride. I would love for its readers to experience all the spine-chilling escapism of the horror genre as you move through time and place with our diabolical anti-hero, witnessing her deeds through her victims’ eyes. And if reading Old Soul leaves you feeling too nervous to turn out the lights, then my job as an author is done.

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

Redraft, redraft, and redraft. Few writers can turn out an exceptional first draft. As Hemmingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Most of us need to redraft bad writing until it’s mediocre writing. Then redraft the mediocre writing until it’s good. Then redraft what’s good until it’s exceptional. I read so much fiction that hovers somewhere between mediocre and good. Keep going! Don’t stop after the first couple of rewrites.

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In this interview, Nana discusses the process of writing about people trying to make something of themselves in her new literary fiction novel, My Parents’ Marriage, her hope for readers, and more!

Name: Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Book title: My Parents’ Marriage
Publisher: Amistad Books
Release date: July 9, 2024
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Previous titles: RELATIONS: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices; BLUE: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky; Powder Necklace: A Novel
Elevator pitch: My Parents’ Marriage is about Kokui Nuga, a young Ghanaian woman traumatized by her father’s flagrant philandering, and by her mother and stepmother’s jockeying for his divided heart. Kokui is desperate to escape the shadow of her parents’ marriage, and believes she has found her ticket out when she meets and marries a man headed for university in the States who seems nothing like her wealthy, domineering dad. But not long after the couple moves to the U.S., she realizes she is pushing against much more than her parents’ turbulent union: She’s battling a web of traditions, systems, and attitudes that conspire to empower the men in her life at the expense and dignity of the women, and she’s fighting to find and value herself.

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What prompted you to write this book?

When I first started dating my now-husband, a lot of the disappointment and pain I had experienced in past relationships or witnessed in different marriages around me as a kid started to come up. I felt acutely anxious and fearful of repeating past mistakes, and I started hearing things differently when my friends and I would discuss our dating highs and lows. So much of what we were thinking about, and so many of the choices we were making, tracked back to the unions we had grown up around or those formative first loves. I wanted to explore this in a novel and examine it through the specificity of Ghanaian marriage traditions.

In Ghana, there are three types of marriage: Customary, Mohammedan and Ordinance. Customary and Mohammedan permit men to take multiple wives while Ordinance, instituted in 1884 when Ghana was under British colonial rule, is strictly monogamous. This duality in Ghanaian marriage law mirrors the duality, or tension, in Ghanaian culture. I thought it would be interesting to explore how the union that was forcibly formed between Ghana and Britain through colonialism has impacted not only the political, but the personal.

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

The book I sold to Amistad is very different from My Parents’ Marriage, but through the four-year process of revising and rewriting, it became clear to me that I needed to tighten the focus of the story from the 40 years of political turmoil a set of families experienced in Ghana after Kwame Nkrumah and many other activists wrested independence from Britain to this very personal narrative. I realized by going narrower and deeper, I would be able to explore the challenges of a people trying to make something of themselves in a post-colonial context in a more intimate way.

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

I learned to trust my vision and advocate for it. I had experienced so much rejection that when I heard a “yes” I thought the process of “selling” my idea was over. In fact, that was the moment when I needed to be clearest about my intention.

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

A beautiful surprise was that My Parents’ Marriage was hidden in the folds of my original draft. The earliest versions of my novel had two sets of troubled marriages in the background that were driving different characters’ actions, but I didn’t really see that. During my revision and rewriting process, one of my editors asked me what my original goal for writing the novel was.

As I deliberated over that question, I started to peel back the layers. I realized that I was hiding behind all of the wonderful research I had done and decided to rewrite the story from a much more vulnerable place. Once I started doing that, the experience of writing this book felt much more high stakes. I squirmed in my seat as I wrote some scenes. During many sessions, I cried as I typed. I feel connected to every story and character I write, but this book became more personal to me than I’ve ever experienced.

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

I hope this book extends community to readers who want or need to acknowledge the impact of foundational relationships on their present life and relationship choices. I hope, too, that My Parents’ Marriage offers strength and perspective to readers who desire to choose a different path than what they have known or seen. Finally, I hope it creates an opportunity for intergenerational conversations in families.

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

My advice is: Keep going. If you keep writing, you’ll outpace the rejection. Storytelling is as old as humanity—every known civilization has told stories of life as they lived it, passed down legends of how we got here, and created fables or parables to illustrate morals or deliver lessons. Stories are inextricable from existence which means your story has incalculable value. It is needed by someone, somewhere, and if you keep at it, at some point you will connect with that someone.

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In this interview, Oisín discusses trying to capture a particular time of life in his new literary fiction novel, Evenings and Weekends, his advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Oisín McKenna
Literary agent: Liv Maidment, Madeleine Milburn Agency
Book title: Evenings and Weekends
Publisher: Mariner
Release date: July 2, 2024
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Elevator pitch: Sprawling multi-generational community drama set in London over the course of one weekend in 2019 during which a whale is beached on the banks of the Thames river. Sex, class, love, and politics collide over the course of one life-changing weekend.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I had been writing for theater and performance contexts for nearly 10 years. I was interested in reaching bigger audiences, and also making something that more closely resembled the artworks that I most admired, which usually were novels.

I had been living in London for about a year and a half, and it had been an exciting time in my life. I was living in a sort of 12-person warehouse commune, like the one described in the book. I had become involved in a big, exciting left-wing political project—the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the U.K.’s equivalent to Bernie Sanders—and my life felt rich and expansive. It was also precarious, both in the sense of my insecure tenancy and work contracts, and in the sense of global ecological and political instability. I was interested in capturing a precious time in my life while it was there to be captured.

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

I first started writing in 2019. It’s being published in 2024. The idea changed many times, particularly in the sense that I didn’t really have any ideas when I started writing it, beyond that I wanted to write a book. I started with some broad thematic and political concerns, stylistic preferences, and emotional textures, and very slowly sketched a very provisional plot and cast of characters. The plot and cast were entirely improvised and changed many times as I went along. But the political concerns and emotional textures remained the same.

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

The book is already out in the U.K. and Ireland, and I’ve had a few opportunities to talk about my own life and the “real-life inspirations” of the book. I was a little bit foolhardy about how emotionally taxing it would be to publicly discuss vulnerable details about my life, and I think I’d be a bit more wary about that in the future.

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

It was a surprised (and a pleasure!) that it worked at all. I didn’t know how to write a book. I was an avid reader but not particularly plugged into the contemporary fiction landscape. Most of the time I was writing the book, I was improvising. It was very much a trial-and-error process, and I didn’t feel the book really came together until pretty late in the day. It was a joy and surprise to finish a draft that hung together as I wanted it to do.

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

When working on this book, I was interested in writing something that moved people, that made them laugh, that was propulsive and gossipy and hard to put down and that was serious about giving readers a good time. In a sense, I wanted it to be a book that many different kinds of people would find easy to read, but I also wanted it to be deep and complicated and compassionate without being corny, and political without being didactic. I didn’t want to compromise on intellectual and artistic integrity, emotional complexity, and stylistic boldness, but I wanted to speak to large audiences, and appeal to both radical and populist sensibilities. Basically, I hope readers have fun, are moved, and have thoughts or feelings that they find stimulating or useful or enriching.

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

For me, it’s a delicate balance between taking yourself seriously, being disciplined about having a writing routine, but also remembering to have fun and be playful. I do my best writing when it feels completely low stakes, when all I’m trying to do is create a pleasurable, stimulating, absorbing experience for myself. I try to remind myself before I sit down to write that it doesn’t really matter whether the writing fails or succeeds. I’m just here to have fun and see what happens. I find that this approach, combined with taking myself seriously enough to show up at my desk every day, works for me.

The other big thing is to try to have a pretty restrained relationship with my phone! If I go on Instagram before writing, it can ruin the whole writing day because it makes my mind so frazzled. I turn my phone off and put it in another room when I write, block all websites for the duration that I’m writing, and generally don’t have social media apps on my phone at all except when I have to re-download them for promotional purposes. I get really addicted to my phone and need to be careful about it because it affects my attention span in a way which is terrible for my writing and well-being. 

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