Author Archive
Courage and Craft in Wanting: Women Writing About Desire
The contributors to Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters’s new anthology risk sharing their desires on the page in empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it a collection that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, but also between wanting and voice.
An Exploration of the Collective in Flight
Lynn Steger Strong’s deeply affecting family novel demonstrates how people move as both individuals and as part of a collective—much like a flock of birds flying overhead—as they endeavor to love each other in a time of crisis.
Lungfish’s Exploration of Isolation
Told in lyrical, first-person fragments as lush, brutal, and self-contained as the island itself, Meghan Gilliss’ debut novel’s remote setting occasions an extended study of isolation—the isolating effects of early motherhood, of food scarcity and substance use, and finally, of secrets kept from one’s self and loved ones.
Human Blues and Reproductive Self-Determination
Elisa Albert’s new novel is a potent reminder that the body and the voice are inseparable, and that both demand autonomy.
The Crane Wife’s Interrogation of the Self
CJ Hauser's interrogation of familial and cultural stories reveals as much about what it means to love someone else as it does about what it means to love a narrative. Ultimately, this leads her inward, turning the force of her questioning toward the unexpected shape of her own life
The Maternal Gothic and Maternal Ambition
"Now in my second pregnancy, I am turning to fiction, in particular a spate of recently published novels that portray the challenges of the postpartum period and early motherhood, to make sense of my attempts to hold together the identities of writer and mother."
A Joint Interview with Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade
The eleven essays that make up Miller and Wade’s new collection emerged through an email correspondence the two writers exchanged over the course of four years—an associative, improvisational game of call-and-response that played out in their inboxes.