Summer 2024
author
Mini-Interviews
To give authors a chance to talk more about their process and craft, or just to give us a little more insight into their piece, we provided them with a list of questions from which they could pick one to answer. We hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain!
Christy Tending
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: The seed idea of the piece was the natural history of wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park. I'm working on a longer piece about the phenomenon of trophic cascades and how they alter not just ecology, but physical geography. But I was looking to play in my work a bit, so I took that seed and let it guide me in a sort of speculative direction related to grief and human loss. How does it alter us—not just our emotional selves, but the trajectory of our lives and our physical surroundings—when we lose someone? So often, we talk about grief as something internal, but it has big, external effects. I wanted to explore how we feel insignificant as individuals, but because we are all connected, our lives have these enormous ripple effects.
Katie Knight
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: This piece began when the first sentence got stuck in my head. I couldn’t ignore it. It came from a conversation I had with my friend, who is a trainer. I knew something about the tone of the story and the main character from that first sentence. (Oddly enough, it came to me in the second person.) But mostly I had to write a first draft to figure out what the story was about. I usually write in that way. I begin with a sentence or image or bit of conversation and start to write, not really knowing where I’m headed. I figure a lot of that out in revision. I’ve never outlined a story. I should probably try it. Anyway, the first draft was a mess. Most of my early drafts are. But slowly, an idea about a mother who vapes became a story about a mother who struggles with the fact that her ex-husband has fallen in love.
L. L. Babb
Q: How did you land on this title?
A: I always have trouble coming up with titles. Once I’m a few paragraphs into a story, I have to call it something, however lame, to save it on my computer. The working title of this story was originally “Invisible Boy Disappears,” because I was writing about the kind of death you read about in the paper—a young man with a lot of potential, a tragic senseless death, life ending too soon, etc. The first few drafts of the story felt exactly like that kind of newspaper story, sad yet disconnected. It wasn’t until I decided to add the first-person narrator, the older sister, that I realized that the title had to be from her perspective. He was never invisible to her.
My method of finding a title is to brainstorm, sometimes with my husband because his mind works in odd and mysterious ways, and make a list of possibilities. It took a while before I landed on “Wasted” but I knew it was perfect. I love the multiple meanings of that word.
Derek Maiolo
Q: If you could give your piece an accompanying tasting menu, what would it consist of?
A: Tasting Menu for“Porcelain”
Cloudy Morning
nimbus, chill, occasional drizzle
Work
acoustic tile ceiling, communal coffee, odor
After-Work Call to Bureaucratic Institution
automated prompts, wilted hope, apologies
Unexpected Sunset
cotton candy clouds, reminder of raison d’être, much wow