F***ing Shakespeare

Phuc and Kate speak with the acclaimed and straight-up luminous Texas Poet Laureate, ire’ne lara silva, at the 2023 Writer’s Family Reunion sponsored by Writespace. We had the opportunity to chat about her process, the bold and unapologetic treatment of grief in her writing, and how she finds cracks of light in the depths. silva, who is an inductee in the Texas Institute of Letters and an inaugural CantoMundo fellow, runs a workshop called “Forget Discipline,” where she and fellow writers practice the art of creating without constraints. Though she has authored books of poetry, short stories, and a forthcoming comic book, silva hardly considers herself prolific. “I’ve spent hours debating a comma,” she quipped in response to this characterization of her work, “I don’t let anything go until I’m ready.” Perhaps these principles are what drive her acclaimed work, which has been described as “candid and fearless.” True to this portrayal, silva’s work is unafraid of approaching heavier themes, and she recognizes this authenticity and honesty as critical to creating a space where readers can see themselves in her stories. This approach lends itself well to silva’s exploration of grief in many of her works, which she artfully conceives of as a transformative process that signifies the importance of those close to us in our lives. Concluding with an elegant summation of her creative process, silva muses, “what’s the point of transforming all these things if it’s not to live a joyous life, if it’s not to find love and friends and work worth doing and to appreciate our creativity?” We couldn’t have asked for a more fitting conclusion for season 6 of the podcast. Stay tuned for more from the desks of Bloomsday Literary. If you’ve heard all the podcast episodes, and still want more, we have short interviews with publishing insiders in our Instagram Live archive series called “Dear Sirs.” Check it out @bloomsdayliterary on IG. Honorable mentions: Writer’s Workshop, Macondo Workshop (next workshop begins July 23, 2024!) the eaters of flowers, Saddle Road Press silva’s books and reviews for Uvalde by ire’ne lara silva Photo credit Jana Birchum

Enzo Silon Surin writes, composes, and publishes artifacts on the “witness continuum”—art that he says “pays homage to the culture in which it was formed” and the necessity of generational change. Surin’s work spans librettos commissioned by the Boston Opera Collaborative, four poetry collections, and a musical-in-the-making. He also founded Central Square Press, an independent publisher of works that “reflect a commitment to social justice in regards to African-American, Caribbean, and Caribbean-American communities.” We had the pleasure of chatting with Surin about how he came to writing as means of documentation—from intuitively producing plays and operas about his childhood in Queens to developing his 10-minute play, “Last Train” (which has a forthcoming operatic adaptation). We discussed the juxtaposition of violence and tenderness in his collection, When My Body Was A Clinched Fist, winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. Between witnessing the coup that forced Surin from Haiti and the “social violence” he saw in New York, he says he grew up in “state of violence.” It was by becoming a “clinched fist” that Surin says he protected his innate compassion and resilience. Finally, Surin celebrates how writing “saved [his] life” and speaks from the corner of publishing he’s forged, where he’s found that real-life audiences hungry for quality work “already exist." Honorable mentions When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (recorded reading) American Scapegoat Central Square Press Cheesy love songs in the style of Barry White Bloomsday Literary in partnership with Official 2023 AWP Conference and Bookfair

Does Alyson Sinclair sleep? We had to keep asking ourselves as we chatted it up with Alyson from the floor of AWP (Association of Writing and Writing Program)’s Conference and Bookfair. She’s done it all when it comes to the writing world—bouncing between the bureaucracy of big-four publishers—um, she sent faxes to Seamus Heaney?—to the hustle and bustle world (emphasis on the hustle) of independent presses. Currently, Alyson is the Owner/Publisher at The Rumpus and founder of Nectar Literary, a boutique publicity and communications firm for authors, independent presses, and literary organizations of all ilk. Making literary community might just be the crux of our conversation. After learning that hunker-down-and-drink-tea-all-day-with-page-turny-manuscripts editorial roles are not the default at an eye-opening internship, she turned to publicity. Connecting authors to the broader writing ecosystem thrilled her. Publicity and pitching media, in Alyson’s eyes, is a fascinating form of problem solving. Her insight comes from a wide range of experiences in all corners of our ecosystem, spanning from soliciting advertising at a magazine, to setting off individually in the convoluted publishing universe, to coexisting with other literary collectives that share the same mission. Let’s just say—both before and after soaking in this conversation—Bloomsday is a certified Alyson Sinclair fangirl. Honorable Mentions: Independent Press, Alice James Books Independent Press, City Lights Literary Network, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Literary Magazine, Crazyhorse Nonprofit Publisher, Graywolf Press Director of Coffee House Press, Mark Haber Nonprofit Publisher, McSweeney’s Seamus Heaney Yusef Komunyakaa Audio by Bloomsday Literary in partnership with the official 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair

As Program Director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), Chelsea Kern is the glue that holds so much of the indie literary world together, advocating for mission-driven independent publishers and magazines—and, with equal importance, introducing readers to the work this community produces. It is clear from our conversation, she has a passion for seeing big projects through to completion. We discussed the constant that is CLMP and how the literary landscape has transformed since the organization’s founding in 1967—becoming increasingly global and digital. CLMP, with Chelsea’s leadership, has taken these changes in stride with webinars, newsletters (that Bloomsday archives for reference religiously), and a listserv for magazines and presses to ask and answer each other’s questions. As a proud member of CLMP, we can confirm that this listserv is one of the crown jewels/hidden gems of the organization, which always saves us from having to reinvent the wheel when it comes to oddly specific publishing questions Google doesn’t have the answer to. We also explored Chelsea’s personal journey, from a CLMP fellow working in Diversity & Inclusion to Program Director. A go-between who works to connect us needy presses with the grant gods themselves, she has spearheaded vital programs like the Literary Arts Emergency Fund. Chelsea could be considered literary royalty, but she is a magnanimous monarch. We are grateful to have shared space with her in this episode. Honorable Mentions: Literary Advocacy Organization, Academy of American Poets Fellowship Program, American Council of Learned Societies Grant, Literary Arts Emergency Fund Literary Coalition, LitNet Literary Foundation, National Book Foundation Writing Mentorship Program, Writers in the Schools (WITS) Audio by Bloomsday Literary in partnership with the official 2023 Conference and Bookfair

Poetry “carr[ies] the most human of voices” for Deema Shehabi, a Palestinian-American writer whose work has appeared in publications including The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology and Kenyon Review. Shehabi earned her undergraduate degree in History and International Relations from Tufts University and Master’s in Journalism from Boston University, previously served as the vice president of the Radius of Arab American Writers, and has received four Pushcart prize nominations. She is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and Diaspo/Renga, the latter of which she co-wrote with Marilyn Hacker. In this episode, Shehabi shares how Diaspo/Renga emerged out of four years of email correspondence with Hacker. Together, we celebrate the collection as a testament to the “private humanity” between its two poets. Shehabi also speaks to the homes she’s found in Palestine, Kuwait, and California and the “perpetual expansion and contraction” that accompanies exile and return in her life. In negotiating this state of flux in her relationship with language, Shehabi talks about the burden of translation and always having to “teach people how to read” when she writes. Finally, Shehabi gifts us a striking reading of her poem, “Tracery of Dune and Chamomile,” which is modeled after Marie Howe and gazes upon the truth of humanity and intersections. Honorable Mentions Radius of Arab American Writers Diaspo/Renga Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” Naomi Shihab Nye “Migrant Earth”, featured as Poem-a-Day on Poets.org Audio by Bloomsday Literary in partnership with the official 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair Photo credit: Omar F. Khorsheed

Exploring the specificities of a diaspora while also calling upon ancestral experiences is just one of the many threads Maha Ahmed weaves through her poetry. Like many members of diasporic communities, Maha’s experiences as an Egyptian American do not always resemble the grossly generalized “immigrant story.” We had the opportunity to chat with Maha about writing herself out of this pigeonhole, as well as how she experiences life as a student, scholar, and poet. She received her MFA at the University of Oregon, and is now a literature and creative writing PhD candidate at the University of Houston (Go Coogs!). She specializes in colonial Egypt, Arab-American diasporic literature, and Arabic to English translation. We talked with her about Rusted Radishes, a Beirut-based literary magazine, and the big-city-but-small-world way she was offered the position as its poetry editor. We dive deep into the US-centric and profoundly skewed notion that immigrants’ stories only matter once they land on US soil. It is exactly for that reason, Maha insists, people of the diaspora can acknowledge ancestral ties to a place even when it may feel uncomfortable to do so with a hyphenated or dual identity. Honorable Mentions: Rusted Radishes Ars Poetica, published in The Recluse, Issue 17 Professor Tim Mazurek Audio by Bloomsday Literary in partnership with the official 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair

Matt Bell is an author, English professor, and editor. He currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. In this episode live from the conference floor at AWP 2023, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of his indispensable book on the craft of writing, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. We also discuss his dystopian novel, Appleseed, and and his admiration for climate writing that restores hope for humanity. Listen to the full episode to find out what Bell means when he advocates for ‘radical revising’ and his mission to conceptualize revision as a process that can transform a draft into a novel, rather than an assignment needed to be completed for school. We also discuss his dreamy ten-plus-year relationship working with Soho Press (shout out to the indie stalwarts!), and some of the advice he gives to his students: 1) allow readers space to figure out things for themselves, 2) experiment with non-traditional writing structures, and 3) work through tangly writing problems together. Finally, Bell ends this episode with advice for gaining inspiration for your next work and the unfortunate discovery that you can learn what your agent truly thinks of you through their editorial notes (writer beware!). Honorable Mentions: A Tree or a Person or a Wall, Bell’s short story collection His incredibly good Substack (a must-read for any writer), No Failure, Only Practice In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, the “truly weird” novel (Matt’s words) that was allowed to just be itself by the good editors at Soho Press Lastly, while we’re still down the rabbit hole, check out his non-fiction book-length essay on the video game, Baldur’s Gate II. Photo credit Jessica Bell Audio by Bloomsday Literary in partnership with the official 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair

Kristen Millares Young calls her novel Subduction “a study of recurrently going meta,” or “an examination of the longing that we have to be in contact with others who are not like us.” From exploring the notion of consent–not just sexually but also culturally–to the difficulty of the transmission of knowledge and the burden of whiteness, this novel plumbs the depths of the human consciousness. Kristen is a prize-winning journalist and essayist who regularly writes essays, book reviews, and investigations for The Washington Post, The Guardian, Literary Hub, and much more. Her recent novel Subduction, published by Red Hen Press, was named a staff pick by The Paris Review, called “whip-smart” by The Washington Post, was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and won the Nautilus and Independent Publisher Book awards. We had the privilege of speaking with Kristen about Subduction, including her writing process, how her journalism informs her work as a fiction writer, and her appreciation for Red Hen Press. We also learned about the importance of cultivating a strong professional relationship with an editor and how building trust with them can allow a writer to push for what they believe in. Honorable Mentions Ellen Akins review of Subduction in The Washington Post [paywall] Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime Other Works by Millares Young Pie and Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze In conversation with Brad Listi on the Otherppl podcast Audio by Bloomsday Literary in partnership with the official 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair Photo credit Natalie Shields

V.V. Ganeshananthan is an author, poet, and journalist, whose works have been featured in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota as a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. Ganeshananthan also co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast with Whitney Terrell, which explores writers and literature as mouthpieces for our cultural landscape. In this episode, we talk about Ganeshananthan’s 18-year-long writing process for her latest novel. Ganeshananthan maps her journey with Brotherless Night, from “bluffing her way into” a novella class during her own time as an MFA student to her techniques for “fielding facial expressions” of doubt over the novel’s completion. We revel in our common ground in the literary ecosystem, with Bloomsday poet Jabari Asim and Kate and Jessica’s longtime mentor, Michael Knight, both appearing on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. While fondly recounting how MFA writers at the University of Minnesota experiment in “speed-dating” to “workshop the workshop,” Ganeshananthan reflects on the value of an MFA program that isn’t genre-siloed and the living body of work that speaks to writers of color. Finally, while celebrating the release of Brotherless Night and asking what’s next for Ganeshananthan’s writing, we try to “remember how to start things.” Honorable Mentions Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan Fiction/Non/Fiction University of Minnesota MFA Letters to A Writer of Color edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues by Kavita Das photo credit Sophia Mayrhofer Audio by Bloomsday Literary in partnership with the official 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair

Amanda Niehaus has a PhD in Physiological Ecology. She is the author of numerous award-winning short stories, essays, and an acclaimed novel, The Breeding Season (Allen & Unwin, 2019). As part of her author profile (bestill our science-loving hearts) she writes: “Does science belong in literary fiction? As a scientist, I never thought so. But fiction connects with readers, enabling them to empathise with imagined lives. So what better way to communicate?” She was studying a unique marsupial species where the male invests so much into their reproduction that they only survive one breeding season. The metaphor was just too rich. That’s when she started writing The Breeding Season. What began as an award-winning short story eventually evolved into a novel—which was completely outside Amanda’s comfort zone. But as both she and Jess agree, you just have to trick yourself by writing it piece by piece. Check out the full episode as we discuss this, and many other traits of scientists-turned-writers, as well as the organization she founded with author, Jessica White, called Science Write Now, a publishing platform and community-based forum for creative writing about science. Honorable Mentions: Author, Lidia Yuknavitch Author, Alice Sebold Author, Krissy Kneen

Corraling the myriad ways Sumita Chakraborty’s poetry collection gets at the heart of grief all but flummoxed me. Its meaning is still washing over me. But I’ll say that poet Rishi Dastidar did what I couldnt do when she wrote that it’s “a book to hold close, an amulet that transmutes the intensities of grief into something uplifting, the attempt to keep hold of wonder.” We are thrilled to get to talk to her today about this luminous debut collection and many other things, if we’re lucky. We were surprised to hear that Sumita’s introduction to creative writing and literary studies was in college. In her 13 years at AGNI Magazine, she worked in many capacities, eventually serving as poetry editor. It was in these positions that became accustomed to every angle of poetry publication before venturing in as poet herself. Sumita’s time at AGNI provided her this comforting(?) insight: no matter how talented and brilliant you are, your poems might still be rejected because of reasons beyond your control. We talk about her decision to publish her collection Arrow with Alice James Books, what it means to be a “sad girl poet” trying to be a “happy girl poet,” and how to honor and dismantle grief while somehow still managing to be playful. (Spoiler alert: she does it!) Honorable Mentions: Poet, Lucy Brach Breido Rachel Mennies’s The Naomi Letters from BOA Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Doppelgangbanger from Haymarket Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance from Alice James Books Alice Oswald’s Nobody from W.W. Norton and Company Bridget Kelly’s Song from BOA Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light from Copper Canyon Press

Vanessa Garcia is a Miami-based novelist, playwright, journalist, and visual artist. Much of her work centers on her Cuban homeland, where her parents and grandparents were born. She is the author of incredible essays you can find all over the web and an immersive theater production called The Amparo Experience. She is the dreamer and 3D printer of so many incredible projects. Shade Mountain Press saw the beauty in Garcia’s 2015 novel, White Light, which interrogates one of Garcia’s obsessions, color. What if this character was a color? What would it mean if a chapter is cardinal red? We talk about the inspiration for that novel, as well as her most recent project, a radio play called Ich Bin Ein Berliner. This autobiographical story details her reaction to the fall of the Berlin wall and its rippling effect throughout Cuba. We explode the myth of the solitary writer and the rewards inherent in creating art in a collaborative fabric of creatives. Honorable Mentions: Poet, William Blake FAU Theater Lab Director and Garcia’s creative partner, Victoria Collado

Photo credit: Mike Glier Aimee Bender graduated from UC Irvine and teaches at USC. Her books have received accolades in all the major outlets: from the New York Times, LA Times, & MCSweeney’s, to Oprah. Her latest novel, published July 2020, is The Butterfly Lampshade. When I was rattling off the list of Bender’s books, Kate deadpanned, “So she’s basically taken all the best titles from the universe.” In this episode, Bender reads from her latest novel. Of it, an astute reviewer wrote, “[it’s] as if we’d shrunk to fit inside a Joseph Cornell diorama... we feel as Francie does: that anything and anyone might be a two-way street, capable of passing from our side into theirs by means of illustration—or from their side into ours by means of emanation...and after ‘slipping into being...we really ought not to be here.’” Listen as we discuss why exposing your kids to things like modern dance and The Blue Man Group is a good thing, how to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on but also feel confident enough to vary your form as a writer, and remembering the mindless goodness (and potential writing prompt) in just staring at an object in space. (N.B. Your phone’s screen does not count.) Honorable Mentions: Flannery O’Connor’s reminder to us all: “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” (from O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”) Best writer note to your younger self: “Write what you like, kid. Enough of this posturing.” Aimee Bender’s Incredible Backlist: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories The Color Master An Invisible Sign of My Own Willful Creatures: Stories

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Habitat Threshold. He’s the recipient of many prizes, including the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award. An assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Santos Perez teaches Pacific literature and directs the Creative Writing program there. Also, shout-out to his gorgeous blog. In this episode, we chat with Craig about his most recent poetry collection, published at the very beginning of the pandemic, which has as its core climate activism and anxieties about the future of the planet his daughters are inheriting. Perez gives his readers great insight into the connection between humans and their environments. In this collection, Perez uses what he coined as ‘recycled form’—taking the form of older poems and inserting his own content into it. Perez’s Works: Hacha Saina Guma’ Lukao Undercurrent by Craig Santos Perez and Brandy Nālani McDougall Crosscurrent Honorable Mentions: Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17 Wallace Stevens’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say

Farid Matuk’s poetry, essays, and translations from Spanish appear in a wide range of publications and anthologies. He is the author of the poetry collection, This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine), several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta), and The Real Horse (2018). He teaches in the MFA program at University of Arizona, where he is poetry editor for Fence, and serves on the editorial board for the book series Research in Creative Writing at Bloomsbury. In this episode, we talk about Matuk’s newest collection of poetry, The Real Horse, and his intention behind not using punctuation throughout the book. Matuk passes on life-changing writing advice that he received about filling the negative space of a page and writing into the “weaving of self and other that’s always around us.” During his time as a professor at the University of Arizona, he was able to publish his poetry with the university press there. That’s also where he experienced, for the first time, the helpful process of the blind peer review. As we spoke about Matuk’s work at Fence, the phrase “mutual entanglement” came up to describe the work being done there. Matuk leaves us with the question, “Which phrases and ways of naming the world that feel really powerful today will end up with quotation marks around them?” Honorable Mentions: University of Arizona Press Fence Fence founder and editor, Rebecca Wolff Visual Artist, Nancy Friedemann-Sanchez and her paintings of lace. Poet, Jorie Graham Poet, John Ashbery

We talked to Michael Zapata about his novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. It was the winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from The Boston Globe and The Millions, and his debut novel. Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine as well as on the core faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. This book is a wholly satisfying romp through the history of science fiction (even for the uninitiated!) with a healthy side-portion of theoretical physics. But please don’t be intimidated. Zapata’s prose is whimsical and yet gloriously skillful, encouraging us to “challenge our most potent ideologies.” Isn’t that what good art is supposed to do? Honorable Mentions: The Yellow House by Sarah Broom We by Yevgeny Zamyatin Chilean author Roberto Bolaño Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai

Alison Deming is so prolific and has been writing for so long that it was a bit overwhelming to pack into a 20-minute interview, but we tried our best. Hawthorne is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, where she founded the Field Studies in Writing Program in 2015. She has an MFA from Vermont College, a Stegner Fellowship, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and multiple other fellowships, residencies and prizes. Her new book, A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress, was released by Counterpoint Press in August. Honorable mentions: Poet Pattiann Rogers Novelist and short story writer Andrea Barrett Scottish poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie Writer and curator Rebecca Senf Writer Pam Houston Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist activist artists Deming’s daughter, artist Lucinda Bliss

AWP 21 Episode—Jeffrey Colvin (Day 2, Episode 1) We talk to Jeffrey Colvin about his stunning new book, Africaville. Jeffrey Colvin is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Harvard, and Columbia where he earned an MFA in fiction. He is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. His debut novel, Africaville, is an expansive book, a genealogy of sorts that follows several family trees who have intertwined branches in an enclave in Halifax, Nova Scotia, called Woods Bluff and then later named Africaville. Honorable mentions: The 2001 New York Times article about Africville that spurred Colvin’s novel Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Credit: Nina Subin

In honor of the launch of Catherine Baab-Muguira’s new book, Poe for Your Problems, we are re-releasing F***ing Shakespeare’s interview with her that we did back in 2019—where we talked about this book in its wee-baby stages. And now, here it is, all grown up like the big beautiful babe it is! Get ready for some perfect hot takes. Kate, Jess, Phuc, and Cat look behind the curtain at the self-appointed guardians of world culture. Cat celebrates indulging a rabbit hole of eccentric ideas as a freelancer and we all have a laugh about how her outstanding personal essay on how her highlights helped propel her career.* Plus, we endlessly appreciate Cat for being real with us about writing, success, and mental illness as she crowns Poe, word for word, “the most likely self-help guru in history.” Check out more of Cat’s work on her website, her Contently page, and her Twitter. Cat’s essays that we discussed in the podcast: “Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer” in The Millions “Buy All Your Furniture at Target, For Tomorrow We Die” in The Billfold “I Spent $11,537 Becoming a Blonde” in The Cut “The Seductive Scamming of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes” in shondaland Suggested Reads & Honorable Mentions Tigers are Better-Looking by Jean Rhys “Like This or Die” by Christian Lorentzen in Harper’s Magazine (we discuss this article at 10:55) “The Literati of New York City” by Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe J.W. Ostrom’s works on Edgar Allan Poe’s letters Elizabeth Holmes’s net worth according to Forbes *Please note, we went out of our way not to say “highlight of her career.” You’re welcome for the lack of bad puns.

Day 1, Episode 1 To kick off the podcast interviews at AWP, we were thrilled to talk to Lilly Dancyger. Her new memoir, Negative Space, comes out May 2021 with Santa Fe Writers Project. She’s the editor of the essay collection, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, and a contributing editor at Catapult. Among the other fantastic things with which she’s involved, she founded and co-hosts a reading series and newsletter (which you should subscribe to) called Memoir Monday. Honorable mentions: Artist Joe Schactman, Dancyger’s father whose story her memoir pieces together Writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water Memoir Monday’s partner publications Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Narratively, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub