The Writer March 2022

OH, READER, WHAT AN EMBARRASSING confession I have for you this month. I’ve tracked the books I’ve read for the past decade using a very official system called “a really long list in an untitled draft email,” where I record the title, author, and the year it was read. I don’t record my opinions of it or its genre or whether it was written by a debut author. So when I started completing a reading challenge in an app that did track all that, I was surprised to see my most-read genre of 2021 was historical fiction. Huh. If you had asked my opinion of historical fiction earlier in the year, I’d have responded, “Oh, I like it just fine!” Emphasis on “just fine” – I enjoyed it, truly, but…

YA I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys (Feb. 1) Award-winning author Ruta Sepetys’ latest historical YA novel follows a 17-year-old aspiring writer in Romania who is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informant. “Sepetys brilliantly blends a staggering amount of research with heart, craft, and insight in a way very few writers can,” praises Kirkus Reviews in a starred review of this “compulsively readable and brilliant” book. Ophelia After All by Racquel Marie (Feb. 8) This debut novel stars boy-crazy Cuban American teenager Ophelia Rojas, who discovers “the course of love – and sexuality – never did run smooth” when she develops a crush on her classmate, Talia Sanchez. “This touching debut offers an emotional ride that readers will be happy to embark upon,” praises Booklist. Bitter…

FOUR YEARS AGO, SHE WRITES PRESS publisher Brooke Warner sat down in a Berkeley, California, restaurant with Grant Faulkner, executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and made plans to launch a podcast that would encourage writers at any stage of their career. “We wanted our themes to range from learning to believe in your story and get it down on the page to how to publish,” Faulkner explains. “We view writing and publishing as different stages of a creative journey.” He’d been impressed with Warner’s Green-Light Your Book: How Writers Can Succeed in the New Era of Publishing, with its message of empowerment, so when she suggested that he co-host, he immediately agreed. “That’s what we’re all about at NaNoWriMo as well – empowering people and helping them…

Feels Blind Literary: Writers who are nonbinary or identify as women Send short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, plays, and art to Feels Blind Literary for consideration for its seventh issue. Only submissions by writers and artists who are nonbinary or identify as women will be accepted for publication. On Mondays, it is free to submit; on other days of the week, the submission fee is $3, a portion of which will be donated to the Richmond Community Bail Fund. Submit by March 6. feelsblindliterary.com/donate About Place Journal: Submissions for ‘Navigations: A Place for Peace’ issue About Place Journal editors are seeking prose, poetry, hybrid genre, photography, artwork, sound-art, and video for their “Navigations: A Place for Peace” issue. Submit by March 10 for consideration in the issue. aboutplacejournal.org/submissions Mistake House…

A MAILMAN TASKED WITH DELIVERing a potentially life-saving secret formula to a Des Moines epidemiologist finds his life threatened by people determined to steal the information for themselves. A woman befriends the daughter of a homicide victim after a 1945 pogrom in Krakow’s Market Square and swears to do whatever it takes to find the mother’s murderer. A woman with a chronic medical condition begins to question reality and her sanity when specially purchased therapeutic foods in her refrigerator begin to vanish. These are three of the plotlines from Mystery Magazine, a 6-year-old print and digital publication based in Canada. Editor Kerry Carter looks for stories that evoke classic mysteries by Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, as well as the pulp fiction stylings of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.…

Sometimes, you talk to a person, and they give you a bunch of hope for the future while simultaneously making it very clear that you still have a lot left to learn. I’m talking to Xu Xi, Jenks Chair of Contemporary Letters at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, author of 14 books and editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Her latest project is The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, an anthology comprising a selection of works by Asian authors with commentary from Xi and travel writer Robin Hemley (Bloomsbury Academic, October 2021). For starters, the anthology was a hard project for me to wrap my brain around – it isn’t, Xi and Hemley write in the introduction, “meant to silo off Asian…