situation / story

Renée Branum’s stories and essays have appeared in several publications including The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Lit Hub. Her story “As the Sparks Fly Upward” was included in Best American Nonrequired Reading’s 2019 anthology. She has earned MFAs in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Nonfiction from the University of Montana. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts 2020 Prose Fellowship to aid in the completion of her first novel, Defenestrate, published by Bloomsbury in January 2022. She currently lives in Cincinnati where she is pursuing a PhD in Fiction Writing.

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Flash fiction, slashing word counts, and obliterating genre, oh my!

About the Book:

Deborah A. Lott grew up in a Los Angeles suburb in the 1950s, under the sway of her outrageously eccentric father. A lay rabbi who enjoyed dressing up like Little Lord Fauntleroy, he taught her how to have fun. But he also taught her to fear germs, other children, and contamination from the world at large. Deborah was so deeply bonded to her father and his peculiar worldview that when he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him.

Sanity is not always a choice, but for sixteen-year-old Deborah, lines had to be drawn between reality and her own “overactive imagination.” She saved herself through an unconventional reading of Moby Dick, a deeply awkward sexual awakening, and entry into the world of political activism as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign.

After attending Kennedy’s last stop at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his assassination, Deborah would come to a new reckoning with loss. Ultimately, she would find her own path, and her own way of turning grief into love.

About Deborah:

Deborah A. Lott is a writer, editor, and college instructor. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely. Her work has been thrice named as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, and thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her book, Don’t Go Crazy Without Me has been acclaimed by writers Mark Doty, Abigail Thomas, Paul Lisicky, Karen E. Bender, Hope Edelman, among others. She is also the author of the book In Session: the Bond between Women and Their Therapists, which was widely praised for its unprecedented look at boundary and transference dilemmas in psychotherapy. Lott surveyed and interviewed several hundred women in gathering the research for that work. The book continues to be used to train psychotherapists nationwide and appears on multiple consumer websites as one of the top books ever written about the psychotherapy relationship.

Lott serves as a faculty member at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and literature courses, and serves as Editor to Two Hawks Quarterly. Among other courses, she has developed The Trauma Memoir, Lolita and Her Literary Sisters, and Representations of Childhood in Literature.

As an independent editor, Lott has worked with a number of published authors developing articles, web content, books, academic monographs, and other material

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Twitter: @deborahlott8

About the Book:

In this intrepid debut essay collection, Melissa Faliveno traverses the liminal spaces of her childhood in working-class Wisconsin and the paths she’s traveled since, compelled by questions of girlhood and womanhood, queerness and class, and how the lands of our upbringing both define and complicate us even long after we’ve left. Part personal narrative, part cultural reportage, TOMBOYLAND navigates midwestern traditions, mythologies, landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. From F5 tornadoes and fast-pitch softball to gun culture, strange glacial terrains, kink party potlucks, and the question of motherhood, TOMBOYLAND asks curious and critical questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman, family, and home.

About Melissa:

About the Book:

An eight-year-old trauma victim is enlisted as an underground courier, rushing frozen organs through the alleys of Eastern Europe. A young janitor transforms discarded objects into a fantastical, sprawling miniature city until a shocking discovery forces him to rethink his creation. A brazen child tells off a pack of schoolyard tormentors with the spirited invention of an eleventh commandment. A wounded man drives eastward, through tears and grief, toward an unexpected transcendence.

About Lidia:

About the Book:

From internationally bestselling Argentine author Pedro Mairal and Man Booker International-winning translator Jennifer Croft, the unforgettable story of two would-be lovers over the course of a single day.

Lucas Pereyra, an unemployed writer in his forties, embarks on a day trip from Buenos Aires to Montevideo to pick up fifteen thousand dollars in cash. An advance due to him on his upcoming novel, the small fortune might mean the solution to his problems, most importantly the unbearable tension he has with his wife. While she spends her days at work and her nights out on the town-with a lover, perhaps, he doesn't know for sure- Lucas is stuck at home all day staring at the blank page, caring for his son Maiko and fantasizing about the one thing that keeps him going: the Uruguayan woman he met at a conference several months back and who he is longing to see on his day trip to Montevideo.

The surprising, moving story of this incredibly impactful day in Lucas' life, The Woman from Uruguay is both a gripping narrative and tender, thought-provoking exploration of the nature of relationships. An international bestseller published in twelve countries, it is the masterpiece of one of Latin America's most beloved writers.

About Pedro:

Pedro Mairal is a professor of English literature in Buenos Aires. In 1998 he was awarded the Premio Clarín and in 2007 he was included in the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 list, which named the 39 best Latin American authors under 39. Among his novels are A Night with Sabrina Love, which was made into a film and widely translated, and The Woman from Uruguay, which was a bestseller in Latin America and Spain and has been published in twelve countries.

About Jennifer:

Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for her novel Homesick, originally written in Spanish. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review and has published her own work and numerous translations in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

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Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was named a Best Book of 2017 by Esquire, Book Riot, The Cut, Electric Literature, Bustle, Medium, Refinery29, The Brooklyn Rail, Salon, The Rumpus, and others. Her second essay collection, Girlhood, was published by Bloomsbury on March 30, 2021. A craft book, Body Work, will be published by Catapult in 2022.

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Judith is a writer who lives in Baltimore, MD, and was born and raised in Africa.  She graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BA in Drama and History of Art, working as a professional actor before becoming the arts editor for SAfm at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Judith joined WBJC shortly after immigrating to the United States in the late 1990s.

It was a joy to sit down with Meredith O'Brien to talk about her COVID-era memoir, UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB. We explore her experiences with a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis through her lens of investigative journalism. In our conversation, she uncovers the all-too-prevalent patriarchal notion that women don't know their bodies as she struggles to get her diagnosis. 

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A Boston area writer, Meredith has authored four books and co-authored one, including Mr. Clark’s Big Band, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award and was a finalist for a Foreword Reviews INDIES Award. She teaches journalism at Northeastern University, where she also serves as a writing coach.

Uncomfortably Numb: a memoir (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2020), author

This medical memoir traces the moment Meredith first experiences what she later learns is a multiple sclerosis symptom, through the two-year diagnostic process, and, ultimately to the other side where she had to make an uneasy peace with the incurable and chronic disease of the central nervous system.

TW: Violence, Rape, Drugs

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: a name as poetic as his prose and as his book is necessary for us right now. Listen in as we discuss his earth-shattering debut novel, WINTER COUNTS. We talk about Indigenous rights, decolonization, characterization, and how fiction writing has the potential to change policy.

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David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is author of the novel WINTER COUNTS (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020).  WINTER COUNTS is a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and has been selected as an Amazon Best Book of August, Best of the Month by Apple Books, a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and was an Indie Next Great Reads pick.

Weiden is also the author of the children’s book SPOTTED TAIL (Reycraft, 2019), a biography of the great Lakota leader and winner of the 2020 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.  He’s published in the New York Times, Shenandoah, Yellow Medicine Review, Transmotion, Criminal Class Review, Tribal College Journal, and other magazines.  He’s the fiction editor for Anomaly, journal of international literature and arts, and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, the MFA program in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the low-residency MFA program at Western Colorado University.

He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts, his law degree from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s an alumnus of VONA, a Tin House Scholar, a MacDowell Fellow, a Ragdale Foundation resident, and received the PEN/America Writing for Justice Fellowship.  He’s an active member of the Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, Western Writers of America, and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers.  He’s Professor of Native American Studies and Political Science at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and lives in Colorado with his two sons.

His last name, Weiden, is pronounced “Why-den.” Heska Wanbli is pronounced “Heh-ska Wahn-blee.”  His nation, the Sicangu Lakota, is pronounced “See-chon-goo Lah-coat-ah.

Listen in as Sarina Prabasi and I discuss the political state of the nation, the effects of COVID-19 on small businesses like Buunni Coffee, the joy and rage of motherhood, and more.

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Listen in as the wonderful Michele Filgate and I discuss her anthology WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT (Simon & Schuster, 2019) on Mother's Day. And Italy, a lot of conversation about Italy. Beyond that, we tackle immense loss, mother figures, the editing process, and more.

Currently, Michele is an M.F.A. student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. Her work has appeared in countless publications including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, The Rumpus, Salon, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She teaches creative writing at NYU and is the founder of the Red Ink series.

Find links to her work here:

For my 15th episode, I sat down with someone who, for me, was a life-changer and a game-changer: poet, essayist, and scholar Adrianne Kalfopoulou. She lives and teaches in Athens, Greece where she currently heads the English and Modern Languages Dept. at Deree College. Lucky for me, she is also a poetry and nonfiction faculty mentor in the low residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University. She has taught in the Masters Program of the Englisches Seminar at the University of Freiburg, the Graduate Writing Program at New York University, and writing workshops at the University of Edinburgh, and the Aegean Arts Circle on the island of Andros. Her scholarly work has focused on 19th and 20th century American literature, and more recently Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influence on Sylvia Plath's poems.

Listen in as we discuss personal history, immigration in the era of Trump, the importance of voting for a not-so-ideal candidate, pain pornography, letting a piece of writing lie fallow, travel & identity, and so much more. Adrianne is truly a brilliant scholar and thinker of our time, there is something for everyone in this episode -- not to be missed.

Find Kalfopoulou's works below:

(TW: Sexual Abuse, Depression, Suicidal Ideation)