Grace Spulak’s debut collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, winner of Autumn House Press’ 2025 Rising Writer Prize, gathers eleven stories set mostly in rural New Mexico among people pushed to the margins. The lives here belong to queer women, non-binary folks, and kids who’ve slipped or been shoved past the edge of any safety net: the poor, the dispossessed, those for whom institutional neglect and violence are not interruptions but the terms of daily life. Darkness is the backdrop – yet the stories are less interested in tallying damage than in tracking the ways these characters angle toward a scrap of light and try to improvise an exit where none really exists.
With a JD from Harvard Law School and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers—where she and I first met—Grace brings a double education in law and literature to Magdalena’s formal decisions. Nearly a decade representing children and young people in New Mexico’s courts has made her attuned to the small, skewed survival narratives people build when no one believes them, and the collection moves through those registers: the borrowed textures of trial transcripts and corporate jargon, the slippages in point of view, the sentence that can withhold and indict in the same breath.
She and I spoke via email about these formal gambits and about why fiction, precisely because it fractures, distorts, and rearranges, sometimes get closer to what’s happened than any official record. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Holiday Dmitri: Hi Grace, we know each other from our MFA program, and I remember reading one of your short stories in workshop, which I love is now part of this collection. Warren Wilson is famous for its rigor and its almost obsessively granular attention to craft. When you look at Magdalena now, what from that world is still in your work—and what did you have to shed or unlearn from workshop wisdom to write these stories the way you wanted to?
Grace Spulak: I think overall what I took from the MFA program is that there are so many ways to tell stories and use language, and I felt this gave me permission to push the stories in Magdalena in ways that I might not otherwise have done—to move between points of view in a single story or to borrow forms and language from other domains.
One moment in Magdalena that is directly influenced by a Warren Wilson craft lecture is the way I use perspective in “Many Glacier,” which takes place during a hiking trip and traces the narrator’s relationship with her sister. On the face of it, this story might seem like a straightforward first-person narration, but I tried to be very intentional about where the narrator slips into a collective first-person narration (“we did this” as opposed to “I did this”) and what that might show about her hopes for the relationship and the realities of the relationship. The narrator wants to function as a “we” with her sister, but the gaps between them are too great. I came to the idea about using perspective in this way after a lecture about mapping moves in perspective at Warren Wilson, and I felt this was a way to use the story’s structure to reflect the narrator’s hopes and limitations, to build these emotional states in the linguistic architecture of the story.
And another story that speaks to some of the unlearning is “The Literal,” which takes place in a writing program and asks questions about some of the conventions we create for stories in these programs. At one moment, the protagonist imagines her life as a workshop story and how she would receive feedback about which things to cut because they don’t fit particular ideas about stories—there is too much grief, too much disconnect, and she has no memory of critical events that would allow her to create causal relationships between various of her choices. Part of my work in the MFA program was understanding what craft elements and narrative conventions would serve the stories I wanted to write and which would actually function as limitations. I came to the idea about using perspective in this way after a lecture about mapping moves in perspective at Warren Wilson, and I felt this was a way to use the story’s structure to reflect the narrator’s hopes and limitations, to build these emotional states in the linguistic architecture of the story.
HD: You move between law and literature, which feel like they have totally different rules about truth, proof, responsibility—about what “really happened.” When you’re writing fiction after years in courtrooms, how do those competing ideas of reality work their way into the structures or voices of your stories?
GS: I spent close to ten years representing children and young people in my home state of New Mexico. My clients were often young parents, in foster care, involved in the juvenile justice system, or homeless. One thing I discovered about law early in my career is that it really is another method of storytelling. There are so many rules to the legal system that feel arcane and arbitrary, but if you know the rules and how to use them to your advantage, you can create a narrative that actually might have nothing to do with “what really happened,” but that will allow you to win a legal case in some way. And one of the things about the legal system that I wanted to interrogate in my writing is how these ideas about proof and evidence often fail to actually get at any sense of truth or accountability for the people involved in the court system. In a situation like that, what good do narratives and stories do? And this is a question I tried to push to certain extremes in various stories in this collection.
I think my experience with the law and seeing how it can omit certain narratives and experiences gave me an interest in exploring ambivalence and the gaps in our understanding. I’m interested not only in how stories might help us make sense of some of the exclusions and injustices I saw in my work as an attorney but how stories themselves can exclude. For example, in the legal system only certain people can come to court and make claims. And these claims have to be phrased in certain ways. And fiction allowed me to explore some of these exclusions and the faith we put in stories as a society.
HD: Got it. So, when you’re drawing on your work and your life, how do you navigate the line between what really happened and what ends up on the page? Like are there ethical principles you lean on for how closely a story is allowed to echo an actual case or person?
GS: For me, fiction has been a way to address some of those stories that felt “too-close.” With fiction, I can take details from life and mix them up in kaleidoscopic fashion and find new patterns that I might not have seen if I was merely trying to follow the path of an actual event. And I can invent to explore some of the troubling things I’ve seen in my work and my own life. For example, one of the things many of the stories in Magdalena examine is the way memory or lack of memory impacts people’s understanding of and experience of trauma. And this is something that was born from my own experiences of trauma. But I didn’t feel that I could tell a meaningful story about this subject just relating my own experience, in part because I didn’t fully understand what my own position about it was. I needed to be able to fictionalize, to change details, to take many different positions and approaches.
HD: Right. You’ve talked about these stories coming out of your own experiences of violence and trauma, and out of years working with kids who’ve been through similar things. How do those lived experiences shape what you’re drawn to on the page—the kinds of narratives you write, the situations you circle back to, the characters you can’t quite let go of?
GS: I think I return to these stories about people who have experienced violence and trauma because I feel the stories I write about these subjects don’t exist in mainstream literary fiction. There aren’t a lot of stories about poor and queer people in rural New Mexico. There aren’t a lot of stories about people involved with the child welfare system in rural New Mexico. And even though there may be a lot of stories about violence and trauma, I didn’t see a lot of stories that felt true to my experiences of violence and trauma as a queer person and a person with a brain injury. I trace a lot of the formal choices I make in my writing to an event eleven years ago, when I survived a home invasion and sexual and physical assault. The way I wrote after this event felt fractured and repetitive and forced me to think about how I might create narrative rhythms and forms that reflect the unexpected ways survivors of violence use narrative.
HD: When you’re working with material that’s close to your own history, how do you sort through it on a practical level? What helps you decide which pieces of lived experience are fair game for fiction and which belong only to you?
GS: This is such a hard question because it so often depends on the material and how I’m using it. Often, I take moments from my life and use them as springboards to explore not only the event itself, but some of the possibilities and “what-ifs” that event gave rise to in my imagination. What if I had responded in a different way? What if the outcome of a particular case had been different? What if this person had made a different choice about something? Something I’m always doing in my fiction is not only interrogating what has happened to me but what might have happened and what possibilities I might have missed.
HD: Tell me about your path to becoming a writer.
GS: My path to becoming a writer feels so strange and fortuitous. My mother was a single parent, and I was the oldest of five children, and I felt really responsible for my family in many ways. And so I thought, maybe I’ll go to law school. And tied up in my interest in going to law school was this interest I had in support children and young people who were involved in the legal system the way my siblings and I had been. I felt that people listened to lawyers in a way they might not listen to writers. But as I’ve mentioned, I also felt like law was not a way to tell stories about certain truths, and so I returned to fiction and ultimately decided to get an MFA to give me a way to think more rigorously about how to write fiction.
HD: I remember you saying somewhere that what counts as “commercially or politically acceptable” feels like it’s really narrowing. While you were putting Magdalena together, did you ever hit a point where you thought, “This might be too much—too much trauma, heartbreak, darkness” or some version of that?
GS: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard in workshops that a piece of mine is “too dark,” or will be “too much” for readers. And I always felt that owed something to people like many of my clients or myself or my own mother, who had been told over and over that their lives were too dark or too difficult. I didn’t want those experiences to be erased from literature because they might be “hard” for some people. But at the same time, I’m also ambivalent about writing about bad things over and over for the sake of writing about bad things. I want to offer some possibilities for transformation or call for change.
Ecuadorian writer, Maria Fernanda Ampuero says about her stories, that they “might seem obscene, insufferable, or […] gruesome, shocking and sordid, but they don’t leave you indifferent and that is exactly what I want.” I feel similarly about my own fiction. I want to create discomfort, both in my readers and in myself. I was very fortunate with this book that I got to work with wonderful editors who really supported my vision and didn’t push me to make things “happier.”
HD: I’m glad you were able to stay true to the stories you felt called to tell. Let’s end on a more hopeful note. I’d love to hear about the books that got you through hard times—the ones you reached for when everything felt untenable. Which writers or books were the secret interlocutors for Magdalena, the voices you felt yourself in conversation with as you were writing these stories?
GS: I looked to writers like Gayl Jones and Dorothy Allison who write directly and unflinchingly about violence and queerness. I also look to writers like K-Ming Chang and Carmen Maria Machado who are using formal experimentation and surrealism to talk about violence and marginalization. And finally, two of the texts I go back to again and again when I’m struggling are Hamlet and Antigone. These seem strangely conventional for someone who thinks of themselves as unconventional, but I think one of the reasons both of these texts are so compelling to me is because they are about what happens when someone finds themselves completely at odds with the power structures in their society and can’t or won’t make concessions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Grace Spulak is a writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico. She is the author of Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, winner of the 2025 Rising Writer Prize, selected by K-Ming Chang. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work was awarded Witness Magazine‘s 2021 Literary Award in Fiction and has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, Nimrod International Journal, and Southwest Review, among others, and her work has received support from Trillium Arts, New Mexico Writers, and Poets & Writers.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Holiday Dmitri is an independent journalist and fiction writer whose work explores interconnectedness and how we make meaning in a hyper-networked world. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Taipei Times, The Chicago Criterion, and Reason Magazine. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and lives in Brooklyn, where she is at work on a technology-themed debut novel.