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Continue reading “Debutiful Podcast: Avery Curran discusses Spoiled Milk”Debutiful Podcast: Avery Curran discusses Spoiled Milk
Category: Interviews
Rachel Knox on Leaving, Longing, and Reclaiming Florida in Anywhere Else
Hiding behind the title of Rachel Knox’s debut, Anywhere Else: Essays on Florida, is a braided set of reckonings, of leaving, longing, and return, asking not just what home is, but who gets to define a place so overdetermined in the national story. Knox’s Anywhere Else resists the easy narratives that so often flatten Florida into caricature. What emerges instead is a place rendered through accumulation—of memory, media, desire, contradiction—where personal history and cultural myth are in constant negotiation. These essays trace not a single arc of departure and return, but a series of recursive encounters with “home,” each one reframing what it means to belong to a place so frequently misunderstood, dismissed, or reduced to spectacle.
Knox writes with an attention that is both intimate and analytical, moving fluidly between lived experience and cultural critique. An anecdote opens outward; a fragment of pop culture refracts a deeper emotional truth; a landscape becomes charged with the weight of history. The essay form suits her precisely because it allows for this elasticity—this capacity to hold multiple temporalities and meanings at once. Florida, in her hands, is neither simply refuge nor aberration, but something far more unstable and generative: a site where identity is shaped through tension, distortion, and reclamation.
What is especially striking is Knox’s refusal to resolve these tensions. Instead, she lingers in them, attentive to the ways narratives about place are constructed and imposed, by outsiders, by institutions, and by those who call it home. In doing so, she restores texture to a landscape often stripped of it, insisting on its complexity without sentimentality.
The conversation that follows extends these concerns, offering insight into Knox’s approach, her investment in the essay as a form, and her commitment to reimagining Florida not as an anomaly or as a meme, but as a lens through which broader American realities come into focus.
Continue reading “Rachel Knox on Leaving, Longing, and Reclaiming Florida in Anywhere Else”The Boyhood of Cain author Michael Amherst is always inspired by JM Coetzee and Damon Galgut
Michael Amherst‘s The Boyhood of Cain originally came out in March 2025. Now, the paperback of the book, which André Aciman called “A powerful, searing tale told by a boy facing the plenitude of life but hemmed in by a world so…ordinary that he can’t wait either to flee it or be drowned in it,” has been released.
We chatted with Amherst a year ago when the hardcover of The Boyhood of Cain came out. Now, we’ve asked him to answer our reucrring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.
Continue reading “The Boyhood of Cain author Michael Amherst is always inspired by JM Coetzee and Damon Galgut”Debut Author Tara Menon Explores Friendship and Grief in Under Water, Spanning Tsunami to Hurricane Sandy
Under Water, the debut novel from Tara Menon, is a compelling exploration of friendship, grief, and the fluidity of both. With two natural disasters – the 2004 tsunami in Thailand that claimed a quarter of a million lives, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as it made landfall in New York City – framing the story.
Throughout the novel, Menon weaves themes of uniqueness and extinction, distillation and expansion, into the language of sea life, flora, and fauna, as well as the beautiful bond between these two young girls. The story also deftly explores the relationship between the consumer and the consumed, and how we live as both, with varying degrees of awareness and complicity.
I spoke with Menon about her writing background, writing her debut, and how the structure came to be.
Continue reading “Debut Author Tara Menon Explores Friendship and Grief in Under Water, Spanning Tsunami to Hurricane Sandy”Debutiful Podcast: Casey Scieszka discusses The Fountain
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Continue reading “Debutiful Podcast: Casey Scieszka discusses The Fountain”Salt Lakes author Caroline Tracey listened to Bright Eyes every night in high school
Caroline Tracey‘s debut book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatrual History, follows the writer and geographer across four continents as she documents the beauty and alarming decline of the world’s salt lakes, from Utah’s Great Salt Lake to the remnants of the Aral Sea. Blending travel writing, environmental reporting, and memoir, Tracey explores the people, ecosystems, and histories tied to these fragile waters while reflecting on her own journey toward queer love and a sense of home in a world shaped by ecological change.
We asked Tracey to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
Continue reading “Salt Lakes author Caroline Tracey listened to Bright Eyes every night in high school”Antiquating the Self: An Interview with Antediluvian Poet Kameryn Alexa Carter
Kameryn Alexa Carter is a Black poet and the founding co-editor of Emergent Literary, an online journal for the work of black and brown artists. Her work has appeared in Bennington Review, Phoebe Journal, Torch Literary Arts, The Best American Poetry, Portable Gray, and elsewhere. She was a 2024 Pushcart Prize winner and is a poetry student in the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh. Her debut poetry collection, Antediluvian, which was born in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, explores what it means to go within, literally and figuratively.
In a virtual chat, I talked to Carter about how this collection came to be, discerning between the author and the speaker of the work, and what writing life looks like.
Continue reading “Antiquating the Self: An Interview with Antediluvian Poet Kameryn Alexa Carter”Kate Schatz read sociopolitical and historical nonfiction to ground Where the Girls Were
Kate Schatz, known for co-writing the New York Times bestselling author of Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book with W. Kamau Bell and the Rad Women book series, is back with her debut solo novel.
Where the Girls Were is about a promising 17-year-old in 1968 whose carefully planned future collapses when an unexpected pregnancy sends her to a home for unwed mothers. Inside the restrictive world of the maternity home, she confronts shame, limited choices, and societal judgment while finding solidarity and strength among the other girls forced into silence.
We asked Schatz to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
Continue reading “Kate Schatz read sociopolitical and historical nonfiction to ground Where the Girls Were”Inside The Body Builders: Albertine Clarke on Dreams, Identity, and the Psychology of Writing
Albertine Clarke’s debut novel, The Body Builders, is a surreal daydream. In it, we look into the protagonist Ada’s subconscious as she struggles to see herself through mirrors, through her own family members, and through the mysterious facility where the middle section of the book takes place. Symbols and dreams are the skeleton of this novel. Together they form an unconscious portrait that considers whether we can ever really know who we are. It is a debut novel from a writer of unparalleled vision into her own unbroken chain of spirit.
Albertine and I sat together in a café in Brooklyn, drinking tea, while an elderly woman loudly played the piano and sang Death Cab for Cutie songs off-key. At times, we misunderstood each other, and at others, we seemed to almost coalesce on an understanding of literature, the dialectic, and why childhood pets die.
Continue reading “Inside The Body Builders: Albertine Clarke on Dreams, Identity, and the Psychology of Writing”Scott Broker on The Disappointment: Grief, Art, and the Brutal Honesty of Love
Life is anticipation. Are the moments that shape our lives the result of our own actions? Or are they the culmination of the long-dammed reservoirs of other peoples’ desires: The delayed dreams of parents. The yearnful longings of spouses. The anxiety-fueled goals that drive individual pursuit of fame, fortune, and fulfillment. Welcome to The Disappointment, Scott Broker’s debut novel, a portrait of a couple navigating the emotional minefields of incapacitating grief amid the burdensome responsibilities (demands?) of love. Partners for more than a decade, over a weekend trip Jack and Randy confront death, fame, and infidelity, questioning their affection and loyalty for each other while they simultaneously, systematically (and sometimes brutally) deconstruct the choices they’ve made about the trajectory of their relationship and artistic careers. The interiority of their conflicts is intimately wrought, painful in its delicacy and brazenly, bravely human. The novel is replete with moments of their tender fondness for each other, but also offers perspective on the complicated, at times horrific, honesty of love from those who supposedly know – and love – us the most. Scott and I spoke via email. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.
Continue reading “Scott Broker on The Disappointment: Grief, Art, and the Brutal Honesty of Love”