Category: Interviews

Interviews

Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove

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Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove

Liam Higginson’s The Hill in the Dark Grove is a gorgeously written folk horror with a compelling atmosphere of mounting dread. At sixty-five years old, Carwyn is facing the knowledge that the farm his family has owned in the mountains of northern Wales will likely end with him. Rhian, his wife and partner since they were teenagers, had the brilliance to go anywhere and do anything with her life, if only she hadn’t fallen in love with Carwyn, his family, and with working the farm. Mountain life is hard but not harsh – at least not harsh in a way anyone with a rural upbringing wouldn’t recognize – but forest figures some might call myths are never far from the dark crags of this landscape. The perils of sheep farming all seem to come to a head at once, making Carwyn and Rhian fear they might be living under a curse.

For as long as Carwyn can remember, his family’s land has coughed up trinkets from eras past, including a figurine with odd energy which makes him not want to keep it in the house. Then the overgrown lower pasture reveals itself, and Carwyn believes he’s found the secret to saving his farm. Rhian wants to support her husband’s new interest in the field he’s avoided his whole life, but when curiosity descends into obsession, she has to decide whether she can trust this new version of the man she loves.

I’ve rarely felt so engulfed by a reading experience. Even as my fear built over what was to follow, I could not stop turning pages to find out what would become of this couple. Liam and I spoke via email about the parallels between Welsh and Native storytelling, the importance of Welsh voices telling Welsh stories, and what it’s like to be an outsider artist. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Interviews

In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?

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In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?

Téa Mutonji‘s My Person opens on an ordinary evening that will not stay ordinary: Tania and Margot, best friends of over twenty years, are getting ready to host their monthly dinner party when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore. It is a small sentence that detonates a life. What follows is not a plot in the traditional sense but a slow unraveling — a “rigorous revision of history,” as the novel puts it — in which two women, one lack and the other white, who have loved each other since girlhood are forced to ask what, exactly, they have been to one another all this time.

Set against the frame of a tense, cross-race and class, will-they-won’t-they breakup power dynamics, My Person follows Tania’s meditative, often wry narration as she tries to live loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s world, even as Margot’s old betrayals come into sharper focus. But Mutonji refuses to let anyone play villain or victim. Margot means well — doesn’t she? They had felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania simply been blind to the patterns all along? The book keeps that ambiguity alive until its final pages, less interested in assigning blame than in understanding how two people build a shared history — and how brutal it is to dismantle one.

Threaded through the friendship story is an unflinching look at race, class, and privilege, and the quiet, corrosive weight of what is owed between people who love each other unevenly. In the interview that follows, Mutonji speaks about naming the book, writing without villains, and why a friendship breakup felt like the truest container for everything she wanted to explore.

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Interviews, my reading life

How ‘Are You My Mother?’ Followed Leslie Bazzett All the Way to ‘Mia’

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How ‘Are You My Mother?’ Followed Leslie Bazzett All the Way to ‘Mia’

Leslie Bazzett is a writer whose fiction has appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and elsewhere. A finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award and recipient of the NER Award for Emerging Writers, she now makes her debut with Mia, a stylish, unsettling work of psychological suspense about reinvention, obsession, and the dangerous allure of becoming someone else.

Set in San Miguel de Allende, Mia follows Sally, an American living in Mexico for a year with her husband and children, after she falls under the spell of Louise, a glamorous and severe older expat. What begins as an intense friendship takes a stranger turn when Louise starts calling Sally “Mia” and introducing her as her daughter. As Sally embraces the possibility of a new identity while hiding the relationship from her husband, the boundaries between performance and reality begin to collapse, turning the novel into a twisted exploration of mothers and daughters, self-invention, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

We asked Bazzett to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews

Rebecca Wright Stevens on true crime, violence against Indigenous women, and the nonstop daylight of Alaskan summers

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Rebecca Wright Stevens on true crime, violence against Indigenous women, and the nonstop daylight of Alaskan summers

In Sisters of the Midnight Sun, Rebecca Wright Stevens has crafted a compelling nonfiction story about the real-life double homicide of two sisters within the Alaskan Iñupiat community. Drawing on her experience as a public defender assigned to one murder suspect, the book is a portrait of a community affected by violence against Native women. The book weaves together personal moments in Stevens’ life with specifics of her work on the murder case. 

Sisters of the Midnight Sun is both a gripping crime narrative and a self-portrait (Stevens declares herself an outsider.) Her descriptions are sharp and vivid throughout. And her depiction of setting is compelling, from courtroom scenes to the Alaskan landscape. The book’s title nods to how the sun can stay out for 24 hours in northern Alaskan summers. Stevens describes it as a “sun so bright it made your eyes wince until you could get behind blackout curtains and hide.” Stevens has written a book that is singular and unflinching.

We spoke via email with Stevens about the years she spent writing Sisters of the Midnight Sun, her inspirations, and the difficulty of placing a book that blends genres. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Continue reading “Rebecca Wright Stevens on true crime, violence against Indigenous women, and the nonstop daylight of Alaskan summers” →
Interviews

When Harry Met Sally Met Marguerite Duras: Inside the Mind of Annie Lord, Author of The Project

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When Harry Met Sally Met Marguerite Duras: Inside the Mind of Annie Lord, Author of The Project

Annie Lord has served as British Vogue’s dating columnist and previously wrote a darkly comic memoir about the demise of her five-year relationship. So it’s no surprise that she knows all the romcom tropes and subverts them with aplomb in her fiction debut The Project. The novel reads as a modern Pygmalion in reverse, with best friends Daisy and Maya pledging to emotionally, culturally, and stylistically make-over their laddy friend James. It’s all too easy to connect with these funny, flawed characters—likewise with Lord, even over email and across six time zones. Her responses to my questions—covering everything from her favorite Marguerite Duras quote to how to write a good bad sex scene—were candid and charming. No doubt she’d make a great romcom heroine.

Continue reading “When Harry Met Sally Met Marguerite Duras: Inside the Mind of Annie Lord, Author of The Project” →
Interviews

Devyn Defoe on Burnside, Lemony Snicket, and Writing the End Times

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Devyn Defoe on Burnside, Lemony Snicket, and Writing the End Times

In Burnside, Devyn Defoe paints an end-of-days portrait of two young women in California that manages to make you laugh, break your heart, and double-check that you’re actually awake and not in some absurdist hallucination. Referred to as a “signature chronicle of our American endtimes” by author Chang-rae Lee, Defoe’s unforgettable characters navigate patriarchy, climate crises, and a whole host of issues for which we can thank late-stage capitalism. 

I sat down with Devyn Defoe to discuss how Burnside came to be, the enduring influence of Lemony Snicket, and the endless rewards of bookselling. 

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Interviews

Stacey Yu on Love, Magic, and Coming of Age in New York City

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Stacey Yu on Love, Magic, and Coming of Age in New York City

Kitten by Stacey Yu, one of Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books, follows protagonist Katie, who is fresh out of university and desperate not to enter the adult world quite yet. When she goes to the Hamptons with her boyfriend James, she becomes instantly enamored with his cat Silver. 

Across Katie’s dynamics with James and Silver, we understand the wound of her upbringing: her enmeshment with her mother, her anxious attachment, and her tendency to seek what is familiar over what is healthy or good. In Silver, she sees the potential for the eternal and pure childhood that she so craves, but she also knows that this desire is impossible.

Katie wants to be both left alone and folded into the world. She wants to be free of responsibility but she also wants to have purpose and grounding. Ultimately, she has to set herself (and Silver) free from these impossible oppositions, and choose a path forward. 

Stacey and I spoke about how this tender coming-of-age novel came to be, and the redemptive quality of small, simple choices. The conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Interviews, my reading life

Leila Renee was shaped by Toni Morrison, Goosebumps, and The Phantom Tollbooth

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Leila Renee was shaped by Toni Morrison, Goosebumps, and The Phantom Tollbooth

Leila Renee is a writer whose fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and a Fulbright Award, and an MFA graduate of Syracuse University, she now makes her debut with Soft Spots, a darkly funny, emotionally incisive novel about family estrangement, obsession, and the difficult work of forgiveness.

Soft Spots follows recent college graduate Robin Clarke after she flees her abusive family for a teaching job in South Bend, Indiana. As Robin becomes increasingly consumed by her dysfunctional school, her seemingly perfect roommate, and the possibility of reconciliation with her ailing father, the novel explores memory, self-sabotage, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

We asked Renee to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

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Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

What makes a great short story collection? In Debutiful’s latest Q&A series, Inside the Collection, short story writers will take readers through their writing, editing, and sequencing of their debut short story collection.

In Please Don’t Touch the Body, Emily Doyle delivers eleven inventive, genre-bending stories that explore the vulnerabilities, contradictions, and strange absurdities of modern life. Moving effortlessly between the surreal and the deeply human, the collection follows characters searching for agency, intimacy, and belonging—from a woman reclaiming herself through an anonymous advice column to Ronald Reagan reincarnated as a puppy and a young woman untangling the expectations of her religious upbringing from her own desires. By turns funny, unsettling, and emotionally resonant, Please Don’t Touch the Body announces Doyle as a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction. Doyle is also the author of the forthcoming novel Encounter. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sun, and elsewhere, and she has received numerous honors, including the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award and the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Participant Scholarship. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Riverside.

In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Doyle takes readers inside her debut short story collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body.

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