Category: Interview

Encounters with Unexpected Animals: Stories
Bret Anthony Johnston
Random House
$28.00
Publication date: February 24, 2026

Petit: Before we dive into the book, what are some influential works (prose, visual art, music, etc.) or events that you might say contributed to the creation of Encounters with Unexpected Animals?

Johnston: First and foremost, thank you for taking an interest in the book and for reading it so closely, so kindly; I’m really grateful.

More than any specific work, most of the influence came from writers and artists I admire. A grossly incomplete list of people whom I wish would have more influence on my work might be: Amy Hempel, Jorie Graham, Ethan Canin, PJ Harvey, Edward P. Jones, Chekhov, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Jack Gilbert, Toni Morrison, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Tim McIlrath. There are countless others, but these artists come immediately to mind.

There are also myriad experiences, but in hopes of not boring everyone to death, I’ll just offer two: Years ago, on a skate trip to Houston, I walked into a hotel and there were hundreds of clowns in the lobby. They were there for an annual clown convention, and I spent much of the weekend attending their panels and presentations. Then, much more recently, a buddy of mine thought a snake had slithered under his refrigerator, so he called me over to search for it. Both of those experiences gave rise to stories in the new collection.

Petit: This collection enjoys an outstanding title. I felt that each story pursues an answer to the title’s meaning. At what point in the writing process did this title come about? What does the phrase “encounters with unexpected animals” mean to you?

Johnston: Thank you! I’d always liked the title of that story, but it wasn’t until we were putting the collection together that it distinguished itself as the right one for the book. As for what it means, lordy, I have no idea. That’s just not the way my mind works or engages with language. I can say, though, that it matters to me that it’s not the encounters that are unexpected but how the characters, and perhaps the readers, ultimately define the concept of what is or isn’t animal.

Petit: With each story, I quickly acclimated to its sense of place, space, and time. Place can be tough for beginning writers. In terms of craft, as an instructor of writing, do you advise your students to establish setting early in a story. If so, how?

Johnston: For me, place determines the story. Setting is far more than window dressing; it’s a force that compels the characters, their actions, the story itself. I feel as though we undergo the places we inhabit, and they move through us as much as we move through them. I don’t know that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to establishing place in a narrative; rather, it feels like it permeates the story in the same way voice does. As a reader and writer, I’m always seeking the detail that suggests a hundred others. I’m dowsing for the image or description that will animate the place in the reader’s imagination.

Petit: In “Paradeability,” a child surprises his father with the wish to become a rodeo clown instead of a football player. This generates a way for the two to grieve the loss of the child’s mother. When writing, do you plan for these synchronicities, or do you imagine your way into the narrative and let the characters surprise you?

Johnston: If a story doesn’t surprise me, no one will ever read it. Everything I write—from a sentence to a novel—is an act of chasing surprise. When I’m deliberating if I want to commit to writing something—knowing how miserably slow I am as a writer—I’ll usually begin with an image of a character doing something. With “Paradeability” it was the image of a father and son driving at night with the interior light on in the cab of the truck. Once I figured out the kid had the light on because he was reading, I wanted to know he was reading. Then, once that answer emerged, I wanted to know where they were going. The surprises are nested in the details and actions, and ultimately—if I do my job and if I’m lucky—reveal the characters.

Petit: In “Palomino,” Mr. Haslam has delusions of being a cowboy and buying a horse; in reality, he buys an ’86 Chevy Silverado from someone mourning a past relationship. Here, as in other stories, you navigate difficult themes like love, loss, and grief, but you bind them to cars and cowboys and unexpected Texas touchstones. How do you balance the universal with the mundane?

Johnston: The writer David Mitchell should be added to my list of influences above, not least because I remember him saying that if you try to write about the universe, you’ll never write about the brick wall in front of you; however, if you write about the brick wall in front of you, you’ll inevitably write about the universe. I wouldn’t know where to begin a story about love or loss or grief; those subjects feel abstract and slippery to me, and because writing is already so obnoxiously difficult, I’m not in the business of making it harder. On the other hand, a story of a man having second thoughts about selling an old truck? Sign me up! I’ll write hundreds of pages just to find out why he’s sabotaging the sale, and I’ll write hundreds more about an old timer who calls a rusted-out Chevy a palomino.

Petit: In “Dixon,” the titular character’s wife, Trish, is confused when Dixon uses the aphorism, “He didn’t think the creek would rise.” Other stories grapple with misunderstandings. Do you think there is a certain power in writing from a point of misunderstanding?

Johnston: What an interesting question! Thank you. To my way of thinking, misunderstanding is a consequence, and consequences are endlessly revelatory. What I’m most interested in, I suppose, is what leads to the consequence of misunderstanding which might be described as the characters not being fluent in the language of their hearts. They’re trying to articulate their pain, their struggles and loves, but they lack sufficient vocabulary and syntax. Like all of us, they’re longing to connect, and it’s in those misunderstandings where, I hope, we see their vulnerabilities, their fight against lonesomeness and isolation.

Petit: Teenagers feature prominently throughout. Teens experience a transitory period (puberty, the liminal space between child and adult), and exhibit behaviors their parents aren’t expecting. In media, teenagers are often the focal points of the coming-of-age story, the bildungsroman. In this collection, the parents are often the ones coming of age or bildungsroman-ing. Why did you find it important to center parents in this way in this book?

Johnston: A lot of these stories were written while I was writing We Burn Daylight. Every time the novel would try to kill me, I would sulk off and start a short story. Then, when the story tried to kill me, I’d return to the novel. The novel is told from the perspectives of two teenagers, so when one of the stories started gravitating toward characters around that age, I found myself exploring their stories and contexts through different lenses than in the novel. Maybe another way to say this is that if the teenagers were the light that illuminated the novel, then in the stories I was more drawn to the shadows that the kids’ cast or that the adults cast upon them.

Petit: My first encounter with this collection was with “Time of the Preacher” in the 2025 edition of The Best American Short Stories (Mariner). Congratulations, by the way! In the contributors’ notes, you mention that the story draws inspiration from the pandemic—a time when folks yearned for connection. How did the pandemic shape you as a writer, and has it changed your writing?

Johnston: Thank you! I’m so deeply grateful to Nicole Lamy and Celeste Ng at BASS, and Allison Wright and Paul Reyes at VQR, for giving the story such a nice home.

For the myriad ways the pandemic shaped all of us, I don’t know that it impacted my writing. I’ve always been pretty disciplined, and I was lucky to feel safe enough during that time in our lives to continue working at my normal (miserably slow) pace. In many ways, that my writing life remained unchanged was a kind of saving grace, a precious gift.

Where I did notice a change was in workshop. On the surface, writing workshops appear tailor-made for remote learning; we can still discuss the fiction the students have made and engage with published work in meaningful and productive ways. The pandemic, though, revealed in no uncertain terms how urgent and vital our being at the same table is. We need to share physical space with each other; we need to be able to walk to dinner together after workshop because that’s where the real communion—with our peers and the work itself—occurs. I think we returned to the workshop table with renewed commitment and a far deeper sense of shared enterprise.

Petit: “Young Life” is set amid the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Here the “unexpected animal” appears to be a teenager whose vulnerable inner life contrasts with a rugged exterior. In exploring the social dynamics of this place and time period, did you find yourself drawing from lived experience, the experiences of others, or from imagined lives amid these circumstances?

Johnston: All of the above! I once “babysat” a boa constrictor and would let her sunbathe in my yard, and I remember my neighbor having an Ozzy Osbourne poster and being afraid to look at it. (Irony aside: I grew to love Black Sabbath, and I was unexpectedly sort of gutted when Ozzy died.)

The story really started, though, when I heard about someone stealing wheelchairs from a store. It seemed like such a callous act that I wanted to understand who would do such a thing and why. Ultimately, it’s a pretty inconsequential element in the story, but that’s where it began. Everything else in the story, including all the characters, proceeded from that seed of dark curiosity.

Petit: The collection features stories that take place in the 1980s, the early 2000s, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. What attracted you to these decades and moments in history?

Johnston: The details, I suppose. I’ve never planned anything I’m going to write. I never start with any kind of agenda or even intention, but rather I try to follow the breadcrumbs of the details through the maze that the story is establishing through those same details. If I’m imagining a kid in his neighbor’s house crank-calling his buddy from a phone on a nightstand, I know we’re not in the era of cellphones. If I’m imagining a woman scolding her ex because he’s not using a medical-grade face covering, it’s clear we’re in the depths of the pandemic. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the images and details aren’t the décor of a house, there it’s foundation and roof; they’re the house itself.

Petit: What are some of the best books, movies, or art forms you’ve enjoyed recently?

Johnston: How much time do you have? Colm Toibin has an extraordinary new collection of stories, The News from Dublin, and I loved Jorie Graham’s most recent book of poems. I’ve been returning to Toni Morrison’s novels more and more. As for visual art, I love anything by Michael Sieben, Peter Sacks, Andy Goldsworthy, and April Gornick. That said, working with all the geniuses at the Michener Center for Writers, I spend a lot of my time reading their work—the brilliant pages that have yet to be published or produced but will be soon. They’re such extraordinary writers that I feel like I’m being given a sneak preview of some of the most important work that’s just over the horizon. Right now I’m reading a thesis that will, I have zero doubt, be published within the next few years and shape the cultural conversation. For all the fears that I have for the planet and society and basically every living thing, I have full confidence in the literature that is being made today for tomorrow’s readers.

Petit: You’ve now published two novels, two story collections, and a book on the craft of writing. Would you be interested in sharing any current projects or plans for publication following the release of Encounters with Unexpected Animals?

Johnston: I’m inching into what I hope will be a short novel, and I’ve got a few stories that are starting to shape a new collection. A dear friend of mine and I are toying with the idea of co-writing a book about skateboarding. I’m curious as to where the projects will lead, how they’ll surprise me and how often they’ll try to kill me. I feel immensely lucky that, as difficult and taxing and slow as this work is, there’s almost nothing I’d rather do.

Bret Anthony Johnston

Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally bestselling author of the books Encounters with Unexpected Animals, We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This and the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, as well as the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, Thrasher Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, he was born and raised in Texas and is the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

You Know Nothing: Stories
Yasmina Din Madden
Curbstone Books
$24.00
Publication date: February 15, 2026

Burke: What was it like gathering these stories together into a collection? How did you go about creating cohesive themes among forty-one short stories?

Madden: I found it fairly easy to gather these stories into a collection given that the themes of body, womanhood, family, rage, unknowability, distance, and desire made themselves apparent to me during the writing process and just kept showing up again and again.

Burke: What was your process for organizing the stories? As a reader, I was particularly interested in the throughline of the Vietnamese American family introduced at the beginning of the collection. What motivated you to scatter that family’s story and context?

Madden: I think the tensions that exist in this family echo out into many of the other stories in the collection—the inability to fully know or understand even those closest to us, our inability to not fully understand even our own actions. The frustration and anger the matriarch of this family feels at not being fully seen or understood are emotions and tensions that, many of the other female protagonists in the collection experience. These particular stories are scattered throughout the collection because they, like the other stories in the book, speak to overarching tensions in the collection as a whole—meaning I did not see a particular value in placing them all in one section of the collection. But as you note, the opening story in the collection centers on this family and the story that closes the book also centers on the matriarch of this family—I knew I wanted this family to bookend the collection. I really wanted to have this particular woman and mother—who is doing the best she can under complex circumstances—to have the last word.

Burke: Beyond recurring characters like Lily and her family, were there other plot connections that you were hoping for the reader to make?

Madden: I’m not sure I’d call them plot connections, but I would say the connective tensions I mention above—tensions associated with the body, womanhood, family, rage, unknowability, distance, and desire—were certainly important to how I structured the collection. I hope that connectivity comes through to readers over the course of reading these stories.

Burke: I’m curious about your relationship with speculative fiction. For the most part, this collection of short stories remains aligned with a feasible reality. However, there are a few short stories that make full use of unreality, such as “A Woman of Appetites” or “Destruction Myth.” What makes speculative/heightened elements essential in this collection?

Madden: The surreal details of the stories you mention, along with “Trimmed” and “When Georgia Simpson Awakes,” were the most natural and truest ways for me to come at the specific tensions of womanhood and existing in a female body. In terms of “Destruction Myth, I found the use of speculative details and the tone of this particular piece essential in underscoring how ridiculous our attitudes are toward the environmental disasters taking place before our eyes.

Burke: How does being a professor influence the stories you write? Beyond some of the stories being from the perspectives of teachers, the process of teaching and how lessons on life or reality are learned felt like a recurring theme.

Madden: Teaching university students has a huge influence on my writing, not so much in terms of content, though you’re absolutely right, there are a lot of stories that include a kind of teaching or lesson—I hadn’t even noticed that! Students don’t influence what I write (not consciously anyway) but they certainly influence how I think and feel about writing. I’m energized by my students’ willingness to take risks in their writing, like the glee many of them exhibit when they try out a second-person imperative point of view for the first time. I love seeing how students respond to reading and writing hermit crab flash essays—which is, typically, with excitement and a hunger to push themselves and experiment more in their writing. Most of all, seeing a student discover something—about themselves or the world and the people around them—through their writing is the best and a constant reminder of why I write.

Burke: This is primarily a collection of fiction, yet “How to Be Your Mother’s Best Daughter” was initially published as nonfiction! When I was first reading through the collection, I assumed that this essay fit into the Vietnamese American family’s narrative, and I think it still can, but it is an exciting complication to know that this work is also nonfiction. How close to heart are characters like Lily, Elyse, and the mother?

Madden: Those characters are very close to the heart, and, yes, that piece was first published as nonfiction—too many good lines (that sounds so obnoxious!) to pass up including this narrative in the collection.

Burke: In “A Gook, Not a Chink” and “Five Things You Should Know About Number Five,” the protagonists have their identities incorrectly simplified by outside observers. How does this experience of being simplified or misinterpreted relate to the collection’s title?

Madden: Great question. ‘You know nothing’ is a line of dialogue from the opening story, uttered by the matriarch of the Vietnamese American family. For me, this line encapsulates so many of the tensions in this collection—being reduced or simplified by someone, as you point out, and also the tensions or challenges many of the characters in this collection experience: feeling unknowable, believing they know someone else in their entirety, believing someone doesn’t have the first clue about who they are, or feeling someone close to them cannot be known.

Burke: Beyond bigotry and lazy racism, I’m curious to know what your opinions are on the ways that Asian Americans have accepted the impreciseness of their own identity. As a Korean American, I am able to relate to many of the experiences of the Vietnamese American family in stories like “Splinter” and “Then Go to Paris, I Say.” At the same time, I recognize that there are cultural and personal contexts that inform these shared experiences centered around belonging. Are monolith identifiers like ‘Asian American’ too simplifying?

Madden: Absolutely on monolith identifiers. My godmother is Korean American. She is the closest thing I have to a second mother. While there are clear overlaps in my mother and my auntie’s experiences, there are also major differences, and their ethnic identities—Vietnamese and Korean—are essential to who they are. I don’t know if I can speak to Asian Americans accepting the impreciseness of their own identity, as my own experience is not one of acceptance. But I do see what you mean in terms of how Asian Americans have had to, historically, accept this impreciseness as a way to assimilate. It seems, to me, that this acceptance was perhaps more necessary for my mother and godmother’s generation given the time period and given the Korean and Vietnam wars. But I think for my own generation, using our specific ethnic identity is natural and perhaps not loaded with some of the challenges other generations have faced.

Burke: Womanhood is explored from a variety of angles across most of the stories in this collection. Women’s bodies are the center of some of the most speculative elements in this collection. In “A Woman of Appetites,” the protagonist is able to devour people; in “Trimmed,” the protagonist mutilates herself to meet unrealistic beauty standards; and in “When Georgia Simpson Awakes,” the protagonist becomes a slug after cheating on her husband. Why focus on the body as the speculative conceit in these stories?

Madden: There are tensions and challenges to existing in a female body, or existing in a world where there are specific expectations of the female body or feminine behavior, along with our culture’s desire to restrict, legislate, and regulate women’s bodies; using the female body as a speculative conceit felt like the most visceral way to offer them in stories.

Burke: Mother-daughter relationships are a recurring dynamic in this collection. In “Splinter,” the perspective jumps between the mother and her daughters as the family fights. What motivates you to explore mother-daughter relationships, particularly in the context of this collection?

Madden: It’s one of my writerly obsessions, I guess. I keep going back for more—my novel centers on mothers and daughters too. Of course, my own experiences as a daughter and a mother inform many of these stories. In the context of this collection, I was particularly interested in exploring the fraught nature of intimate relationships—whether between mother and daughter, husbands and wives, lovers, siblings, or friends.

Burke: In stories like “Swan Dive” and “Reflections” parenthood is defined by a mix of love and fear. “Reflections” seems to stress how this knot of emotions and experiences can’t really be taught or prepared for. I’m curious to know how your own experience with parenthood has informed these stories.

Madden: For me, and I imagine a lot of parents, parenthood is a mix of so many emotions—pure love and joy along with a lot of fear and anxiety, moments and days with your child that come close to perfection mixed with some long-ass days full of mind-numbingly boring games. And so much more I can’t even get into here in a concise way. Exploring parenthood in some of these stories was a way to make sense of some of the feelings and questions I had about the role of a parent.

Burke: I found “That Baby” to be particularly interesting, as it explores both divorce and a broken mother-daughter relationship in which the damage has long since been done. The protagonist of the story is alone, yet there is a clear sense of hope for the protagonist to find some way to fix the damage. What makes a relationship irreparable? What makes a relationship salvageable?

Madden: Oh man, I wish I knew the answer to these questions, but I don’t. Maybe a relationship that is irreparable is one in which one person in the relationship cannot or will not recognize a problem and their part in that problem, let alone try to work through it. The protagonist of “That Baby” recognizes her part in the demise of her relationship with her daughter, which I think allows (for her, at least) some semblance of hope that she might fix some of the damage.

Burke: Much of the conflict throughout relates to the collection’s title, to the limitations of our perspectives and lived wisdom that inherently leads to hurt. Yet in “At the Dog Park,” there is such a profound sense of community that is created with the other dog owners, a sense of community that is rooted beyond the context of who these people are. The other dog owners are strangers, yet they are family. I found myself comparing the bonds in this story to the alienation of Lily and Margot in “Rococo.” What does it mean to know someone?

Madden: Such a great observation about how these two stories demonstrate connection and alienation in unexpected ways. It should be Lily and Margot who demonstrate that unbreakable bond, not the random dog park crew. But I think that part of what I was exploring in Rococo was how the relationships with those closest to us, in this instance two sisters, have the potential for visceral moments of unknowability and distance because of the history, complexity, and shared experiences specific to intimate relationships.

Yasmina Din Madden

Yasmina Din Madden is a Vietnamese American writer living in Iowa. Her story collection You Know Nothing, was published by Northwestern University Press in February 2026, and her writing has been published in Electric Literature, The Idaho Review, The Fairy Tale Review, and other journals. She won the 2022 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, and her short stories have been finalists for The Iowa Review Award in Fiction and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is an Associate Professor of English at Drake University and is represented by Andrea Blatt at William Morris Endeavor, New York.​

A Preponderance of Starry Beings: Stories

Samantha Edmonds

Northwestern University Press: TriQuarterly

$24.00

Publication date: June 15, 2025     

Poissant: This is a gorgeous collection of intense, vulnerable stories. Some feel like stumbling into the open diary of a dear friend, while others read as fabulously constructed works of fantasy. What is the oldest story in the book, and what is the newest? And how do you feel that your style or aim as a writer has evolved over time from one to the other?

Edmonds: The oldest stories are the four featuring Ruth Emerson, the young student who has an affair with the assistant pastor at her father’s church. I wasn’t even writing this collection when I drafted those stories, and I only added them to the book later, when I began to understand this project less about “outer space” and more about “looking up”—after all, God is also a kind of starry being too, right?

By contrast, the newest story in the book is “Tastes like Raspberries, Smells like Rum,” which I didn’t write until after the manuscript had been accepted for publication. I felt the book could use a bit more unpublished material, and I thought that a collection about “starry beings” without an alien story would be missing an opportunity. A decade has passed between those stories, and in that time, I feel that my goals as a writer have stayed the same—I often think of the quote by E.B. White—all that I ever hope to say is that I love the world—but my style has evolved to allow more room for play and experimentation, especially in terms of genre and worldbuilding.

Poissant: Let’s talk about influence. Lorrie Moore (humor) and Mary Miller (grit and faith) spring to mind, but those might just be surface level. “Mama Says” feels like it’s in conversation with Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” Am I right on any of these? Whose fiction really resonates with you, at any level?

Edmonds: I’m definitely a fan of Lorrie Moore and Jamaica Kincaid, so I’m flattered by any reading that puts my work in conversation with theirs. Mary Miller is new to me—but the description “grit and faith” makes me sure that I’d feel right at home with her writing. Personally, I feel my work is most influenced by fiction writers like Amber Sparks and Italo Calvino (Cosmicomics, perhaps unsurprisingly, is my favorite). I love fabulism, especially when it’s lyrical and language-driven, and I really admire the way the magic in the stories by these writers often begins at the sentence level.

Poissant: While we’re talking influence, these stories are clearly informed by a faith background. Would you care to address the topic of growing up in the church? And, if so, do you see that history as a trauma that you escaped? Or as something else?

Edmonds: Oh, now that is The Question, isn’t it? I would have a different answer for you if you had asked me ten years ago, a year ago, last week. My perspective on being raised in the church is constantly shifting, and I don’t have a clean or simple answer—these conversations are best hashed out, in my opinion, over cold drinks on a long summer night. The most honest thing I can say is that I’m coming to realize that the answer to how Christianity has shaped my experiences matters very little to me; my life instead is about the question.

Poissant: Do you think that the shadow of Evangelical Christianity will continue to show up in your work, or have you said all you wanted to say with this book?

Edmonds: I haven’t said nearly as much as I want to say. As I said, it’s the question that I find more interesting than any answer: I find meaning in the asking and reflecting and contemplating, and as these are not things that tend to lend themselves to conclusions, I think that’s why I keep returning to the subject in story after story. I might never be finished.

Poissant: This is a generous collection, seventeen stories of varying lengths (some as brief as two or three pages, one story thirty-five pages long) told in a multitude of voices from varying points of view. You never play the same song twice, which is refreshing. Were you conceiving of a collection of this kind as you wrote, or did you suddenly find that you had enough stories to fill a collection?

Edmonds: It’s a little bit of both—I’m a big believer in writing your obsession, and for a long time, mine was outer space, so I had written three or four separate stories about stars before I had the idea to create a collection. I discovered the title, A Preponderance of Starry Beings, one night when I had fallen into an online rabbit hole researching the Egyptian Book of the Dead (you know, as you do), and that’s when I started to conceive of my space stories—and others, like the ones about Ruth—as a collection that I hoped would showcase the different interpretations of a “starry being”: it means stars and moons and celestial bodies, sure, but it also means aliens and religious deities and—above all—the very human characters here on Earth.

Poissant: In terms of craft, do you find that longer stories take different shapes, in their writing, from the writing of the flash pieces, or do you approach both the same (beginning, middle, end) regardless of length? I guess I’m asking: What is your philosophy of flash?

Edmonds: With flash, I sometimes feel a freedom from plot I don’t often allow myself with longer writing. The more length a story has, the more pressure there is to make something move. Good flash should imply movement, I think, but—perhaps ironically, given the constraints of word limit—I also feel that flash allows me to slow down, to pause and consider the moment my characters are in without the added burden of contemplating their histories or futures.

Poissant: You’re a fan of alternative titles or subtitles: “Samson Collapsing, or What I Lost Falling in Love;” “Eve Choking, or How to Love Someone Who Is Uncertain;” “Magdalene Waiting, or How I Recovered (or Maybe Didn’t)” (first published in The Florida Review). When and how did your passion for such titles begin?

Edmonds: The easiest answer might just be that I love long titles. I think they’re fun. I had a writing teacher tell me once that a good title should do three things: catch the eye, evoke the plot, and enhance the meaning of the story. I added subtitles to only the Ruth Emerson stories to create continuity; since they’re scattered throughout the collection, I wanted readers to see at a glance that those four stories are connected. I also felt the first person POV in the titles added a layer of context to the stories themselves, because although the stories are in third, the titles suggest they’re being (re)constructed by a narrator—I’ve always imagined Ruth herself—who can’t help but chime in from time to time.

Poissant: Your work falls into any number of categories. Sci-fi. Fabulism. Realism. Fantasy.  Do you feel like an adherent to any of these genres, or do you find such designations less useful when thinking about fiction?

Edmonds: I consider myself a fan of all these categories, and I think their influence is obvious in this collection. However, I often feel that my work doesn’t fit neatly into one genre: despite my affinity for sci-fi, for example, there are only a couple stories in the book that might be considered science fiction. I find the most meaning in the umbrella term “speculative fiction,” which I feel speaks to many of the elements I pull from when writing. I also like thinking of speculative writing less as a genre designation and more as a craft technique, and thus applicable to any category of writing: fabulism, fantasy, realism, even nonfiction.

Poissant: Do you have a favorite story in the collection, or one that feels particularly important to you personally?

Edmonds: Ah, this is hard! I have a special affinity for “Tastes like Raspberries, Smells like Rum.” This might just be recency bias, as it’s the newest one, but I had a great time writing that one. I also have a special place in my heart for “Star Stuff,” the last story in the collection, because it was the first space story I ever wrote, and the first from the book to be accepted for publication.

Poissant: You teach creative writing at my alma mater, Berry College. (Go Vikings!) What is your best craft advice for emerging or aspiring writers of any age?

Edmonds: Stay low. It’s easy to get caught up in the lofty plans of a project—all the stories you’re going to write someday, what you’ll title them, and how you’ll design the book cover—only to end up neglecting the next page, the next sentence, that needs your attention. I’m guilty of this with each new project, and I always remind myself (and my students) to keep your head down and focus only on the paragraph in front of you: Stay low. Daydreaming about a finished book is fine, sure, but I can’t get anything done with my head in the clouds. I’ll end up paralyzed by the unwritten ending, the future synopsis, the readers I imagine buying this book, and that’s not where stories start. In the words of Cheryl Strayed: “We get the work done on the ground level.”   And hell yeah—go Vikings!

Poissant: What are the best books you’ve read recently?

Edmonds: I just recently read—and adored—the Emily Wilde books by Heather Fawcett: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands, and Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales. They follow a wayward scholar of faerie folklore on her field research as she attempts to uncover the unstudied mysteries of faerie. The books are whimsical and cozy with a touch of the academic adventurer plot I love in Indiana Jones.

Poissant: Finally, what’s next for you? Would you care to share any details about what we might expect from you following the publication of A Preponderance of Starry Beings?

Edmonds: In addition to finally drafting new fiction (which has been so much fun!), next for me, I hope, is securing representation for my speculative memoir, currently titled A World to Hold Us All. The project shares many of the same themes as this collection—especially regarding faith and belonging—only instead of the cosmos, this time I’m featuring the invisible friends my best friend and I had when we were fifteen, which we used as a way of enriching and escaping our established reality in the Evangelical Church. (Told you I haven’t finished with that subject. In fact, I’m just getting started!)

Samantha Edmonds

Dr. Samantha Edmonds is the author of the story collection A Preponderance of Starry Beings as well as the chapbooks Pretty to Think So and The Space Poet. Her work appears in The New York Times, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Creative Nonfiction, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She’s an Assistant Professor in the creative writing program at Berry College and lives in Rome, Georgia.

Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds
Christian Moody
Dzanc Books
$17.95
Publication date: October 14, 2025

Poissant: Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds is a collection that has been in the works for a while. I’ve been watching from afar, as a fan and a friend, as these stories came together, and I was so glad to read the finished book at last. It’s a masterpiece, full stop. The stories are distinct, but they feel connected thematically or stylistically in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on. What do you see as the glue that holds these stories together?

Moody: I published the first story at thirty and handed in the collection at forty-nine, so I didn’t chase any current hot topics or consciously attempt to unify them by theme. But I do think they’re a good representation of some of my core obsessions: forests, magical strangeness, and humans in their private, unguarded, awkward moments.

I grew up deep in the woods—first in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains (looks like the Moon of Endor) and then in the deciduous oaks and sycamores of the Midwest. Very isolated. Few people. Lots of trees. People see climate change commentary in my stories because nature is often under threat—and those themes are there—but, more simply put, forests are the landscape of my childhood and heart.

How to explain the weird magic? As a kid, my younger brother and I would stand at the bus stop, shivering in the snow, and entertain ourselves with questions like: “What if you had a tiny extra head in your armpit that whispered to you? Would you keep it for life or pluck it? When would you tell your girlfriend?” Those semi-disturbing what ifs helped us laugh through divorce stuff, money problems, and all the usual growing-up stuff. We still fall back into what if mode when we’re together. So, to me, magical weirdness is where my mind goes to survive life’s harder parts, to find joy, to laugh, feel weirded out in delightful ways, and to connect with other people who like that too.

And, finally, I’m drawn to people in their private, unguarded moments—like the story with trees with eyes that record everything. Growing up in such isolated places, I get freaked out when someone rings my doorbell. It makes me want to hide. So, as cameras and social media proliferated, it did freak me out, and some of that ended up in my stories. I like to write about how people are when no one’s watching, when they’re alone with themselves, being weird, unafraid to whisper back to that tiny extra head in their armpit.

Poissant: You must have influences. George Saunders and Steven Millhauser spring to mind, but those might just be surface level comparisons. Who else do you read whose work creeps into your work, either at the surface level or at the sentence level?

Moody: This is a tough one. The metaphor that comes to mind is that writing a story is like building a house out of thousands of stolen parts. I’ll take a board from Kevin Wilson, a bag of nails from Aimee Bender, a few roof shingles from Haruki Murakami, some plumbing from Station Eleven or The Hunger Games. Little bits and pieces of everything I’ve read.

But those earliest, first reading experiences might count the most. My most honest roots go back to first grade, when a substitute teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lucy pushing through the wardrobe’s fur coats into snowy woods was elemental for me. I begged for the book, got it in my Easter basket, sat on a mossy boulder in the redwoods, finished it, and started it again immediately. I didn’t get the religious subtext and skipped over big words, but I loved the witch, werewolves, frozen statues, and talking beavers. I still have that copy, inscribed by the Easter Bunny in my mom’s big, loopy handwriting.

Poissant: While we’re talking influence, I couldn’t help thinking of the work of filmmaker Ari Aster, who often credits his love of literature as an influence on his filmmaking. Your stories are richly visual. I can see the worlds of your stories. Do you credit any movies or film language with the nod toward imagery that your prose evokes?

Moody: I had to look up Ari Aster—turns out I have seen Midsommar. Beautiful and super creepy.

My 1980s childhood left a mark: The NeverEnding Story, The Goonies, Labyrinth. None hit harder than Labyrinth—you had to be eleven, with a crush on Jennifer Connelly, and a confusing parallel one on David Bowie. One of my dreams was to work for Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop; I even wrote him letters, and his son wrote back a few times.

Later came The Royal Tenenbaums, Pan’s Labyrinth, and prestige TV like The Wire. More recently, I’ve admired Craig Mazin’s screenwriting on The Last of Us and Chernobyl. I didn’t even see Chernobyl, I just read the scripts. They’re so vivid in memory that I feel like I’ve seen the show. I even had two questions read on his Scriptnotes podcast, including one about puzzle box storytelling that ended up helping me finish the novella. He always mocks my question, then answers it really well.

When I write, I often start with an image—a landscape or scene. This seems somewhat cinematic, but I think dreams and daydreams are the real medium writers work with. I like the “waking dream” theory of fiction: the writer has a vivid daydream and uses text to give someone else a similar dream.

Poissant: The collection is anchored by a novella: Ray of Golden Yolk. Without offering any spoilers, I think it’s fair to say that Ray, your protagonist and viewpoint character, gets put through the wringer. But the story never treats Ray as a punching bag. How do you negotiate your compassion for your characters with your need to riddle them with conflict?

Moody: Raising the stakes was central to Ray of Golden Yolk. I’d put Ray in a tough spot, then try to find a psychologically true reaction. I liked him, didn’t want to hurt him, but I wanted to see how he’d react.

I started the story at twenty-five and left just about every mystery unsolved. My editor, Chelsea, asked me to solve those mysteries. Dealing at age forty-nine with the consequences of decisions I made at twenty-five was some of the hardest writing I’ve ever done.

I dodged Chelsea’s emails for months, rewrote the beginning, broke open the original premise and scattered the pieces, failed over and over, then wrote that letter about puzzle box storytelling to Scriptnotes for advice. I almost gave up, thinking maybe I’d just go into hiding and never publish another book.

Then, just as Chelsea said maybe we’d go with the original version if I couldn’t deliver, the solutions came. It was easier than I’d thought. I kept the heart of the original story, wrote over twenty new pages, cut a bunch of the middle, and gave the novella a new ending. I didn’t have a daughter when I began the story, but my daughter is now close to the age of the daughter in the story—that might have helped.

Poissant: The story “The Babycatcher” feels almost like a fairy tale. Have any fairy tales informed your fiction?

Moody: Fairy tales are in my fiction at a deep level.

My parents were divorced. At my mom’s, we lived in a shack-like cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains, surrounded by redwoods. I could walk outside and wander for miles through forest. At my dad’s, down in Santa Cruz proper, the yard was dug up for years for a project, just dirt and sun, which I hated, so I’d retreat to the garage for shade.

That’s where I read fairy tales. Brothers Grimm, library finds, garage sale paperbacks. I loved how the same fairy tale could be totally different in another book—translation differences, alternate versions. Fairy tales were an escape from one physical space into another, especially if a story featured woods and weirdness.

Poissant: “Horusville” is the quintessential coming of age story. It’s very funny and very sad, sometimes at the same time. In terms of craft, how do you juggle such tonal shifts?

Moody: I tried to see each scene as vividly as I could in my mind’s eye and get the reader to see it too (that daydream theory of fiction I mentioned). I often like my own sadness—not full-on depression, but that gentle, pleasurable melancholy of a sad song.

As I mentioned, I also love jokes and what if thinking. The kind of sadness in this story and the kind of funny in it are both joy to me—just toggling between stuff I love. So, to me, those tonal shifts never felt far apart.

Poissant: For a long time, you taught creative writing. What is your best craft advice for emerging or aspiring writers?

Moody: Early on, balance two opposite perspectives: be honest about the kind of work you love and want to write, while staying open to work you might initially dislike because your taste could change—the way maybe you once hated coffee and now love it.

At a certain point, though, just write the work you most want to read. I spent years writing stories to please my teachers—competent but without duende, without heart. Eventually, I said eff it and wrote about magical mechanical birds, expecting mockery. Instead, people liked it best. I like cooking/taste metaphors for writing: Just because your teacher or friend is a renowned master chef of French cuisine doesn’t mean they won’t enjoy your awesome scrambled eggs.

My list for what I truly want from a story, and a quick, oversimplified tip for how to get there:

• Momentum—to write a page-turner, open the story with a problem or goal for your character, then place obstacles in the way to create structural suspense by delaying the goal or solution.
• Immersion—to make the world around the reader disappear, write in scenes, and use precise, vivid descriptions (harder than it sounds).
• Feeling—one way to break a reader’s heart is to give a character something important and then take it away. But don’t label the feeling (e.g. “she was sad”). Leave the feeling unstated in the scene, and let the reader empathize and provide the feeling themselves (a spin on the classic “show don’t tell”).
• Meaning—I like stories to feel meaningful, but I don’t want them to be didactic or to play that marketing game of “important issue of today.” All topics are meaningful, you just need to be honest with yourself about what you really care about (a difficult, lifelong journey).

Poissant: In closing, what’s next for you? Would you care to share any details about what we might expect from you in the coming years?

Moody: As I’ve revised my answers to these questions, they’ve all stayed the same except for this one. I’ve accumulated a big pile of unfinished work. Sometimes, on walks with my wife and daughter, I’ll describe a story or novel I’ve started to see if they like it. There’s a father-daughter time travel novel that they seem keen on, so maybe I’ll finish that.

At age forty-nine, with my first book coming out, there’s not much chance of an auspicious debut. It’s too late to build up the long career that makes a writer famous or leads to academic stardom. The money math from writing definitely isn’t mathing for me. These career-related things are all in the rearview mirror. And it feels great!

I have zero self-induced pressure. Zero expectations. I just get to think: what kind of story, if I were reading it, would bring me the most joy and meaning? How can I make something with as much honesty and authenticity and generosity as possible? Spending time with my family is more important than writing and dealing with these questions, but if I can steal a little quiet time to write and reflect on some of this stuff—that’s not such a bad use of my time.

Christian Moody

Christian Moody’s stories have appeared in Esquire, Alaska Quarterly Review, and in the anthologies Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy. He received his MFA from Syracuse and PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and spent years as a creative writing professor. He now works as a brand director and lives in Indianapolis with his two kids and his wife, memoirist and illustrator Margaret Kimball.

Julian’s Debut

Brian Alessandro

Rebel Satori Press

$21.95

Publication Date: March, 2025

Leona Strong: How did your education in clinical psychology influence the creation of your character Julian in Julian’s Debut?

Brian Alessandro: I pursued an MA in clinical psychology rather than an MFA in creative writing because I wanted to better understand the interiority of people. I thought it would give me a different vantage point as a writer, and I believe it did. When writing a story, I find that I start with a theme and subtext and allow the plot or characters to develop from there. It was certainly the case in my creation of Julian Sorrento, who is partially based on me. I began with Julian’s passive-aggressive personality, his accommodating nature, his martyr complex, and my intention is to always analyze and dissect the behavior and personality. My interests mainly reside in perception and the many ways we react to trauma, in all its forms.

Leona Strong: This book combines three distinct elements: the primary prose, excerpts from The New Yorker essay that launches Julian’s journey, “The Mighty Meekness,” and the cable series script, The Touring Barbarism!, that Julian writes throughout the book. I’m curious to know how this came about. Did you craft these pieces chronologically as you wrote the book, or did you write each thread separately, then weave them together?

Brian Alessandro: “My Mighty Meekness” was based on a true short memoir I wrote about my family, friends, and ex-boyfriends, which was published in the online journal, Exquisite Pandemic, in 2020. I wrote the fictionalized version of that, Julian’s essay published in The New Yorker, using the same title, and the novel simultaneously. I wrote the screenplay, The Touring Barbarism, separately. I love books that combine styles of writing, ergodic, or more specifically, multimodal literature. I wanted to do something like that here, and since I am a journalist and screenwriter as well as a fiction writer, it was fun to mix formats.

Leona Strong: As a writer who has penned screenplays, plays, and fiction, in addition to journalism, was creating a book that combined all of these forms the realization of a dream? Do you prefer one genre of writing over another?

Brian Alessandro: It was a joy to combine these different forms and see how they complement each other. Fiction writing is my favorite, for sure, though they all offer different rewards.

Leona Strong: How closely do you identify with Julian, the main character and narrator?

Brian Alessandro: For better or worse, I very closely identify with Julian. He isn’t meant to be heroic or sympathetic, or even likable. I don’t prioritize likability when I write characters, but I do need for them to be honest and interesting. I think Julian is interesting, if not always honest. I hope that I am not as meek as him, nor as spiteful or deluded.

Leona Strong: I read your Instagram posts from November 2024 in which you say that many of the people you have fictionalized in Julian’s Debut “are family members, writers, filmmakers, and acquaintances that have in some way left an impression.” Given the book’s storyline, I can’t help but wonder if you think people, particularly your family members, might recognize themselves? If so, as with Julian, do you worry about the consequences of this?

Brian Alessandro: I am both worried and excited to see who recognizes themselves and how they will react. Not everything in the story is true, but there are kernels of truth even in the most outrageous fictionalized behaviors and events. Then again, my good friend Edmund White once said if you want to bury a secret, publish it.

Leona Strong: On page 30, Julian says, “Living inside someone’s head and sharing their experience with readers was a kind of intimacy that compelled me to write in the first place.” Would you speak to this and if the same holds true for you as a writer?

Brian Alessandro: It does! Writers and readers are in conversation with each other. Literature allows for greater intimacy than most other art forms because the entirety of the writer’s perception and soul is being conveyed through voice to the reader, who is tasked with listening and interpreting. It’s as though the reader absorbs the transcription of the writer’s mind.

Leona Strong: Meekness is a common theme within Julian’s Debut. What does meekness mean to you, and do you feel Julian overcomes his meekness by the end of the book?

Brian Alessandro: When I wrote the real essay, “My Mighty Meekness,” in 2020, I intended to also investigate meekness journalistically as a virtue, as a form of strength. I am working on my dissertation for my doctorate in psychoanalysis now, and the focus is on the interplay between masochism, martyr complexes, trauma, and resilience with plasticity and morality as connective tissue. I believe and hope to prove with my doctoral work that truly the “meek will inherit the earth.” There is a benevolent, constructive, transformative, and even Buddhist energy endemic in passivity.

Leona Strong: Many of Julian’s relatives accuse him of writing the initial essay and subsequent screenplay and book as ways of getting “up there.” You hit this very hard. Julian seems to eschew this characterization, but also admits that he would “sell out his mother if it meant a big TV or movie deal.” Do you read this as character change, or is this something he’s always wanted but just wouldn’t admit to?

Brian Alessandro: It’s important to keep Julian’s motive ambiguous, even contradictory, and complex. Does he sell out his family for profit or out of spite, or is he truly misremembering events? Memory is highly subjective and fallible. Every time we remember an event, we revise that memory and conflate and combine it with other memories of the event, so that when we recall something that has happened to us in the past, it has already been extensively reinvented.

Leona Strong: I wouldn’t call Raul and Julian’s relationship healthy, yet they seem to have an undeniable connection. What are the challenges of writing about relationships?

Brian Alessandro: Raul is an amalgamation of two ex-lovers and one ex-friend. I think writing about relationships is a tricky affair. It should be honest, and with that honesty there needs to be something raw and ugly and even embarrassing to capture the full picture. I am grateful for all my relationships, especially the ones that have left me bruised.

Leona Strong: Are we reading the book that Julian is writing and ultimately published in the book?

Brian Alessandro: That is a fascinating insight, but I will remain coy about it. I want each reader to decide for themselves.

Leona Strong: I would love to know if the trouble Mary has in India is based on a real incident. If so, how did you learn of it and what really happened?

Brian Alessandro: I spent three months in India in 2008 with friends throughout the country, and they often spoke about Western academics meddling in personal affairs, causing trouble. Mary is the embodiment of the well-intentioned Western researcher upending an ancient culture by prying. She is not based on any actual person I know.

Leona Strong: Julian believes that writing is like painting portraits. Do you intend a connection between this and Raul and Julian’s penchant for museums?

Brian Alessandro: I do! For Julian, writing is about constructing abstract portraits. It’s not dissimilar to how a painter paints a portrait with oils or watercolors. I even used the self-portrait of Egon Schiele for my cover.

Leona Strong: What would you say are the primary themes of Julian’s Debut? Any takeaways you’d like the reader to leave with?

Brian Alessandro: I wanted to write a book that explored the ethical complexities of memoir writing and autofiction. What are the moral implications of writing about other people? Also, it is very much about the dangerous nature of memory, how the past continues to shape us, and the division between public and private personas.

Brian Alessandro has written for numerous publications including Interview Magazine, Newsday, Kirkus, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and many others, and is the author of three novels, The Unmentionable Mann, Performer Non Grata, and Julian’s Debut, as well as coauthor of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story: The Graphic Novel and coeditor of Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs.