‘There’s something about the way stories were told around me growing up that shaped my voice’
Today’s featured Friday Five writer is Chrissy Stegman, a poet and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work appears in Gooseberry Pie Lit, Jake, UCity Review, Okay Donkey, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle Magazine, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish, 5 Minutes Mag, and BULL. She is the author of the chapbook Somewhere, Someone Is Forgetting You (Alien Buddha Press), a two-time Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, and 2025 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fellow.
For writers and other artists, weirdness is a virtue
Do you ever write something and think, This will never fly? That it’s just too weird to share?
Same here. My notebooks, laptop, Notes app, and Google docs are stuffed with ideas that may or may not become stories.
Continue reading “The call of the weird”‘A delayed dream feels even sweeter when achieved’
In his book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life, Henry Oliver highlights how some of our world’s most successful people — Vera Wang, Frank Lloyd Wright, Julia Child — achieved their most notable successes later in life. This week’s featured writer, Tracie Adams, might feel at home among those late bloomers. For Tracie, that second act began last year at age 58 with the publication of her first writings in various literary magazines. Her memoir, Our Lives in Pieces: A Collection of Flash Memoir Essays, came out earlier this year and has been praised for its honest reflections on life’s joys and sorrows.
A writer since childhood (when she wrote “truly awful poems about horses and mushrooms”), Tracie spent twenty-five years teaching writing to her four homeschooled children on her family farm in Virginia along with hundreds of other homeschooled and private-schooled kids. “While teaching writing and literature was rewarding,” she writes on her website, “I have found immeasurable joy in retirement as I have finally begun publishing my creative nonfiction work in literary magazines.” And we her readers are the better for it.
Continue reading “Friday Five: ‘Our Lives in Pieces’ memoirist Tracie Adams”On interior monologues, the devil we don’t know, the future of fiction, and the rage of the literary man
Happy Juneteenth!
Here are some lit-related items that caught my eye in recent weeks:
As always, if you’d rather listen to a podcast-style AI summary, here you go. Or use the player below.
Image via Pexels.
A Father’s Day weekend conversation about this new genre and the appeal of “voicey, moral, unwieldy, independent, ambitious, and impatient” literary men.
With Father’s Day just around the corner, it seems appropriate and timely to shine the Friday Five spotlight on Daniel Roberts, a historian, writer, and host of the Dad Lit podcast, which is available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
A professional historian, Dan has many published works of history, but no published works of fiction — not yet, at least. He is the author of the biography, The American: The Life, Times, and War of Basil Antonelli, the story of an Italian-American immigrant that Amazon describes as “a quintessentially American biography of immigration, assimilation, and sacrifice.” Currently he is on submission with two novels, The Black Hole Pact, a Sci Fi novel about a woman investigating her father’s role in saving the world from a killer asteroid, and Cursed at the Hanging Pine Inn, a horror novel best described as The Shining meets Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
He established the Dad Lit Pod earlier this year, not long after a bit of hand-wringing in The New York Times about the disappearance of the literary man (a topic I also blogged about). So the topics Dan delves into on his podcast have never been more timely.
As you might expect from such a booster of Dad Lit, Dan is himself a dad. He’s the father to a four-year-old girl and has been blissfully married for eight years.
Continue reading “Friday Five: historian, writer, and Dad Lit podcaster Dan Roberts”
