< Back Creatures Crissy Van Meter June 30, 2020 Going back and forth in time, Evangeline (Evie) recalls the challenges of being raised on a lush island off the coast of California. Her mother has left Evie and her father, and her father raises Evie from the age of three. He’s a jack-of-all-trades but survives by selling a specially grown variety of marijuana. And although he provides her with adventure and a deep love of the ocean, Evie’s father doesn’t show up as a consistent adult in her life. The book opens just before her wedding, when a storm is brewing, her fiancé is out at sea, and a dead whale beaches, which causes a pervading smell of decay across the island. Evie’s mostly absent mother suddenly shows up wanting to participate in the joy of her daughter’s wedding. In flashbacks and musings, Evie confronts her abandonment, guilt, anger and ultimately her love for all creatures - including her parents, her husband, her best friend, and her best friend’s child. With sporadic notes from Evie’s research on wales and sea life, this is a novel to savor while either gazing out to sea or imagining it. Crissy Van Meter is a writer based in Los Angeles. Creatures: A Novel (Algonquin Books) is her debut novel. She teaches creative writing at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the founder of the literary project Five Quarterly and the managing editor for Nouvella Books. She serves on the board of directors for the literary non-profit Novelly. Crissy loves going to Disneyland and has been an annual passholder since she was 5. She’s been to Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Walt Disney World, and she plans to visit the remaining Disney parks in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Promise of Pierson Orchard Kate Brandes November 19, 2018 How do families decide when financial relief outweighs the risks of drilling for natural gas on their land? In Kate Brandes' novel Promise of Pierson Orchard (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2017), a big energy company comes to Minden, Pennsylvania and hires the long-estranged brother of orchard owner Jack Pierson. Thinking that Wade Pierson is one of their own, some struggling neighbors start selling mining rights to Green Energy. Jack fears what the company will do to the land and worries that Wade will try to rekindle his relationship with Jack’s wife LeeAnn, who recently left him. Jack reaches out to the mother who abandoned him and his brother when they were teenagers. She’s now an environmental lawyer with experience in dealing with companies whose spurious promises to landowners are broken, along with ecosystems, relationships, and towns. Kate Brandes is an environmental scientist with 20 years of experience. A geology teacher at Moravian College, she is also a painter and writer who focuses on the environment. Her short stories have been published in The Binnacle, Wilderness House Literary Review , and Grey Sparrow Journal . A member of the Arts Community of Easton (ACE), the Pennwriters, as well as the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, Kate lives near the Delaware River with her husband and two sons. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Field Victoria Garza March 21, 2023 Victoria Garza begins her poetic memoir with her ten-year-old self learning that her little sister and cousin have died in a car accident. She painstakingly recalls lovely moments with her sister as they faced their parents’ divorce, their new lives surrounded by family members, their Mexican American culture and celebrations. Over the course of the book, she examines her own survivor’s guilt, her disassociation, and her attempt to rebuild herself. She includes the memories of other family members, each of whom remembers parts of that awful day, and she observes the different ways everyone is affected by grief. Garza also explores death and its customs as described by various poets, authors, and religious traditions. The Field (Jackleg Press, 2022) is a memoir about losing a loved one, family, and memory. For most of Victoria’s professional writing career, she’s written journalism, screenplays, documentaries, and multimedia content. Sometimes, she’s a filmmaker, information designer and content strategist. She holds an M.A in Media Theory, History and Criticism from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A in Film and Media Production from NYU's Graduate Institute of Film & Television. Currently, she's a senior writer for Apple's WW Enterprise group. She and her wife Lisa live in the Bay Area with two soulful children named Augustin and Dakota. When Victoria is not reading or writing, she loves hiking, cooking, and having deep conversations with her toddlers. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back One Two Three Laurie Frankel September 21, 2021 Today I talked to Laurie Frankel about her new novel One, Two, Three (Henry Holt, 2021). The little town of Bourne made national news seventeen years before when its water turned green and people started to get sick. The Mitchell triplets were born that year, after the factory closed, the town began to wither along with its citizens, and their father died. The three girls, each a different version of normal, have watched their mother’s endless fight for justice from the company that destroyed their town. Mirabel, number Three, is the smartest triplet, even though she can’t speak and uses a wheelchair. Monday, number Two, inherited all the library’s books when the library building closed. She eats and wears only yellow and knows exactly where in the house each book is hidden. And Mab, number One, is trying to get into college and out of Bourne. Then one day, a moving truck pulls up and the Mitchell sisters are forced to grapple with a past that was never resolved. Laurie Frankel writes novels (and reads novels, teaches other people to write novels, raises a small person who reads and would like someday to write novels) in Seattle, Washington where she lives on a nearly vertical hill from which she can watch three different bridges while she's staring out her windows between words. She's originally from Maryland and has a degree in reading Shakespeare, which has relatively little to do with writing novels. She has taught writing, literature, and gender studies at both community colleges and universities. Now she is at work — always — on her next novel but also blogs about craft at Medium where she endeavors to help other people finish their novels. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Harvesting the Sky Karen Hugg September 7, 2021 Botonist Andre Damazy undertakes a perilous exploration into the mountains of Kazakhstan to retrieve a sapling from a rare apple tree in the mountains of Kazakhstan. At great cost, he manages to retrieve a sapling, and brings it to his hidden greenhouse in Paris. The fruit of the tree has mysterious medicinal properties, and Andre’s mission is both scientific and personal, because his mother has suffered a serious stroke. He receives sufficient funding to create the correct conditions to care for the trees, but he’s under pressure, both from his sponsors, and from a mysterious organization that fears the apple is an omen of evil. Second in Karen Hugg’s literary thriller series focused on the world of plants, Harvesting the Sky (Woodhall Press, 2021) is a parable about what we take from nature. Karen Hugg is also the author of The Forgetting Flower and Song of the Tree Hollow . Born into a Polish family and raised in Chicago, she later moved to Seattle and worked as an editor in tech, which gave her the opportunity to live in Paris for a short time. Afterward, she became a certified ornamental horticulturalist and master pruner. Karen earned an MFA from Goddard College and her work has appeared in The Big Thrill , Crime Reads , Thrive Global , and other publications. She lives with her husband and three kids in Seattle, where she’s finishing up her first nonfiction book, Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness Through Plants . When she’s not writing or gardening, Karen is learning guitar by playing her favorite songs from the Scottish band, Travis. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Homicide and Halo-Halo Mia P. Manansala February 22, 2022 Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley, 2022) is the second cozy mystery in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen mystery series. Written in first person, baker Lila Macapagal is about to open the Brew-Ha Café in Shady Palms, a fictional town about 2 hours outside of Chicago. Lila, a proud Filipino American who bakes awesome fusions of Filipino and American pastry, is a 25-year-old who has been asked to guest judge a local beauty pageant that she won as a teenager. The first sign of trouble is a threat about the competition, and then one of Lila’s fellow judges is found dead. Cozy mysteries are usually lightweight and amusing – while Homicide and Halo-Halo is written in a light-hearted style, characters grapple with serious issues such as PTSD, fatphobia, fertility and pregnancy issues, predatory behavior, unresolved grief, parental death, and dismissive attitudes toward mental health. Mia P. Manansala is a writer and certified book coach who earned her undergraduate degree in English at Northeastern Illinois University. A 2017 alum and 2018-20 mentor for Pitch Wars, a volunteer-run writing program, Manansala uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the winner of the 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck - Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. A lover of all things geeky, Mia spends her days procrastibaking , playing JRPGs and dating sims, reading cozy mysteries, and cuddling her dogs Gumiho, Max Power, and Bayley Banks (bonus points if you get all the references). Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Muffin & Bread Recipes to Die For Muffins and Breads, Gluten Free, Baking, Breakfast Gluten-Free Pancakes We were desperate for pancakes so I tweaked another recipe I was working on to make these. Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Gluten Free, Vegetarian, Baking, Vegan Gluten-Free/Nut Free/Vegan Banana Bread The recipes uses 2 bananas and a whole small seed apple. Read Recipe Vegetarian, Baking, Breakfast, Muffins and Breads, Cakes & Pies & Icing Chocolate Zucchini-Pear Cake GF Healthy enough for breakfast! Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Baking, Vegan, Gluten Free, Cakes & Pies & Icing Best Chocolate Cake/Muffins GF. V. Didn’t I tell you I was going to be at my Aunt Ivy’s for a barbeque dinner at which I ate purely protein ... Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Baking Challah Traditional recipes never tasted so good! Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Vegan, Breakfast Vegan Sweet Potato or Pumpkin Muffins "There are only six sweet potato muffins left," said Alene. Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Baking, Vegetarian, Breakfast, Cakes & Pies & Icing Chocolate Zucchini – Apple Cake Yes, we eat this for breakfast! Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Gluten Free Fudgy Chocolate Butternut Squash Muffins No dairy, low-sugar, healthful, delicious! Read Recipe All Recipes Baking Breakfast Cakes, Pies, & Icing Cookies & Brownies Dips & Sauces Entrees Gluten-Free Muffins & Breads Soup Vegan Vegetarian Load More

< Back Dry Land B. Platek October 3, 2023 Rand Brandt, a forester in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, discovers that his touch can grow any plant or tree. In this tale of Magical Realism, he dreams of using his gift to restore landscapes ruined by the lumber industry, but first needs to test his powers. Gabriel, his fellow forester, and secret lover, finds and saves Rand after he’s pushed himself by spending his nights sneaking into the forest instead of sleeping. It’s 1917 and the foresters are drafted to join in the fight in France. An old friend of Rand’s joins the press covering his unit and helps him cover his tracks. A commanding officer learns about Rand’s gift and demands that he grow forests for the wood needed to win the war, but Rand learns that everything he grows will die within days. Now, he’s keeping two major secrets, either of which, if discovered, could destroy him. Ben Pladek is associate professor of literature at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His first novel, Dry Land , appeared in September 2023 with the University of Wisconsin Press. He’s previously published short fiction in Strange Horizons, The Offing, Slate Future Tense Fiction, and elsewhere. As a colleague pointed out to him, his short fiction is often set in the near-future and his longer fiction in the near-past; other recurring interests include ecology, messy relationships, messier bureaucracy, and people feeling guilty. He’s also written an academic book called The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790-1850, that came out from Liverpool University Press in 2019, as well as a number of articles on British Romanticism. Before getting hired at Marquette, he did his PhD at the University of Toronto and taught for a year in the fantastic Foundation Year Programme at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he moved to Wisconsin, he fell in love with the landscape and the state’s fascinating history of conservation, including the writings of Aldo Leopold. Ben and his husband have hiked all over Wisconsin. They especially enjoy the Northwoods, Horicon Marsh, and the southwest “driftless” area. In Ben’s spare time you can find him reading, birdwatching, taking long walks around Milwaukee, admiring wetlands, eating peanut butter, and taking pictures of informational signs at historical monuments that he’ll never go back and read. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Take What You Need Idra Novey March 14, 2023 Today I talked to Idra Novey about her new novel Take What You Need (Viking, 2023). Leah, her husband, and their little son are driving back to where she grew up in the mountains of Appalachia. They are heading to the home where her stepmother fled after leaving Leah’s father, and after the divorce, Jean was no longer allowed to stay in touch with Leah. But she was the mother Leah knew and loved. Now, Jean has died and left Leah her artwork, and when they arrive at the house, Leah is stunned to find giant sculptures welded from scrap metal. During her final years, Jean had needed the help of a troubled young man, a neighbor who has no chance of finding employment and who is squatting without water in the house next door. He’s the one who tells Leah that Jean has died. This is a story about family, the opioid epidemic in rural America, the rise of hatred and bigotry during the past few years, and the grip of creating art on those who feel its pull. Idra Novey earned degrees at Barnard College and Columbia University. She’s the author of Those Who Knew , a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Time s Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets. Her first novel Ways to Disappear received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian , selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Coun­try , a final­ist for the 2008 Fore­word Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor , a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Idra teaches fiction writing at Princeton University and in the New York University MFA program in Creative Writing. When she is not writing or teaching, Idra likes welding and making collages with old literature magazines. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Holding Onto Nothing Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne November 19, 2019 Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than tobacco fields, a bluegrass bar, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne , the author of Holding Onto Nothing (Blair, 2019), grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly . Her nonfiction work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe , and Globalpost , among others. She worked on this novel in Grub Street’s year-long Novel Incubator course, under Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists, edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan. She lives outside Boston with her husband and four children. When she’s not kid-wrangling, Elizabeth enjoys doing CrossFit. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back I Meant to Tell You Fran Hawthorne January 17, 2023 I Meant to Tell You , by Fran Hawthorne (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) opens during a conversation between Miranda Isaacs and her fiancé, Russ, who is going through an FBI security check as a prelude to getting his dream job in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Miranda worries that her parents’ antiwar activities in the late 60s might be a stumbling block, but neglects to mention a felony kidnapping arrest that happened when she tried to help a good friend escape a bad marriage. Miranda thought that charge from nearly a decade ago had been erased, so she never mentioned it to Russ. But now, Russ is justified in bringing up the question of honesty in a serious relationship. Fran Hawthorne has been writing novels since she was four years old, although she was sidetracked for several decades by journalism. During that award-winning career, she wrote eight nonfiction books, mainly about consumer activism, the drug industry, and the financial world. (Ethical Chic was named one of the best business books of 2012 by Library Journal, and Pension Dumping was a Foreword magazine 2008 Book of the Year.) Hawthorne has been an editor or regular contributor for The New York Times, Business Week, Fortune, and many other publications. She also writes book reviews for the New York Journal of Books. Her debut novel, The Heirs, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2018. In her non-writing life, Fran runs 8 miles a day, studies Hebrew and French, volunteers at the New-York Historical Society, and works on community projects at her local park and other places. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Purple Lotus Veena Rao March 2, 2021 Already in her late twenties, Tara is relieved when her parents arrange a marriage with a man who lives across the world in Atlanta. But she understands quickly that her husband doesn’t love her or even want her. The ensuing loneliness brings up memories of being left at age eight with her grandparents and mentally ill uncle when her family moved to Dubai. Now, as her husband isolates her and becomes increasingly abusive, she accepts the help of American strangers to leave and set up a life of her own. The scandal, even across oceans, is insurmountable, and she’s pressured into moving back into her husband’s house. This time when the violence escalates, Tara finds the strength, despite fear of being shunned, not only to leave, but to seek love outside the community. Purple Lotus is a story of a woman facing her fears and choosing her own path. Veena Rao is an award-winning journalist and author. Purple Lotus (She Writes Press, 2020), her recently released debut novel, is the winner of the She Writes Press and SparkPress Toward Equality in Publishing (STEP) contest. She is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of NRI Pulse, an Atlanta-based news publication. She has been recognized by The Limca Book of Records (the Indian version of the Guinness Book of Records) as the first Indian woman to edit and publish a newspaper outside India. When she is not writing or meeting press deadlines, you will find her meditating or photographing the flora and fauna on her wooded walk route. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next