Maryka Biaggio

Maryka Biaggio is a psychology professor turned novelist who brings forgotten lives back to the light. Specializing in historical fiction inspired by real people, she is celebrated for illuminating overlooked historical figures with psychological depth and narrative grace. Her debut novel, Parlor Games (2013), launched a distinguished career that includes Eden Waits, The Point of Vanishing, The Model Spy, Gun Girl and the Tall Guy, and Margery and Me (forthcoming from Regal House in 2026). Her work has earned numerous accolades, including the Willamette Writers Award, Oregon Writers Colony Award, Historical Novel Society Review Editors' Choice, La Belle Lettre Award, and a Michigan Upper Peninsula Notable.

My Q&A with Biaggio:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Gun Girl and the Tall Guy is based on the true story of a young couple who went on a robbery spree in 1924 Brooklyn. I wanted the title to include both the main characters, and I had to look no further than the headlines of the day to discover the many monikers the press applied to the duo, including the bob-haired bandit and her handsome companion or the feisty gun girl and her shy man. I settled on gun girl for Celia because it’s short and catchy and tall guy for Ed because it makes it clear he’s in a supporting role.

At its heart, the story is about why this young couple resorted to crime and also why New Yorkers—and the whole country, for that matter—were so fascinated by these two. They were the Bonnie and Clyde of the 1920s, with a few twists. So I wanted a title that featured both Celia and Ed and provided a sense of the story to come.

What's in a name?

I decided to use Celia and Ed Cooney’s real names because I stuck to the facts as much as possible, although dialogue and many day-to-day details are obviously manufactured. But I had to include a whole cast of other characters, and I enjoyed selecting names that gave some sense of the characters and the times—like Em and Rosie to lend the ring of familiarity to Celia’s friends and Mr. Gualazzi for the neighborhood grocer because lots of Italians lived in New York at that time. Another invention of the novel is the many varied terms of endearment Ed came up with for Celia, which I liked because it showed how devoted Celia and Ed were to each other.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be very surprised by this novel, particularly my decision to write about crooks. I was a bookish youngster who enjoyed stories of adventure, like the Tarzan novels and tales of North Pole expeditions. When I was a teenager, I did think I’d like to write novels, but I hadn’t a clue as to what those novels would be about. It took me a few decades to settle on first, writing fiction, and second, basing my stories on real people whose lives had been forgotten. Now I enjoy the hunt for fascinating characters from the past, and Celia and Ed’s story just drew me in.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are hard! I like to feel that I’m capturing a sense of my main character in the first few sentences of a novel, and sometimes that takes a while to manage. I just keep plowing ahead with my research until I feel that I’ve “found” the character’s voice. Endings are easy by comparison. I don’t worry about them until I get to the end. And once I’ve cranked out the bulk of the story, I find that the end tends to flow pretty easily from what came before.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I’ve written about quite varied characters—a conwoman, an older couple who establish a utopian community, a young writer with a tragic life, a World War II spy, and, in the latest, robbers. I find that parts of myself always come through, however, because what writer doesn’t use her own thoughts and feelings to enrich the portrayal of characters? When it comes to Celia Cooney, I’d say she has certain principles that she lives by—even if she bends the rules from time to time—and that is something I borrowed from my own “psychology.” Still, I labor to give each of my protagonists distinctive traits, and I hope my readers enjoy the greatly varied characters I write about.

Visit Maryka Biaggio's website.

My Book, The Movie: Parlor Games.

The Page 69 Test: Parlor Games.

Writers Read: Maryka Biaggio (February 2013).

--Marshal Zeringue

Christa Carmen

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and two-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, and How to Fake a Haunting, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror), and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australiasian Shadow Award-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.

When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens; uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle; and sets out on adventures with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.

My Q&A with Carmen:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title is very much the premise of the novel. My main character, Lainey, is married to a man named Callum who is an alcoholic but not on paper. He’s ruining her life and their daughter’s life with his drinking. She feels that if she were to take him to a judge to try to divorce him and get full custody of their daughter, she’s not going to have a lot to go on, and that’s heightened by the fact that he has a very influential family. So Lainey’s wild and crazy best friend comes up with a wild and crazy plan to stage a haunting in the house so realistic that it drives her husband out of the house for good.

What's in a name?

I do occasionally give my characters names that are symbolic (Saoirse White and Emmit Powell as having the same initials as Sarah Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe in Beneath the Poet’s House, for example), but in the case of How to Fake a Haunting, I just went with whatever I felt in the moment (with a small shout-out to Lainey Wilson, whom Lainey Taylor is named for, but only because my daughter loves her music).

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I have been writing in one capacity or another for as long as I can remember—painstakingly bound and hilariously illustrated short stories as a child, emo journal entries as an adolescent and when I was in treatment for substance abuse, impassioned nonfiction essays and decidedly weak attempts at memoir—but I didn’t start writing fiction seriously until about 2014, so I think my teenaged reader self would be surprised…and maybe a little impressed!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’d say the hardest scenes for me to write are both the first and the last, or, maybe not the last, per se, but the climax. The first scene I have to get right before I can move on, even on a first draft, because the tone and content of that scene will set the stage for me for the rest of the novel in terms of my headspace and how I’m approaching the characters and narrative. I’ll go back over it thirty-six times if I have to, and once I feel like it’s “right,” I’ll allow myself to write the next chapter. And I feel like climax scenes are hard for any writer, no matter how skilled or experienced. It’s the place where you have to put everything together, where you have to prove to the reader that they’ve made the right choice by following you as far as they have.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Every character I write is the result of small elements of my own personality or experience, which I then force through the blender of edits, beta reader observations, rewrites, cuts, late-night analyses, and (sometimes impulsive) additions. For me, emotionally satisfying characters are a matter of examining them over and over again from all different angles. Is this character believable? Relatable? Driven by clear motivations? Neither all good nor all bad? And onward through the editing process until they resemble both “real” people and “real” players within the drama of the story’s narrative.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Place inspires a lot of my writing. I’d say 95% of what I write takes place somewhere in my home state of Rhode Island; How to Fake a Haunting is set in Newport, RI, my last novel, Beneath the Poet’s House, is set in Providence, my debut, The Daughters of Block Island, was set on Block Island, and many of my short stories take place in Mysticism, a fictional town that exists somewhere between Westerly and Charlestown, and borrows a portion of its name from Mystic, Connecticut.

I think the consistent use of Rhode Island as setting can be attributed to a combination of two factors. First, there is absolutely something haunted and horrific about the smallest state in the United States. Especially in the beach communities at the southern part of the state, there’s such a sense of isolation in the winter, of things lurking in the cold and waiting to awaken. Additionally, while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the oft-repeated ‘write what you know’ adage, I find that in terms of place, setting a work of fiction in a locale with which you are intimately familiar makes for fiction that’s more dynamic to read, and more enjoyable to write.

Visit Christa Carmen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beneath the Poet's House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Chorão

Ian Chorão is a writer and psychotherapist in private practice in Brooklyn, New York. He lives with his wife, who is a filmmaker and professor; they have two children.

Chorão's new novel, When We Talk to the Dead, is his first book of horror.

Like his main character, Chorão appreciates that the space between feeling and creation, reality and imagination is often ambiguous at best.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My book’s title, When We Talk to the Dead, was a last-minute decision. For the longest time it was called, She’s Not There. Both titles work, but are wildly different, vibe wise. She’s not there is a refrain said several times in the book; it has multiple meanings (no spoilers but trust me).

But alluding to what the book’s about isn’t enough. A title needs to capture more: tone, genre. My book is a gothic, psychological horror. I needed a title to speak to that. When We Talk to the Dead instantly tells you the type of story you’re about to read. This is a scary book, a story of darkness. This is the tale of 19-year-old Sally da Gama, so haunted by tragic loss that she will follow a path that might offer release or might plunge her deeper into madness.

The title also has an energy and action I really liked. It sets up a dynamic. When we talk to the dead, what then happens? Get ready. Once you enter the book, you will find out.

What's in a name?

A character can’t feel alive and dimensional until I have their name. Personally, I shy away from their names being overly symbolic—for me that feels too pushy. I name them more the way people often name their kids. A name you like, a name that reflects some aspect of their background, culture, region. For me, it’s less about being meaningful and more about being naturalistic. Finding a name that feels like their name.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I didn’t read much horror or gothic literature when I was a teenager. I loved existential books, like The Stranger, by Albert Camus, and books that explored the ills of society, like Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and I was also into intense emotional books, like The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. At first blush, my teenage self might think: “Older me, you wrote a horror novel?” But in truth, the differences between genres is maybe less than we think. Horror simply offers an extreme and active landscape to explore all the things I have always loved: the deeply complicated and emotional experience of being a flawed person living in a very imperfect world. Once my teenage self began reading this book, I’d like to think he’d be hooked.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

For me, neither is harder, just different. The beginning always just appears. There’s some situation or person I’m curious about, a memory, a stranger I see on the street, an image, an issue, and suddenly my curiosity has morphed that into a character or fictional situation.

I’m a psychotherapist. I work with a lot of traumas, anxiety, fear. Another thing that comes up is how variable people’s memories are, particularly as it’s been affected by life events: some have very detailed memories, some very impressionistic, some people have no memories, whole sections of their lives lost behind a big blank. One day, these culminated into a character in my head. A young woman who had endured a tragedy in childhood. A traumatic event she has no memory of that has, nonetheless, haunted her life since. A beginning was born.

Having a character and situation is one thing; finding the right entryway into the story is often a lot of work of going down many dead ends until the right path is found. It’s time consuming but doesn’t feel hard because even writing you toss out helps you get to know your character.

The ending is different from the beginning. Where the beginning just appears spontaneously, the ending reveals itself once I’m deep into the writing, but well before I’ve gotten to the end. Once the life of the character is set in motion, I know them well enough to see exactly where they are going. And once I know the ending, it tends to be set, almost like fate.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There is a diverse cast of characters in the book, of varying ages, races, ethnicities, genders, cultures, economies. I am closer to some than others. There is a therapist—obviously I know what it is to be a therapist; likewise, the main character’s father taps into me being a father. I’m a different age and gender than the main character, but we share a lot in common. Though I don’t have the traumatic background she has, we are similar temperamentally, ethnically, the ways we both have felt like “the other” in different situations. She makes little films to try to understand the things she doesn’t understand, or to at least find some expression for what churns inside her—for me writing serves a very similar function. I feel I know her very well.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Like an archipelago, a group of seemingly distinct islands that are connected beneath the water, there’s an interconnection across creative fields; they commingle. I get inspiration for my writing from so many art forms beyond other writing.

Music is huge. I always have a playlist for my characters. How music folds around you, moves through your body, transports you, how it conjures emotions: these are so helpful when trying to occupy the sensation of the written character. A song like "Depreston" by Courtney Barnett is as good as any Raymond Carver story.

I studied visual art, and my writing tends to be visual. I will look at art, colors used, how a hand is painted, and it taps me into a wordless visual relationship to things that I then try to put into words.

Films, for the story, for the tempo, how scenes are cut together. A favored movie of my childhood, Over the Edge, had a huge impact on how it felt to be a teenager, and in my book, I have an ode to it if one cares to look. Or a movie like The Witch captured an unnerving menace that inspired the atmosphere of my book.

Lastly, spending time outside, in nature. The book has an island that’s another character. I wanted to let the island speak in its language of wind and plants and sea. I also wanted to capture the embodied experience of being a person in the physical world. The felt experience of running, of hyperventilating; feeling the elements of air and water on the skin, the physical nature of fear. I spend time in nature, with the elements, so I can try to write those elements in a way that the words might fade, and the reader forgets they’re reading because they’ve been plunged into a world of sensations.

Follow Ian Chorão on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Writers Read: Ian Chorão.

--Marshal Zeringue

Addie E. Citchens

Born in the Mississippi Delta, Addie Citchens graduated from Jackson State University and attended the Callaloo Writer Workshop. She has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Midnight & Indigo, and The Oxford American. She is a 2025 O. Henry Award winner and in 2023 was noted by the ASME. Her Blues history work is featured heavily in Mississippi Folklife Magazine.

FSG's inaugural Writer's Fellow, Citchens's highly-anticipated debut novel is Dominion.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title Dominion shoves readers into the book, and ultimately, for me, the moral of the story is that the concept of dominion itself is both relative to the forces at hand and dependent upon the willingness of other entities to be subjected. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I have a love/hate relationship with my title. It feels powerful, yet literal. The first title, or rather the working title was In the Image of the Beast, which also felt literal, though, so I don’t know. I’ve never been good at titles. Dominion was a joint effort, which I could dig, but I sometimes wish I would have held out until we could come up with something even harder and more poignant.

What's in a name?

Emanuel’s name is the most deliberately chosen in Dominion, but otherwise, as a lover of interesting names period, I didn’t mean to be symbolic in naming this characters, but after the fact, I can see how some of the names could be seen as so. Most of the time I have to rehash the beginning of a story over and over to find a name for a character that sticks with me, and for me, factors like how it would sound read aloud in my head for however many times it appears in a text fare heavily. I have to really fuck with it to want to keep saying it. Rarely do my characters start out with permanent names. In my short story “A Good Samaritan,” featured in The Paris Review, I almost avoid naming folks altogether.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would not be surprised at all at Dominion. I’ve been writing this, via observation of the community around me, for most of my life.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Almost all of my stories begin assertively as hell, so I will say beginnings almost always come out exactly how they will stay for however long I am working on the project. I used to have endings in mind when I wrote, but I’ve learned not to marry myself to anything in the text or force anything to be. Endings change as my relationship to my characters change and as they themselves evolve in the text. I don’t mind changing endings until it feels right.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

My characters all have some aspect of me, even the minor ones. I’m a person with a lot of strange habits and aversions, so I stick a piece of me all throughout my stories. I don’t have kids, so this is my version of spreading my genetic code about.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music of all types influences my writing. I walk in the French Quarter and people watch. I walk through Treme and people watch. Watching people and being nosy influences my work. Life is like theater of the living. Social media, cat behavior, exercise, YouTube videos—there’s inspiration in almost everything for me.

Visit Addie E. Citchens's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen S. Allen

Kathleen S. Allen is a young adult writer of gothic horror, historical, fantasy, and speculative fiction. She has published poems, short stories, novellas, and novels. She prefers dark to light, salty to sweet, and tea to coffee. She is a fan of K-Pop, classic rock, and British detective shows. She loves gray, foggy, cool, rainy days; unfortunately she lives in Los Angeles which is usually sunny and warm.

Allen's new novel is The Resurrectionist.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title sets up an image in the reader’s mind that this is a story about a resurrectionist, which it is. I went through many title changes before my agent suggested the current title. Here’s a list of them:

The Darkness Within; In Darkness We Rise; What Lies Beneath The Skin; We Shall Be Monsters; Unhallowed; The Resurrectionist’s Daughter; For in that Sleep of Death What Dreams May Come; Frankenstein’s Daughter; In Darkness We Dwell; The Story of The Creature; The Story of The Monster; The Creature; The Last Dream of My Soul

The book cover goes further in that readers will guess it’s about a young woman in Victorian times trying to become a resurrectionist. Yet, there’s something sinister as evidenced by the bloody scalpel in her hand and the blood spots on her gown and handkerchief she carries. The Masquerade Venetian half mask she wears also suggests all is not as it seems.

What's in a name?

I took my main character’s name from Swan Lake/The Swan Princess. Odile Rothbart. In Swan Lake Odile is the evil or black swan and Odette is the non-evil one. I used Deirdre as the name of Dilly’s (Odile) twin because it went well with Dilly. Rothbart is the villain in both Swan Lake (Von Rothbart) and in The Swan Princess. Why choose those names? I liked the juxtaposition of them, with one being the evil one and one being the so-called good one. And I chose Rothbart because I wanted their last name to be that of a villain that wasn’t immediately recognizable.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self wouldn’t be surprised because I’d been thinking about writing a gothic horror story for a long time. And Frankenstein has been my favorite book since I read it at the age of eight! My first foray into the genre was a Jane Eyre retelling I wrote when I was seventeen. Needless to say that one won’t see the light of day, it’s been permanently shelved.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I think solidifying the perfect beginning takes time. Where should I open the lens so readers can view their story at the precise moment to bring them into the world I’ve created? What is important for the readers to know about Dilly and Deirdre? Finding that balance between too much information/back story and too little is like teetering on the edge of a cliff. One step too far and you plummet into the abyss of tedious information no one (except the author) cares about, and one step too far back and no one can figure out what’s going on.

I usually change both depending on the final form of the story. The original beginning of this novel had their father’s funeral in it but was cut during edits. It took me a while to figure out the ending. I had several written but none were working. One day as I was editing, the ending came to me in a flash and that’s the ending readers will see.

Visit Kathleen S. Allen's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Resurrectionist.

My Book, The Movie: The Resurrectionist.

Writers Read: Kathleen S. Allen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Fawcett

Before writing books, Jennifer Fawcett was an award-winning playwright and cofounder of the theater company Working Group. She is the author of Beneath the Stairs. Born and raised in Canada, she spent a decade living in the Midwest before settling in the Hudson Valley. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her plays have been published by Original Works and in Third Coast Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and in the anthology Long Story Short.

Fawcett's new novel is Keep This for Me.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

A good title is doing several things at once: it’s catching a reader’s attention, it’s helping a reader (and bookseller or librarian) place a book in context with others, i.e., what genre, sub-genre, and which other writers might be similar to, and finally it is a connection into the story, one that should go deeper as the reader dives in so that by the end, its meaning is layered.

Keep This for Me is an evocative title. It doesn’t explain itself immediately. “Keep what for me?” a reader might understandably ask. Without knowing what specifically is being kept, the title should make the reader think about holding on to something (or someone), about memory, and about objects that hold meaning.

The title comes from a line in the book, but that line doesn’t come until quite far in. Even before they come across that line, the reader will learn about the importance of specific objects in this story. This is a story about someone who disappeared. When someone disappears, all that’s left behind are the physical objects they once owned and their memories. So, while the line is said by one specific character to another, if you expand the “this” being kept from just a physical object into a memory, a memory of a whole person, then the meaning deepens.

What's in a name?

I’m very specific about character and place names. They have to feel right. If I can’t find the right name for a character (or place) then I use letters as stand-ins until I get the right fit. I’m less concerned about deeper meaning and more about gut instinct. I also don’t use names that belong to friends and family because I need a feeling of distance to be able to write freely.

If a name doesn’t organically appear to me, then I look up lists of baby names for the year when I imagine the character to be born. This is particularly helpful with characters who are older than I am.

Sometimes names have to be changed. It can be confusing for a reader if there are two characters, whose names start with the same letter, especially if they are the same gender or have something else in common. In early drafts, I had a David and a Danny. Both male names, five letters long, two syllables, and starting with a D. Even though the characters were entirely distinct to me, I was told it might cause confusion and so I renamed Danny, Jason.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think my teenage self would have loved my novel! (At least I hope so.) When I was a teenager, I read lots of Stephen King, a variety of literary fiction, poetry, and the odd steamy romance novel that made the rounds between the girls in my class. My novel is a literary thriller and I like to think there’s some poetry to the language, so aside from the steamy stuff (I got that out of my system in my first book), I think my fifteen-year-old self would approve.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Endings are harder. In a thriller, everything has to build toward the ending but it can’t be predictable. For Keep This for Me, I knew what the climax was going to be from early on. I don’t want to write about it specifically because that would give spoilers, so all I’ll say is that I knew that X + Y would happen, but I had no idea how I was going to get there. As I started writing and digging deeper with these characters, I figured out how I was going to get there. I think of it as climbing a mountain. I can see the summit from the ground, but I can’t see the path that’ll get me there until I start the journey.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I am in all of my characters, even though many of them are quite unlike me. One of the reasons why I write is to imagine what it would be like to be in different situations. Given that I write thrillers, those situations are often nightmarish. The original spark for Keep This for Me came from this. I learned about a couple whose car had broken down on the side of the road (this was before the age of cell phones). They waved down a passing transport truck, not knowing that the driver was a serial killer. Not far into the journey, the trucker stopped and asked the man to help him adjust the load. He killed him and then held the woman hostage for a few hours before killing her, too. The driver was caught after these murders and this information came from later court testimony.

When I read about this, I immediately started wondering what was going through that woman's mind in those few hours before her death. How would she have kept herself from descending into utter panic? I imagined she would be trying to make sense of how she had suddenly gone from an ordinary drive to a nightmare. Humans are sense-making creatures, and even when there is no logical explanation, we try to find one. We think of all the “what ifs.” So, as I imagined her (or me as her) in that truck, I started to build out her family and all the people who didn’t even know yet that this had happened. The people who would try to piece together the events of this night and try to build their own understanding of why it had happened.

My characters feel very real to me and I think this is because I try to imagine myself as them. Inevitably, pieces of me get woven in. I believe that within each of us, there is the possibility for cruelty, for love, for bravery. By writing, I imagine what would happen if those possibilities were realized.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Keep This for Me was inspired by an actual serial killer case, as I noted above. I stumbled upon it in a news article many years ago. The article was actually about something else and this case was only briefly mentioned, but it struck me and through some research I was able to dig up more information. I have used news articles before as inspiration because I’m fascinated by human psychology. Why do we do what we do? Often, when there’s no easy or obvious answer, a story starts to grow. I’m not trying to write nonfiction, so I use real events as the jumping off point into fiction.

Visit Jennifer Fawcett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John A. McDermott

John A. McDermott was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He now serves on the board of directors for the Writers’ League of Texas and teaches creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. Prior to teaching, he worked as an actor, bartender, house painter, and advertising copywriter. He lives in Nacogdoches with his wife and teenage daughter.

The Last Spirits of Manhattan is his first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The Last Spirits of Manhattan is pretty direct in two respects: the novel has ghosts at a cocktail party (hence two kinds of spirits) and it’s set in Manhattan. “Last” is the tricky word; are these the final spirits or the latest spirits? I’d like to leave that to the reader. The title wasn’t always so directly informative; for a long time, it was called The Direction of Rented Spirits. Direction was a play on both film directors, since the party is hosted by Alfred Hitchcock, and the life-changing choices confronting the characters. What direction are they heading? Rented played on the idea that the house where the party happened was an old rowhouse rented for the evening by Hitchcock—and rented in the sense of torn. There are lots of emotional scars on these ghosts. The published title is more informative, though I was sad to see the play on rented and direction go, but last gives it the interpretive options I wanted.

What's in a name?

The novel is based on a family story my mother told me years ago, so the original incarnation of my protagonist was named Marion, a nod to my mother’s middle name. The further I progressed into the manuscript, the more I fictionalized the source material, the harder it was to make Marion do things that caused interesting plot points. I was hampered by her being too close to my mother’s personality; she needed a change. My mother’s first name was Cornelia, so I mashed Cornelia and Marion together, and with a nod to Carolyn Keene of Nancy Drew fame, my Marion became Carolyn. Once she was Carolyn, I found her much easier to write. She was no longer my mother, she was her own woman and gained some of Nancy Drew’s energy.

The weirdest character name in the book is an advertising executive, Bob “The Duck” Buck. As he solidified, he became simply “The Duck.” I don’t think I’ll ever have another character with a capitalized article again because it was a proof-reading nightmare. But it fits him: he is The Duck.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be surprised I’m a writer, since he was obsessed with theater, but it was a logical creative move to go from acting to writing fiction. The topic wouldn’t surprise him too much. I’ve always loved old family stories and ensemble casts and Manhattan, though I grew up far from it, in Madison, Wisconsin. The weird mix of mystery, ghost story, comedy, and family drama would amuse him. I’ve always liked novels that were hard to categorize.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find it easier to write beginnings, at least with this novel. The prologue of the published novel has been in the manuscript since my first days with the project. Endings are trickier, although one character thread of this novel ends with a scene that I wrote before I wrote anything else in the entire book. (It’s a scene with Hitchcock in a hotel bathroom, but not the sort of scene you might expect with Hitchcock and hotel bathroom in the same sentence!) My biggest challenge was choosing an ending, not so much writing one. My editor told me after a round of edits that he thought I had three endings and I needed to choose one. He was right but it meant yanking an epilogue I’d spent a lot of time on and was inordinately fond of. One day maybe I’ll put out an edition with the lost epilogue. Or at least put it on my website!

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Honestly, I think fiction writers inhabit all of their characters as we play out emotions we have actually felt or try out choices we are either too scared or polite or sane to make in real life. My favorite aspect of writing fiction is pretending to be all of the characters (that’s my theater background, I guess), but it’s also why I love reading fiction. Losing myself in someone else’s world is such a joy. Empathy’s a hot button word now, but for me, writing (and reading) fiction are acts of empathy, trying to think like someone else and why they might make the choices they make, but writing a novel is a constant mix of using my own choices and asking but what would this person do?

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

To get into the right mood to write this novel, I listened to a lot of 1950s music, singers like Blossom Dearie, Sammy Davis Jr., and Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of jazz musicians. There’s a playlist available at both my website and the Simon and Schuster site that explains a bit of my musical influences. For a historical novel, it felt necessary to listen to the music that my characters would know. I love film, too, and with a novel with Alfred Hitchcock as a primary character, I had to watch his films from that era. The tonal span between the comedic The Trouble with Harry and the tragic The Wrong Man might explain the tonal shifts in my novel! I go from comedy to tragedy in one night and I think Hitchcock might have inspired that. His TV series of that era was helpful, too, because I could study the cadence of his speech. The research I did for this novel was so much fun—the music and the movies of the era are just two examples.

Visit John A. McDermott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Skyla Arndt

Skyla Arndt has always loved the creepy, crawly side of life. When she was younger, she thought that love might translate to hunting Bigfoot, but luckily for him, writing proved easier. These days, you can catch her writing stories by candlelight, splurging on candles for her office, and continuing to keep an eye out for Bigfoot (because you never know). She lives with her husband and three cats by the perpetually frozen Great Lakes.

Arndt's new novel is House of Hearts.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I’m not sure what strange book magic is involved, but for the most part, the book’s title comes to me first! I knew I wanted this story to be called House of Hearts before I even fully incorporated Alice of Wonderland into the book…which is wild considering how heavy an influence the Queen of Hearts plays in this finished novel! In the end, it was a perfect fit.

What's in a name?

While Violet and Calvin’s names were both chosen on a vibe-based whim, the name of the boarding school they attend was intentional. Hart Academy is an obvious tie-in to the title and it helps to create the pun for my Wonderland-inspired bogeyman, the Queen of Hart’s.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I don’t feel like she would be surprised! I’ve wanted to be an author since I was a kid, so it was always a dream of mine that I wanted to make a reality. On top of that, I’ve always been into stories that are equal halves spooky and swoony! Being a horromance author was a natural fit.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings, 100%! There is something so unbelievably daunting about staring at a blank page. It’s also challenging on a psychological level. Knowing that a majority of readers will judge a book off its opening definitely applies a ton of pressure.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Definitely! In this particular book, I was navigating my own personal grief alongside that of my main protagonist. In an odd twist of fate, I experienced loss in the middle of revision. While it was challenging to work on the book in the beginning (to put it lightly), it ended up being extremely therapeutic to include my own feelings. My not-so-fun fact is that I went through all the stages of grief alongside my MC.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

TV/Movies influence me a lot! For this book, there’s inspiration drawn from The Ring and Maxton Hall (a bizarre combo, I know).

Visit Skyla Arndt's website.

Writers Read: Skyla Arndt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keshe Chow

Keshe Chow (she/her) is a Sunday Times bestselling author of fantasy, romance, and speculative fiction. Born in Malaysia, Chow moved to Australia when she was two years old. Her debut novel, The Girl with No Reflection, won the 2022 Victorian Premier's Literature Awards Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript and was shortlisted in the 2025 ABIA awards. Her new YA fantasy is For No Mortal Creature. Currently Chow resides in Naarm (Melbourne) with her husband, two kids, one cat, and way too many house plants.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title is taken from an excerpt from Wuthering Heights, which was one of the inspirations for For No Mortal Creature. Specifically, this passage of dialogue uttered by Cathy Earnshaw:

“He quite deserted! we separated!” she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. “Who is to separate us, pray? They’ll meet the fate of Milo! Not as long as I live, Ellen: for no mortal creature. Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff.”

I feel as though the title conveys quite a lot about the book. Firstly, that it draws inspiration from Wuthering Heights. Second, using words such as ‘mortal’ and ‘creature’ conveys that it has fantasy and gothic undertones. Third, ‘no mortal creature’ fits the book well, as the book is about ghosts who can die and become ghosts of ghosts. Since there are many ghosts in the book, having ‘no mortal creature’ in the title is very evocative.

What's in a name?

The names in this book are significant in that they indicate where the characters come from. For No Mortal Creature is set at the very edge of an empire that borders on a neighboring kingdom, so there are clashing cultures. The main character’s name, Jia Yi, is supposed to mean ‘auspicious’ and is Chinese-coded.

The character Lin, who is an orphan, is named after the forest in which he was found. Lin is the Chinese word for forest and it made sense to me that, as an orphan adopted into a Chinese-coded community, he would be named a simple single-character word that relates to how he was found. This is a similar origin story to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.

The character Essien Lancaster is from across the border, from the kingdom of Yske, which is modelled more after England. He is inspired by the character Edgar Linton, so his name reflects that.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I’ve always been quite scared of ghosts so my teenage self would probably be surprised that I would dare to write a ghost story! That being said, I don’t think they would bat an eyelid at me writing a book that mixes fantasy, romance, and horror elements, since I read extremely widely as a child.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Usually I find beginnings much easier to write, but I found the opening chapter of For No Mortal Creature extremely difficult. This is because I had a vision of the ‘vibe’ I wanted to achieve for this book and when I first started writing it, I wasn’t nailing that vision at all. The opening chapter initially started in a bustling market—it was much more urban and action-packed. However, it didn’t have that creeping, pervasive sense of doom, or the haunting atmosphere I wanted, so I scrapped that chapter several times. It was only when I rewrote it to the forest setting that it all clicked into place.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All of my characters do have elements of my own personality but they are also their own people! Mostly they’re also a lot braver than I am. I’m a massive introvert and these days I would much rather be holed up at home with my family, books, and cats than out there journeying on quests!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

These days, I very rarely get a chance to consume other forms of media apart from books, but when I do I like to watch film and television. The other major influence for For No Mortal Creature was the film Inception—that’s where the idea for ghosts who can die multiple times, and a multi-layered afterlife, came from.

Visit Keshe Chow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and six books of fiction. Her newest novel is I Am You. Redel’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated in ten languages. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O, and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Redel is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York and Utah.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My hope is that before reading the novel the title I Am You provokes a question in the reader-- What does this mean? Or maybe even a response of-- No way, you're not me! But when you start reading the novel, what the title means keeps slightly altering as the relationship of the two central characters, Maria and Gerta, shifts. And when you come to the end, the title hopefully feels quite layered and rich.

What's in a name?

In I Am You though the story is invented, the central characters are based on real people from the Dutch Golden Age and I've kept their names.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I've actually written the kind of novel my teenage reader self would have gobbled up, which maybe says that my obsessions haven't changed all that much. A novel that concerns itself with paint, art, an awakening self, gender, obsession, betrayal and secrets-- that was my jam then, and it apparently still is.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The key for me is to find the opening. I believe that once I have the "right" beginning I simply have to keep unpacking it to find the entire work. So, sometimes that takes a while. In I Am You, the opening paragraphs happened fast and easily and are not much changed. At a certain point in the writing, I could see the end. The hard part for me was not rushing to get there, to slow myself down, and find more unexpected surprises along the way.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Despite the centuries between myself and my characters, I feel close and deeply connected to them. There is so much that Gerta says and feels about herself and her awakening development as an artist that feels akin to me. Maria is difficult in ways that I am not, but I wanted to think about ambition both it's necessity in the world and the corrosive effects it has on relationships.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I'm not trying to be glib when I say everything! I spend a lot of time outdoors-- in the mountains, on lakes, and lately, at a late age, I've started riding horses (western). So trees, creeks, the attentive ears of horses are all inspirations. In this novel, I was also able to pay homage to my love of painting, paint, and color.

Visit Victoria Redel's website.

The Page 69 Test: Before Everything.

The Page 69 Test: I Am You.

--Marshal Zeringue