Barrelhouse Editor Dave Housley sat down to talk with Neema Avashia about her big-hearted and absorbing memoir, Another Appalachia, one of the featured books at Barrelhouse’s Conversations and Connections: Practical Advice on Writing conference in DC on April 15, 2023.

I edit a literary magazine called Taco Bell Quarterly, where the only guideline is every piece must contain a Taco Bell reference. It’s a joke. It’s totally serious. It’s a monster writing prompt come alive in the lab, and now I’ve read thousands of pieces of writing about Taco Bell. I have a weird glint in my eye.

As the book drew to a close, I was filled with the same satisfied fatigue as when leaving a vast museum.

So many author interviews start with “welcome to the pages of Driftwood.” New readers will feel the warmth of that welcome.

Green’s “songs” communicate the possibility of finding pleasure and connection in a body previously dismissed as a myth.

Bark On is a horridly perfect novel for this modern American moment.

When I’m reading submissions, I find myself looking for the heart of the questions each manuscript is asking. Are they messy enough? Are they risky enough? Are they beautiful enough? Are they questions I want to end time with?

Tessa Yang’s debut collection of fiction, The Runaway Restaurant, was released last fall by 7.13 Books. Jen Michalski’s third collection of fiction, The Company of Strangers, was released this January by Braddock Avenue Books. In many ways, that is where the differences end.

I love, love, love a memoir that’s also more than a memoir. A memoir (or essay collection) that’s also a work of cultural criticism, that uses research to deepen and complicate a personal story. A book that makes you rethink the boundaries between genres.

Aaron Burch is many things: literary magazine founder, editor, publisher, teacher, all around literary Mister Peanutbutter, inventor of the “we’re open right now and will be responding in real time” method of taking submissions. Now he can add novelist to the impressive range of titles. I sat down with Aaron around a Google document to talk about most of those things, but mostly his new novel Year of the Buffalo.

Anca Szilágyi’s second novel, Dreams Under Glass, explores a young artist’s ache to make meaning in a world that feels meaningless.

I’ve been into the Weird and Unknown my whole life. I grew up Catholic, and all of the strangeness and magic really stuck with me.

Where does a mother’s body end and a child’s begin? Belly to the Brutal roots itself in that liminal space.

There is nothing better as an editor than to get a chance to do this, to find something wonderful and brilliant and weird and surprising written by a person you had never heard of before, to be in a position to get that story poem essay out there in the world.

“I used to be the Goatman of PG county. It’s been eight years since I was unmasked,” Earl said. The others nodded. Joan made a warbling sound with her throat that was maybe supposed to sound like a farm animal. Carol punched her in her shoulder.

My daughter has a sound machine for when she sleeps.  It offers many bells and whistles — tinkling lullaby options, pulsing color change through a pediatrician-approved scroll of soft reds and blues — but we don’t use those. 

This is a hard book, in multiple senses of the word. Hard like difficult, like indestructible, like painful, like merciless.

I'm a big believer in hooking the reader from the first paragraph with a unique story or point of view and memorable language.

When I read a collection, I like to feel like I’m on a rollercoaster. Ups and downs, time and space to breathe before I sail (and maybe flail) down a hill again.

The thing about reading submissions is how quickly you realize that a story doesn't have to just be good. It has to be special.