In My Big Little Break, we ask authors to talk about the first piece they ever had published, how it felt to finally break through, and what they’ve learned since then. This week we’re pleased to be speaking with one of the featured authors at our upcoming conference in Philadelphia on September 23, Athena Dixon.

Where is the balance between wallowing in the past and reverent remembrance? How do we keep the present alive without abandoning who we’ve become?

As writers, we’ve all been stuck. Whether it’s figuring out an ending to the 87,000 word novel you’ve been working on for two years, or what that sad alien spaceman story is really about, or just how the hell do I move this story about the old man sitting in his neighbor’s basement with a gun and a bottle of rum along, we have all been frustrated and not quite sure how to move ahead (yes and sorry, those are all literally things that the person typing this introduction is trying to figure out right now). Maybe we can apply a little design thinking to our work?

All these strategies prod both the reader and the narrator to consider what she isn’t prepared to express outright.

At our Washington, DC conference this past Spring, we loved Holly Wendt’s craft workshop session Getting Hands on with Metaphor so much that we asked her to run it back at our Philly conference on September 23, 2023. We sat down with Holly to talk a bit about this very cool and effective workshop, what writers can get out of it, and of course Patrick Swayze movies.

Again and again, de Kerangal invokes the imagined threat of the forbidden country.

These poems are saturated with images of Antigone, autonomy, and the diaphanous film that stands between us and death.

Does our trauma guide us towards the darkness, or could our trauma act as a sort of beacon, inviting the darkness in?

Conversation and Connections: A Lit Conference Review, by Sarah Tollok

Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in Write or Die, the in-house magazine of Chill Subs.

Ulrich’s stories poke and prod at the world, creatively and intelligently, and refuse to flinch or turn away from what it offers up.

The stones are burdens given to the speaker, but also accepted. Women are taught to abide. Taught to carry.

The fluidity of the sea finds an equivalent in the fluidity of memory. Crews constructs a world (and a love) that transcends time’s usual strictures.

Above all, Someone Who Isn’t Me yearns to sound a pure, clear note. The note is life, “as if our bodies are expensive stereos and life was a song that lasted only as long as we could hear it.”

This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. Sender’s collection screams, “Pay attention. Why is love so hard?”

All of it combines — maybe it was never separated — the language the character the narration, me, the reader, the world in which we read this.

Here, memory is both personal and communal. The four sections of the collection cross time and space, braiding together difficult experiences.

He scoops my ice cream into a chipped yellow mug I bought at a thrift store before we met and fell in love. Three scoops dug out of the carton with a warped soup spoon and the same for him. He brings it to my bedroom, which has lately become his bedroom, too, though he has yet to leave behind the basement apartment he rents up the street.

To inhabit As If Fire Could Hide Us is like the impossible experience of continuously reading the entire book all at once.

It’s as if the speakers have been starved of their ancestral languages, and so their English reaches for oracular truths.

Crossman doesn’t want to put a bow on things--the fear of loss persists; it’s merely taken new shape.