Rebecca Renner is the author of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, which was named a most anticipated nonfiction book of 2023 by BookPage. Renner is also a contributor to National Geographic, and her writing has appeared The New York Times, Outside Magazine, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Stetson University, and she lives in her home state of Florida.

—

To read the full interview, visit Fiction Advocate and be sure to check out the previous installments of Non-Fiction about Non-Humans with Bethany Brookshire, Sabrina Imbler, Erica Berry, Tove Danovich, Karen Fine, Jaime Green, Cat Warren, Gloria Dickie, Karen Pinchin, Rosanna Xia, Maddalena Bearzi, and Linda Hogan!

The post Non-Fiction about Non-Humans: Rebecca Renner appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

If you’d like to hear Tove Danovich and E.B. Bartels in conversation in person, come to Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA tomorrow (Friday 4/7/23) at 7pm! To register and learn more information about the event, click here.

Tove Danovich is the author of Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them. Her work appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Ringer, Eater, NPR, Vox, Grid, and many others. Her articles have been selected for The Year’s Best Sports Writing and Best Food Writing and have been notable selections in Best American Food Writing and Best American Travel Writing. She has been interviewed about her work by 99% Invisible, Marketplace, KERA Think, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio, and others. She lives in Portland, Oregon and works as a freelance journalist.

—

To read the full interview, visit Fiction Advocate, and be sure to check out the previous installments of Non-Fiction about Non-Humans with Bethany Brookshire, Sabrina Imbler, and Erica Berry!

The post Non-Fiction about Non-Humans: Tove Danovich appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

I first learned about Vince Granata’s memoir Everything Is Fine through my friend who is friends with one of Vince’s friends, and when I hopped on the phone with Vince, we naturally figured out we had yet another friend in common. Even though Vince now lives in Texas, he spent his 20s in the Boston area, where I have lived most of my life. Everyone knows everyone through someone else in Massachusetts it seems. It’s a small world.

It’s a small enough world that even before I read Vince’s searing memoir about the murder of his mother at the hands of his schizophrenic brother, I remembered hearing about the news story. I’ve long been someone interested in reading about the darker aspects of life, and Vince’s memoir might just be one of the darkest books I have ever read. There is nothing easy or light about reading Vince’s family’s story. And yet, while Vince’s book does not shy away from some of the hardest – the hardest? – things a family can grapple with, his memoir is one of the most empathetic, kind, and human works I have ever read. There is also a history of schizophrenia in my own family, and Vince’s book provided the nuanced and thoughtful approach to a devastating mental illness that is absent in so many pop culture narratives. I was thrilled to get the chance to speak with Vince and ask him about what it took to write this remarkable work.

The post Interview with Vince Granata on Full Stop! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

When I finished Julian K. Jarboe’s debut short story collection Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel, I was struck by how well they captured a world that was ours, but not quite ours. All the fears, anxieties, and terrors were painfully real, but transposed onto a universe that was both familiar and not. Immersed in Jarboe’s stories, I had that sense of being in a dream––one where you know you’re in your childhood home but it doesn’t look like the house you grew up in. I both recognized and didn’t recognize the places in Jarboe’s stories: a gentrified neighborhood now under water thanks to climate change felt a lot like Boston’s Seaport district, a version of the early 2000s where kids can time-travel back to try to rescue parents from the Twin Towers on 9/11, an America where the job market has become so dire that people are emigrating to the moon to find work, a rural home surrounded by fairies who steal human babies and replace them with changelings while parents wonder if maybe not vaccinating their babies would stop the fairies.

By the time Jarboe and I spoke on the phone a couple weeks after I’d finished reading, though, I was having trouble recognizing the world I lived in. Handshakes, hugs, and kisses were things of the past; people were bumping elbows instead, then keeping six feet apart, then avoiding each other all together. I was communicating with friends who lived down the street through Google Hangouts. I couldn’t see my parents and grandparents even though they only live a couple towns over. Doorknobs, light switches, phones, keys, elevator buttons, credit cards, and mail had become dangerous. Everyone was wearing gloves and masks. Stores were depleted of the most basic goods. Many of us were now working from home, exclusively communicating through screens; the most vulnerable and poor still had no choice but to continue going to work. It was a place I at once recognized but also didn’t; I felt as if I had been transported directly into one of Jarboe’s stories.

It seems appropriate that Jarboe’s publication date for Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel was March 5, in the middle of this pandemic. This collection of stories is more than a clever take on the world we live in, reimagining our everyday problems with fairies and monsters, science fiction and myth. We spoke recently about how the places where we grow up influences our work, how to make sense of the world we live in now, and how to imagine a new and better kind of universe.

To keep reading the interview, head over to The Rumpus.

The post Who Has the Most to Lose? A Conversation with Julian K. Jarboe on The Rumpus! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on August 20, 2019.

—

Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir. Her book was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction and was selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club PiCCK for March/April 2018. Heart Berries was also listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and was one of Harper’s Bazaar‘s Best Books of 2018. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, the Electra Quinney Award for Published Stories, a Clara Johnson Award, and she is also the recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Céillie Clark-Keane. Céillie lives in Boston, where she currently works as a managing editor. She has a Master’s in English Literature from Northeastern University, and her work has been published by Ploughshares online, Electric Literature, Bustle, and more.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Terese Marie Mailhot, interviewed by Céillie Clark-Keane appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on February 14, 2019.

—

Alanna Okun is a writer, editor, and crafter living in New York. She is currently a deputy editor at Vox, and she has previously worked at Racked and Buzzfeed. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Brooklyn Magazine, Apartment Therapy, The Billfold, NPR, Vogue Knitting, The Hairpin, and other places. She has appeared on The Today Show and Good Morning America, as well as other local and national television and radio shows. Okun’s first book, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, was published by Flatiron Books in March 2018.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Céillie Clark-Keane. Céillie lives in Boston, where she she currently works as a managing editor. She has a Master’s in English Literature from Northeastern University, and her work has been published by Electric Literature, Bustle, Entropy, and more.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Alanna Okun, interviewed by Céillie Clark-Keane appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

I am so excited to have this piece up on Electric Literature today! In my three years interviewing writers for my Non-Fiction by Non-Men series on Fiction Advocate, I have learned many helpful things from these badass women, and I hope you all will, too.

The post “I Talked to 39 Women Who Write Nonfiction, and Here’s What I’ve Learned” on Electric Lit! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Three years ago today, on April 28, 2015, Brian Hurley published my very first Non-Fiction by Non-Men interview with Patricia O’Toole. I can’t believe that it has been three years, and so I wanted to take a moment to pause and thank some people who have made this whole Non-Fiction by Non-Men thing possible.

Thank you, Patty, for your willingness to be the first interviewee in the series. You started it all three years ago. Thank you!

Thank you, Brian, for giving me a platform to publish Non-Fiction by Non-Men (I love being part of Fiction Advocate!), for your careful, helpful, and perfect edits, for always sending me suggestions for future interviewees, and for being the column’s number one champion. Non-Fiction by Non-Men exists because of you!

Thank you to everyone who has read my interviews over the past three years, especially those of you who have taken the time to read every single one (hi, Mom and Dad).

And, of course, thank you to every writer who has let me interview her. Non-Fiction by Non-Men would not exist without the generosity of your time and the care and thoughtfulness you take in answering my questions. It has been my greatest pleasure getting to speak with each of you about writing (and reading and teaching and journaling and studying Russian and going to therapy and drinking beer and having pets and whatever else has come up over the course of our conversations), and I have learned so much from each and every one of you. Thank you again for your time and for being supportive of your fellow writers, especially the new ones who are just starting out, like me. Thank you.

As of this month, I have published thirty-seven interviews on Fiction Advocate (for a complete list, go here) and I have no intention of stopping any time soon. Just wait and see who I have lined up for this spring and summer.

Happy birthday, Non-Fiction by Non-Men!

The post Happy birthday, Non-Fiction by Non-Men! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

—

Meghan Daum has written two popular essay collections, My Misspent Youth (Open City Books, 2001) and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (FSG, 2014), which won the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction. Daum has also written a novel, The Quality of Life Report (Viking, 2003) and a memoir, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House (Knopf, 2010). She is the editor of the New York Times bestselling essay anthology Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids (Picador, 2015).

In addition to her books, Daum has been an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Times for over a decade, covering cultural and political topics. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Vogue, among others. Daum is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is an adjunct associate professor in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Meghan Daum appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

I was interviewed by The Nobleman! As the former Editor-in-Chief of the Nobles literary arts magazine, Calliopé, I was a little uneasy at first about talking with our rival publication, but it was actually a blast. Check it out.

Shout out to my interviewer, William Wang ’16, for asking such great questions. I even had to write a dog haiku on the spot.

The post Interview with The Nobleman appeared first on E.B. Bartels.