This week we talk with Maggie Ginsberg (Still True, Univ of Wisconsin Press, September 2022). Maggie, a journalist and magazine editor, always thought the novelists she admired were born with "magic author brains", that ideas simply flowed out of their fingers onto the page. It was only after she decided to write a book herself that she discovered the similarities with er non-fiction interviews—the characters were actually "real people" and all she had to do was ask the right questions so she could understand their story. We discuss the pluses and challenges of publishing with an academic press, how the key to a major character was buried in her own personal history, and how her award-winning book unabashedly claims "Midwestern Lit" as its genre.

Maggie Ginsberg is a writer, editor and author in Wisconsin. Her debut novel, Still True, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in September 2022 and is one of three finalists in this year's WFWA STAR Award for Outstanding Debut. It was also the honorable mention selection for the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and a 2023 Midwest Book Awards silver medal winner in the Literary/Contemporary/Historical Fiction category. Maggie is now a senior editor at Madison Magazine after freelancing for city, regional and national magazines since 2006, and her nonfiction work has earned numerous honors from the City Regional Magazine Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Milwaukee Press Club. She lives with her bicycle mechanic husband and a revolving door of kids and pets.

To learn more about Maggie, click here.