This week’s guest is Cheryl Walsh (Unequal Temperament, American Buffalo Books, September 2023). We discuss her writing process, which entails months of thinking and writing about what she wants to write about before she starts, and how the concept of unequal temperament in baroque music became the central metaphor for her main character’s situation as well as providing her unique title. Our wide-ranging talk pinged between her research into meteorology and opera to harpsichords, community theater, and how having Iowa City in her return address enhanced agent’s response rate. As the first podcast guest to win a competition which included a publishing contract, Cheryl shares what it’s like to work with a non-profit university-based micro publisher. And we end the episode with a discussion about writing as a way to deal with grief, both your own and your reader’s as well.

Cheryl Walsh is the author of the novel Unequal Temperament (American Buffalo Books, 2023). She earned a master's degree in history at Cornell University before giving in to the tug of fabrication and pursuing her MFA in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been awarded writing residencies with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. Her creative work has appeared in Short Édition, the online journals Embark and Burningword, the audio magazine The Drum, and such print magazines as Confrontation and The MacGuffin. Originally from Michigan, she traded in lake-effect snow squalls for prairie blizzards and now lives and writes in a 110-year-old house in Iowa City, which she shares with her husband, the Australian photographer Bruce Hart.

To learn more about Cheryl, click here.