Become a paid subscriber on our substack to participate in the next discussion: https://hotliterati.substack.com/Creds to those who joined:Janet is the owner of a creative agency, Oma Influence and you can find her work on Substack and IGMegan is a DC-based freelance writer. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Nashville Review, The Minnesota Review, and JMWW among other publications. Her debut short story collection Softie: Stories was published by West Virginia University Press in December 2024 to critical acclaim including a starred review in Publishers Weekly. You can find out more at her website meganhowell.org.Joe is an American Aspiring Physician from Utah.