Today, we’ve got a very special guest, the person I cofounded the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program with and who is a beloved teacher and writer in the Boston area, Lisa Borders. Lisa’s latest novel, Last Night at the Disco, was released on October 7. We’re talking about using an unreliable narrator, character liability, and how our dear late agent, Esmond Harmsworth, helped her with the novel’s structure. You can catch Lisa at Brooklyn’s Lofty Pigeon Books with Patricia Park tonight, October 21st, as well as Harvard Bookstore on October 27.

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Lisa Borders is the author of the novels Cloud Cuckoo Land, chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award and a Massachusetts Book Awards honoree, and The Fifty-First State. A frequent humor contributor at McSweeney’s, her essays and short fiction have appeared in Past Ten, The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Black Warrior Review and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and residencies at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center and St. Nell’s. Lisa taught for many years at Boston’s GrubStreet, where she founded the Novel Generator program and co-founded the Novel Incubator program. She currently teaches her own Novel Reactor workshops and does private manuscript consulting. After growing up largely in Central Jersey – a part of New Jersey whose very existence is the topic of much debate – Lisa moved to the Boston area and now lives in Central Massachusetts with her partner and two rescue cats. Lisa’s new novel, Last Night at the Disco, will be published by Regal House on October 7, 2025.

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