The 7am Novelist

Join us as we talk about Anjali’s journey toward publishing her first book, writing her second, and her decision to launch an independent press with fellow author Henriette Lazaridis that re-envisions the writer-publisher dynamic and how books are marketed and sold.

Anjali Mitter Duva is an Indian American writer who was raised in France. Her first novel, FAINT PROMISE OF RAIN, set in 16th century India, was shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction. She has been a Finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. She is a Fiction co-Editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, an instructor at Grub Street, and a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon. She is also a co-founder of Chhandika, a non-profit organization dedicated India’s classical kathak dance. Along with Henriette Lazaridis, she is now launching a new publishing company called Galiot Press. 

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Why include real life characters, either historical or present-day (even family!), in your fiction? How might it inspire and give some valuable context to your work? And what are some of the pitfalls you might want to avoid? Authors Chris Boucher and Hesse Phillips help us wade through the answers.

This webinar recording is available for 24 hours. Missed it? Listen to the podcast version, available here on our SubStack page or on your favorite podcast platform.

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Hesse Phillips (she/they) was raised next-door to a chicken farm in rural Pennsylvania but now lives in Spain. Their debut novel Lightborne, about the death of Christopher Marlowe, was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and will be published by Atlantic Books in the UK in 2024, and hopefully in the US someday as well. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Bridport Review, the époque (pronounced EPOCH) press é-zine, Roi Fainéant (Wrah Fah-NAY-unt) Press, Emerge Literary Journal, Erato Magazine, and on DeadDarlings.com, and is forthcoming in Pangyrus, among others. They have a PhD in Drama from Tufts University and are a very proud graduate of Grub Street Boston's intensive Novel Incubator program. 

Christopher Boucher received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 2002. Chris is the author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Golden Delicious and Big Giant Floating Head (a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award Finalist) and editor of Jonathan Lethem's More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers. He's an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College and the managing editor of Post Road Magazine.

What are the differences between YA and adult, and why do I have to pay attention to them if I want to write something in between? Emily Ross and Desmond Hall help us navigate this thorny issue that involves voice, content, audience, marketing, and what it means to stay true to your vision (and how genre rules might just help you).

For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.

Emily Ross is the author of Half in Love with Death, an International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist for best young adult novel, inspired by a true crime from the sixties.  She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist award in fiction for Half in Love with Death. Her work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Five South, and other publications. She is an editor at Deaddarlings.com. She used to work in tech. Now she writes full time and is currently working on The Black Sea, an adult mystery set in a fictional version of her hometown of Quincy MA.

Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee’s creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He’s also been named one of Variety magazine’s Top 50 Creatives to Watch. Desmond is the author of the gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark which confronts the harsh realities of gang life in Jamaica and how far a teen is willing to go for family. It’s been listed among the best YA books of the year by Bank Street, Essence Magazine, and was a New England Book Award Finalist. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters.

Author Julie Carrick Dalton helps us re-see our novel drafts through a unique (and colorful) method she calls “Visual Graphing.”

Julie Carrick Dalton is the Boston-based author of Waiting for the Night Song, named a Most Anticipated 2021 novel by CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and others, and an Amazon Editor’s pick for Best Books of the Month. A Bread Loaf, Tin House, and GrubStreet Novel Incubator alum, Julie is a frequent speaker on the topic of Fiction in the Age of Climate Crisis at universities, conferences, libraries, and museums. Her writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Orion, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, and other publications. When she isn’t writing, you can usually find Julie digging in her garden, skiing, kayaking, or walking her dogs. Her second novel, THE LAST BEEKEEPER, is coming out on March 7.

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Julie’s graph (plus her dog!)

Character interiority in prose is one of the most misused and misunderstood writing tools, but without it your story will go nowhere. Rebecca Makkai helps us understand why our prose needs interiority and how to do it, going beyond the surface level.

For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the short story collection, Music for Wartime, and the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, The Borrower, and her new novel coming out in February titled I Have Some Questions for You. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Why rewrite old tales and myths? And how best to do it? Helping us find the answers, we’re joined by Nina MacLaughlin , author of Wake, Siren, a story collection retelling Ovid’s Metamorphosis from the perspective of the women transformed in his tales.

For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren (FSG/FSG Originals), a re-telling of Ovid's Metamorphoses told from the perspective of the its female figures, as well as Summer Solstice (Black Sparrow). Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton). Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and is now the New England Literary News columnist for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

How to represent place with good research, good intentions, great details, an ear for the nuances of criticism and nostalgia (your own and those of others), and as always: humility. To help us out, we hear from Allison Amend and Shilpi Suneja, both writing about places they know well and places less familiar to them and to their readers.

For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.

Allison Amend debut short story collection, Things That Pass for Love, won a bronze Independent Publisher’s award. Stations West, a historical novel, was published by Louisiana State University Press  and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday published her most recent novels A Nearly Perfect Copy  and Enchanted Islands. Allison lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College in the Bronx and at the Red Earth MFA.

Shilpi Suneja was born in India. Her work has been published in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Cognoscenti, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. Her writing has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, and a Grub Street Novel Incubator Scholarship. She holds an MA in English from New York University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Saul Bellow Prize. Her first novel, House of Caravans will be published in September 2023.

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How to keep the faith and find the time when writing gets tough and you need to begin again (because you always can). Authors Rosie Sultan and Jessica Keener give us some helpful pointers to get us going.

For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.

Rosie Sultan’s novel Helen Keller In Love (Viking) was praised by The Washington Post, Booklist, and The Library Journal and was an American Library Association book club pick. Rosie won the PEN Discovery Award for Fiction and a Virginia Center of the Creative Arts fellowship. Her new novel, The Best Way to Disappear, is nearing completion. Rosie has taught writing at Suffolk University, Boston University, and Grub Street. She’s a manuscript consultant and helps novelists get their stories into the world. As a literary activist, Rosie raises awareness and money for racial and reproductive rights with Writers For—a group of women writers who use their voices to make our world a better place for all. 

Jessica Keener Jessica Keener's latest novel, Strangers in Budapest, was an Indie Next pick, a "best new book” selection by Entertainment Weekly, Chicago Review of Books, January Magazine, Real Simple, and a Southern Independent Bookstore Association (SIBA) bestseller. Her debut novel, Night Swim, was a national bestseller, followed by Women in Bed, her collection of award-winning stories. She has taught writing at Brown University, Boston University, and Grub Street, and is currently completing a new novel. An anniversary edition of Night Swim was just released in February. 

Thank you for reading The 7am Novelist. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Get ready for our March March 31-day writing challenge, with live webinars and daily inspiration and writing tips—and it’s all free. Thanks to the writers who are helping us out for our second challenge: Rebecca Makkai, Allison Amend, Julie Carrick Dalton, Desmond Hall, Margot Livesey, AE Osworth, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Henriette Lazaridis, Jenna Blum, David Abrams, Dawn Tripp, Jane Roper, Randy Susan Meyers, Shuchi Saraswat, Patricia Park, Lara Prescott, Erica Ferencik, Michael Lowenthal, and many, many more!

When is your book “done”? Or at least, when is it done enough to send to readers, to an agent, to an editor? What is the difference between exhaustion and completion? And how good is good enough? To help us answer these questions, we’ve got author Kasey LeBlanc.

Kasey LeBlanc (he/him) is a 2015 graduate of Harvard College, and an alum of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator program where he was an Alice Hoffman Fellow. He was a finalist in 2019 for the Boston Public Library's Writer-in-Residence position, and has had articles published through WBUR's Cognoscenti, Conde Nast's them, and WriterUnboxed. His debut novel FLYBOY, which tells the story of a closeted trans teenager who becomes a flying trapeze artist in a magical dream circus, all while navigating senior year at a new Catholic school, will be published in spring 2024 by Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins. 

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