The Spark with Madelyn Postman

For the full interview with Maggie Smith, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendation for ravenous readers

Here is the recommended read for December.

All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong

Beginning with her mother’s stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories--some epic, like her mother and father’s daring escapes from communes during China’s Cultural Revolution, and some banal, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons--Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions “Where did I come from?” and “Where are we going?” At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.

I’m excited to announce that Teresa will be our guest author in January!

Share The Spark

✏️ Resource for wonderful writers

The Outland Publishing Fair spotlights creative publishing practices from Chinese and Sino-diasporic communities in London and worldwide. Bringing together leading practitioners and their works across various regions, the fair aspires to establish a vibrant network that catalyses the translocal and intercultural mobility of Sinophone publications. It is scheduled for 17–19 April 2026 at the Copeland Gallery in Peckham in South London.

👣 My moseying

I’m making progress with getting Staring into the Sun ready for ARCs (advance reader copies) and other marketing ahead of its publication by Ten16 Press in May 2026.

🎙️ Interview with Maggie Smith

I first heard Maggie Smith either on the podcast she hosts, Hear Us Roar, or being interviewed on The S**t No One Tells You About Writing podcast. After getting my deal with Ten16 Press, I got in touch with her to ask how it was working with the publisher and she was very generous with her feedback and sharing resources.

In a career that’s included work as a journalist, a psychologist, and the founder of a national art consulting company, Maggie Smith added novelist to her resume in 2022 with the publication of her debut, Truth and Other Lies. Her second novel, Blindspot, was published in May 2024. Maggie also hosts the weekly podcast Hear Us Roar, where she interviews debut authors about their novel and their path to publication. She blogs monthly on Substack and is a board member of Novel Book Camp and the Chicago Writer’s Association, where she serves as Managing Editor of their Write City Magazine. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband.

Books mentioned:

The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer 

We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

Maggie can be found on Substack as @maggiesmithwriter, on Instagram as @maggiesmithwrites, and at maggiesmithwriter.com.

Tune in to the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

Staring into the Sun on Substack, weekly through the end of 2025.

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, The Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by [email protected].

Thanks for reading The Spark! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Spark

For the full interview with publisher Michael T. Braun of Orange Hat Publishing and Ten16 Press, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Here is the recommended read for November.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016)

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015.

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

This month, a single suggestion: to find balance between your writing and everything else in your life. My own life is super busy right now, so I’ve streamlined this month’s edition!

👣 My moseying

The cover design of Staring into the Sun is pretty much finalized. Can’t wait to share it with everyone, probably early next year. Many thanks to Dana Breunig at Ten16 Press for the design.

I’m still working on the end notes of my book.

With all this life busy-ness, I’ve dropped my novel-writing group earlier than planned. I was going to see out the year with three more meetings, but stopped it early. I plan to get back to writing my novel in the second half of 2026.

🎙️ Interview with publisher Michael T. Braun

I met Michael after submitting my manuscript to Orange Hat Publishing, one of about twenty submissions I made to independent publishers. His first email to me, which arrived auspiciously on my twentieth wedding anniversary, had the subject line, “Let’s Work Together on Staring Into the Sun.”

Michael T. Braun is the owner and editor-in-chief of Orange Hat Publishing and its imprint Ten16 Press. He holds a BA in English literature and an MA and PhD in communication science, all from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before purchasing Orange Hat from its founder, he worked in academic research and program evaluation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Medical College of Wisconsin. In addition to his role at Orange Hat, he is an adjunct professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, teaching writing.

Books mentioned:

Haven: A Small Cat’s Big Adventure by Megan Wagner Lloyd

The Hallmarked Man by J. K. Rowling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith

The Forgotten 500 by Gregory A. Freeman

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Tailspin by John Armbruster

Michael can be found on Instagram as @brauninthebooks. Orange Hat Publishing is at orangehatpublishing.com, on Instagram, and on Facebook. Ten16 Press is also on Instagram and Facebook.

Tune in to the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

Staring into the Sun on Substack, weekly through the end of 2025.

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, The Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by [email protected].

Thanks for reading The Spark! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Spark

For the full interview with author S.E. Reid, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Here are the recommended reads for October.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin (2014)

A.J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. He lives alone, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. But when a mysterious package appears at the bookstore, its unexpected arrival gives Fikry the chance to make his life over--and see everything anew.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019)On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie (2024)We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children. But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we’ve made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history.

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you’ve been told about the environment, from the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of overpopulation, plastic straws and palm oil. It will give you the tools to understand what works, what doesn’t and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let’s turn that opportunity into reality.

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

An episode of the Memoir Nation podcast mentioned host Brooke Warner’s Substack post, “‘You’ in Memoir, Five Ways,” about the use of the second person. A great post to check out.

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994) is a heartfelt guide. One suggestion for writers who feel blocked is to start with what you can see through a 1-inch-square frame.

Discoveries 2026 is open for submissions until January 12th. It’s the Women’s Prize’s writer development program. Send the first 10,000 words of your novel and a synopsis of between 500-1,000 words. Novels do not need to be finished before you enter the competition, but you should be able to summarize in your synopsis the main plot of your work-in-progress. It’s open to women who are at least 18 years old at the time of entry and a resident of the UK, the Republic of Ireland, or the Channel Islands.

Literary agency AM Heath have launched a “biennial adult novel prize to honour the much-loved double Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Hilary was a staunch supporter of countless first-time novelists, so the prize will focus on work in progress from unpublished writers, with the aim of offering the mentoring and financial support to assist the best of the next generation in finishing their work. AM Heath will be working with the publisher John Murray and creative writing charity Arvon.” The Hilary Mantel Prize for Fiction submission requires your first 15,000 words and a synopsis, to enter by December 31st.

👣 My moseying

Dana Breunig at Ten16 Press sent over four gorgeous routes for the cover of Staring into the Sun. She’s working on a second iteration of my favorite option now.

I’m continuing to write the end notes for the collection, with a lot of info about the Sausalito Salmon Derby in 1955 🎣

I am submitting a proposal to the Bay Area Book Festival for next May, which gives us a deadline of mid-November to have the digital ARC (Advance Reader Copy) ready.

My writing group is still meeting every three weeks, though I have decided to complete the year and then bow out. Just too much other stuff going on to keep up with everything.

My work-in-progress novel is on hold while I’m getting Staring into the Sun ready for publication. Then the marketing and promotion will kick in!

Because I haven’t been submitting much, for now I’m cutting out the stats, tracked on the brilliant Chill Subs, on my story and book submissions. That section may return in future.

🎙️ Author interview with S.E. Reid

I came across S.E. Reid on Substack, through Eleanor Anstruther, a previous guest on The Spark. Both S.E. and Eleanor serialize their work on that platform, which inspired me to serialize my short story collection, Staring into the Sun, there too.

S.E. is a freelance writer, editor, and poet living on a patch of wooded wetland in the Pacific Northwest with her craftsman husband and her two big goofball dogs, Finn and Huck. She loves to hear and tell stories about nature, history, ghosts, and God, and when not writing she loves to cook nourishing food, read widely, and tend to her vegetable garden. Learn more about her work at sereid.com.

Books mentioned:

Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

In the Woods by Tana French

Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

The Wisdom of the Beguines by Laura Swan

S.E. can be found on Substack, on Instagram as writer.sereid and at sereid.com.

Tune in to the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

Staring into the Sun on Substack, weekly through the end of 2025.

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, The Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by [email protected].

For the full interview with bookseller Amber Harrison of FOLDE Dorset, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Here are the recommended reads for September.

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk (2025)Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion, taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant, because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could.Linda knows that she can’t tell anyone she’s sexually obsessed with planes. Nor can she reveal her belief that it’s her destiny to “marry” one of her suitors, uniting with her soulmate plane for eternity. But when an opportunity arises to hasten her dream of eternal partnership, and the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of control, she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy and launching herself headlong toward the love she’s always dreamed of.

The Interpreter’s Daughter by Teresa Lim (2022)In the last years of her life, Teresa Lim's mother, Violet Chang, had copies of a cherished family photograph made for those in the portrait who were still alive. The photo is mounted on cream card with the name of the studio stamped at the bottom in Chinese characters. The place and date on the back: Hong Kong, 1935.Teresa would often look at this photograph, enticed by the fierceness and beauty of her great-aunt Fanny looking back at her. But Fanny never seemed to feature in the family stories that were always being told and retold. Why? she wondered.This photograph set Teresa on a journey to uncover her family's remarkable history. Through detective work, serendipity, and the kindness of strangers, she was guided to the fascinating, ordinary, yet extraordinary life of her great-aunt and her world of sworn spinsters, ghost husbands and the working-class feminists of nineteenth century south China. But to recover her great-aunt's past, we first must get to know Fanny's family, the times and circumstances in which they lived, and the momentous yet forgotten conflicts that would lead to war in Singapore and, ultimately, a long-buried family tragedy.

Good Luck Life: The Essential Guide to Chinese American Celebrations and Culture by Rosemary Gong (2005)Good Luck Life is the first book to explain the meanings of Chinese rituals and to offer advice on when and how to plan for Chinese holidays and special occasions such as Chinese weddings, the Red Egg and Ginger party to welcome a new baby, significant birthdays, and the inevitable funeral. Packed with practical information, Good Luck Life contains an abundance of facts, legends, foods, old-village recipes, and quick planning guides for Chinese New Year, Clear Brightness, Dragon Boat, Mid-Autumn, and many other festivals.

Written with warmth and wit, Good Luck Life is beautifully designed as an easily accessible cultural guide that includes an explanation of the Lunar Calendar, tips on Chinese table etiquette for dining with confidence, and dos and don'ts from wise Auntie Lao, who recounts ancient Chinese beliefs and superstitions. This is your map for celebrating a good luck life.

For further inspiration, this month’s reading theme from Backstory Bookshop is Prize Nominations.

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

Still a little way off: there will be a Mayfair Book Fair for “readers of all ages and interests” in London in March 2026. I hope to have a table there.

Not quite a craft book, but something to motivate you to focus on your writing is Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

The Fabula Deck is a fun way to structure your writing. You can use the 40 cards however you want, to analyze, organize, and build your stories.

👣 My moseying

This past week, I spoke with my publisher, Michael T. Braun, at Ten16 Press. Now that I have my manuscript edits back for Staring into the Sun, next steps are for Ten16 to do the interior layout and the cover design. My dear friend and former design business partner, Luca de Salvia, will be designing the handwritten script typography for the cover.

Together with another dear friend, Kate Hammer, I will start recording the audio book for independent publication. Mercury Calling Audio will produce it.

I thought I’d go back to working on my novel work-in-progress but have decided to focus on Staring into the Sun for now.

📊 Tracked on Chill Subs

Short story collection submissions to small presses & awards⏱️ 1 pending🚫 14 rejected↩️ 3 withdrawn🥉 1 semi-finalist🎉 1 publication offer!🟰 20 total

Novel prize submissions of my work in progress🚫 4 rejected🟰 4 total

🎙️ Author interview with Amber Harrison

I met Amber Harrison in 2020 through work and since the end of that year, we have been colleagues at consultancy Grain Sustainability.

Amber is co-founder, together with Karen Brazier, of FOLDE Dorset, an award-winning nature writing focused bookshop that opened in April 2021, in the hilltop town of Shaftesbury, Dorset.

FOLDE also celebrates traditional art and crafts, working with local makers to create a sense of place through their work. As well as the shop, they run a spring and autumn author events programme and recently launched their book club.

The business has always been run with a strong environmental and social intent, and in April 2024 became B Corp certified.

Books mentioned:

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Amber can be found in the shop and FOLDE is online at foldedorset.com as well as Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Tune in to the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

Staring into the Sun on Substack, weekly through the end of 2025.

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, The Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by [email protected].

Thanks for reading The Spark! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Spark

I recorded the podcast this month in Den Bosch, in the Netherlands, while my daughter did some work experience at Antigif branding and design studio.

For the full interview with Dr. Anjana Khatwa, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Here are the recommended reads for August.

Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)Dana's 26th birthday celebration ends when she's ripped from 1976 California and thrust onto a Maryland slave plantation in 1815. Her mission: keep alive the white boy who will grow up to assault her ancestor—because without him, she'll never be born. Every trip back grows more dangerous. Dana feels the lash, wears the chains, endures the daily terror that defined millions of lives. She can't just read about slavery's horrors—she lives them, bleeds from them, nearly breaks under them.

The Past by Tessa Hadley (2015)Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend’s son, descend on their grandparents’ dilapidated old home in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past—their mother took them there to live when she left their father—but now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions. As the family’s stories and silences intertwine over the course of three long, hot weeks, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life—bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican—winds down to its inevitable end.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (2019)I received this from the Big Green Bookshop’s Book Club.

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

If you’re in London on September 13th, come along to the Story Feast Lit Fest celebrating ESEA (East and South East Asian) stories and authors. It’s at SOAS University of London and tickets are free.

Mslexia’s 2025 Adult Novel Competition is open until September 22nd. Send the first 5,000 words and be ready to submit your finished manuscript if you get longlisted.

The Outland Publishing Fair, which represents a curated selection of self-published titles by Chinese and Sino-diasporic practitioners, was meant to be in September but it has been postponed. I’ve applied for a space at a shared table there. Look for @outlandpublishingfair on Instagram for the new date.

👣 My moseying

I did not win the Developing Your Creative Practice grant from the Arts Council. However, I’ll apply again in the next round.

My short story collection, Staring into the Sun, was a semifinalist in the Autumn House Press 2025 Nonfiction Prize!

Big news: I’ve signed the contract to publish Staring into the Sun with Ten16 Press in May 2026 (Asian American and Pacific Islanders month in the U.S.). The book links memoir and narrative nonfiction about my Chinese American family. Spanning 1895-2015, look out for a millionaire, a magician, and a model. Ten16 Press will publish the paperback and ebook. With the same release date, I will self-publish the audio book, narrating the four memoir chapters.

Kate Hammer

will narrate the historical creative nonfiction chapters and Anthony at Mercury Calling Audio will produce it. I started researching and writing this book in January 2017 and to finally have a publication deal is an enormous joy. Staring into the Sun celebrates and honors my ancestors.

If you can’t wait until next May to read the stories, subscribe for free on Substack to get them sent to your inbox every Saturday through the end of 2025. More info, links to each installment, and sign up are here. The free subscription is for Staring into the Sun serialization as well as The Spark monthly newsletter.

I’m still writing my novel and meeting with my writing group every three weeks.

📊 Tracked on Chill Subs

Short story collection submissions to small presses & awards⏱️ 4 pending🚫 11 rejected↩️ 3 withdrawn🥉 1 semi-finalist🎉 1 publication offer!🟰 20 total

Novel prize submissions of my work in progress⏱️ 2 pending🚫 2 rejected🟰 4 total

🎙️ Author interview with Dr. Anjana Khatwa

I met Dr. Anjana Khatwa at the Nature Writing Prize for Working Class Writers, founded by Natasha Carthew. The event was held on the stunning roof terrace of Hachette in London.

Dr. Anjana Khatwa is an award-winning earth scientist who has worked for the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site and the National Trust. Dr. Khatwa has contributed to and presented TV programmes for the BBC as well as ITV. She has been given the Geographical Award for public engagement by the Royal Geographical Society, the RH Worth Award by the Geological Society of London and the Halstead Medal from the Geologists' Association. In 2021, she received a National Diversity Award in recognition of her work to champion inclusion within earth science and natural heritage, and the same year was longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing. She lives with her family in Dorset in a house filled with rocks and fossils collected from all over the world. The Whispers of Rock is her first book.

In The Whispers of Rock earth scientist Anjana Khatwa asks us to think again, and listen to their stories. Boldly alternating between modern science and ancient wisdom, Khatwa takes us on an exhilarating journey through deep time, from origins of the green pounamu that courses down New Zealand rivers to the wonder of the bluestone megaliths of Stonehenge, from the tuff-hewn churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, to Manhattan’s bedrock of schist. In unearthing those stories and more, Khatwa shows how rocks have always spoken to us, and we humans to them. She delicately intertwines Indigenous stories of Earth’s creation with our scientific understanding of its development, deftly showing how our lives are intimately connected to time’s ancient storytellers.

Through tales of planetary change, ancient wisdom, and contemporary creativity, The Whispers of Rock offers the hope of reconnection with Earth. With Khatwa as your guide, you won’t simply hear rocks speak; you, too, will feel the magic of deep time seep into your bones.

Anjana can be found on Instagram, Bluesky, and on her website, anjanakhatwa.com.

Photo credit: Rob Coombe.

Tune in to the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

Staring into the Sun on Substack, weekly through the end of 2025.

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, The Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by [email protected].

Thanks for reading The Spark! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Spark

I recorded the podcast this month in Den Bosch, in the Netherlands, while my daughter did some work experience at Antigif branding and design studio.

For the full interview with Dr. Anjana Khatwa, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Here are the recommended reads for August.

Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)Dana's 26th birthday celebration ends when she's ripped from 1976 California and thrust onto a Maryland slave plantation in 1815. Her mission: keep alive the white boy who will grow up to assault her ancestor—because without him, she'll never be born. Every trip back grows more dangerous. Dana feels the lash, wears the chains, endures the daily terror that defined millions of lives. She can't just read about slavery's horrors—she lives them, bleeds from them, nearly breaks under them.

The Past by Tessa Hadley (2015)Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend’s son, descend on their grandparents’ dilapidated old home in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past—their mother took them there to live when she left their father—but now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions. As the family’s stories and silences intertwine over the course of three long, hot weeks, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life—bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican—winds down to its inevitable end.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (2019)I received this from the Big Green Bookshop’s Book Club.

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

If you’re in London on September 13th, come along to the Story Feast Lit Fest celebrating ESEA (East and South East Asian) stories and authors. It’s at SOAS University of London and tickets are free.

Mslexia’s 2025 Adult Novel Competition is open until September 22nd. Send the first 5,000 words and be ready to submit your finished manuscript if you get longlisted.

The Outland Publishing Fair, which represents a curated selection of self-published titles by Chinese and Sino-diasporic practitioners, was meant to be in September but it has been postponed. I’ve applied for a space at a shared table there. Look for @outlandpublishingfair on Instagram for the new date.

👣 My moseying

I did not win the Developing Your Creative Practice grant from the Arts Council. However, I’ll apply again in the next round.

My short story collection, Staring into the Sun, was a semifinalist in the Autumn House Press 2025 Nonfiction Prize!

Big news: I’ve signed the contract to publish Staring into the Sun with Ten16 Press in May 2026 (Asian American and Pacific Islanders month in the U.S.). The book links memoir and narrative nonfiction about my Chinese American family. Spanning 1895-2015, look out for a millionaire, a magician, and a model. Ten16 Press will publish the paperback and ebook. With the same release date, I will self-publish the audio book, narrating the four memoir chapters.

Kate Hammer

will narrate the historical creative nonfiction chapters and Anthony at Mercury Calling Audio will produce it. I started researching and writing this book in January 2017 and to finally have a publication deal is an enormous joy. Staring into the Sun celebrates and honors my ancestors.

If you can’t wait until next May to read the stories, subscribe for free on Substack to get them sent to your inbox every Saturday through the end of 2025. More info, links to each installment, and sign up are here. The free subscription is for Staring into the Sun serialization as well as The Spark monthly newsletter.

I’m still writing my novel and meeting with my writing group every three weeks.

📊 Tracked on Chill Subs

Short story collection submissions to small presses & awards⏱️ 4 pending🚫 11 rejected↩️ 3 withdrawn🥉 1 semi-finalist🎉 1 publication offer!🟰 20 total

Novel prize submissions of my work in progress⏱️ 2 pending🚫 2 rejected🟰 4 total

🎙️ Author interview with Dr. Anjana Khatwa

I met Dr. Anjana Khatwa at the Nature Writing Prize for Working Class Writers, founded by Natasha Carthew. The event was held on the stunning roof terrace of Hachette in London.

Dr. Anjana Khatwa is an award-winning earth scientist who has worked for the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site and the National Trust. Dr. Khatwa has contributed to and presented TV programmes for the BBC as well as ITV. She has been given the Geographical Award for public engagement by the Royal Geographical Society, the RH Worth Award by the Geological Society of London and the Halstead Medal from the Geologists' Association. In 2021, she received a National Diversity Award in recognition of her work to champion inclusion within earth science and natural heritage, and the same year was longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing. She lives with her family in Dorset in a house filled with rocks and fossils collected from all over the world. The Whispers of Rock is her first book.

In The Whispers of Rock earth scientist Anjana Khatwa asks us to think again, and listen to their stories. Boldly alternating between modern science and ancient wisdom, Khatwa takes us on an exhilarating journey through deep time, from origins of the green pounamu that courses down New Zealand rivers to the wonder of the bluestone megaliths of Stonehenge, from the tuff-hewn churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, to Manhattan’s bedrock of schist. In unearthing those stories and more, Khatwa shows how rocks have always spoken to us, and we humans to them. She delicately intertwines Indigenous stories of Earth’s creation with our scientific understanding of its development, deftly showing how our lives are intimately connected to time’s ancient storytellers.

Through tales of planetary change, ancient wisdom, and contemporary creativity, The Whispers of Rock offers the hope of reconnection with Earth. With Khatwa as your guide, you won’t simply hear rocks speak; you, too, will feel the magic of deep time seep into your bones.

Anjana can be found on Instagram, Bluesky, and on her website, anjanakhatwa.com.

Photo credit: Rob Coombe.

Tune in to the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

Staring into the Sun on Substack, weekly through the end of 2025.

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, The Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by [email protected].

Thanks for reading The Spark! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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For the full interview with Virginia Evans, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Here are my pick ‘n’ mix recommendations for July.

Stoner by John Williams (1965)William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

Misspelled Paradise: A Year in a Reinvented Colombia by Bryanna Plog (2014)What does “Colombia” bring to mind? This South American country has sometimes been misrepresented, only known for cocaine, guerrilla groups, coffee, and Shakira’s hips. In 2011, Bryanna Plog spent a year in the country to find out what the headlines might be missing (headlines, that let’s face it, sometimes misspelled the country as “Columbia.”).As a volunteer middle school English teacher in an impoverished community outside of Cartagena, Colombia, Plog recounts with delightfully understated wit her year traveling Colombia’s cities, deserts, and rain forests (fairly successful ventures), her attempts to hold class on a regular schedule (less successful), and her quest to eat meals that didn’t include rice (a complete and utter failure).Through her teaching and traveling, Plog realizes Colombia is a place closer to a paradise than a country supposedly off-limits to travelers. Instead of having to survive encounters with drug cartels or avoiding kidnappings, Plog discovered her biggest problems included trying to get her students to pay attention in class, the country’s strangely undrinkable coffee, and the searing Caribbean heat.

Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin (2023)As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Chin traces the story of the pioneering family members who emigrated from the Pearl River Delta, crossing an ocean to make their way in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and of the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows their paths to New York City.In New York’s Chinatown she discovers a single building on Mott Street where so many of her ancestors would live, begin families, and craft new identities. She follows the men and women who became merchants, “paper son” refugees, activists, and heads of the Chinese tong, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws. She soon realizes that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one.

If you’d like further inspiration, Backstory bookshop’s theme for July is books published in your birth year.

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

The lovely folks at Collaborist are still offering a review of 25 pages of your writing to give their intern Maddy more experience. Email them at [email protected].

Split Lip Press is open for submissions of novel and novella manuscripts until September 1st.

C&R Press is open for three categories of book awards—poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction—until September 16th.

👣 My moseying

Yesterday I had an hour-long call with Jason, Ben, and Maddy at Collaborist to review the first 25 pages of my work-in-progress novel. They had some really insightful points about having too many characters in the first scene, upping the tension and stakes in my second scene, and not writing to a word count…

…which is great advice—except that I’m aiming for 20,000 words by the end of July, in case I get long-listed for any of the prizes I submitted to in May. I’m almost at 9,000 words now and scribbling away on it.

I’m finalizing my contract to publish my short story collection, Staring into the Sun. The plan is to serialize it for free on Substack, then pull the online version before publication, which should be May 2026. And I’ll be narrating the four memoir chapters of the audio book, with another narrator covering the other five chapters. I’m super excited about all of this and can’t wait to tell you more.

Also near the end of July will be the news from the Arts Council about my application for the Developing Your Creative Practice grant. Fingers crossed!

📊 Tracked on Chill Subs

Short story collection submissions to small presses⏱️ 9 pending🚫 9 rejected (some of which were super lovely)🤫 1 secret something🎉 1 publication offer!🟰 20 total

Novel prize submissions of my work in progress⏱️ 3 pending

🎙️ Author interview with Virginia Evans

The S**t No One Tells You About Writing podcast (my daughter says that the only time I swear is when I mention the podcast) helps find comparative titles to authors’ works-in-progress. These comps, as they’re known, are included as references for genre, voice, tone, and setting (i.e. vibes!) in letters to prospective agents and publishers. When I asked for comps for my novel, Emily from East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C. suggested The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

I promptly listened to the audiobook, which is masterfully narrated by a huge cast, and loved it.

Virginia Evans attended James Madison University for her bachelor’s in English literature. After starting a family, she went back to school for her master’s of philosophy in creative writing at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where she had the good fortune to study under Carlo Gébler, Eoin McNamee, Claire Keegan, Harry Clifton and Kevin Power. She now lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband, Mark, two children, Jack and Mae, and her Red Labrador, Brigid.

In the interview, Virginia mentions Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr, and Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller.

You can find Virginia at virginiaevansauthor.com and on Instagram as @virginia.l.evans.

Tune into the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, the Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by [email protected].

Interview with Eleanor Anstruther

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Dive into these literary explorations of familial relationships, mental health, community, and friendships. Plus some am-dram (amateur dramatics) and theater.

In Judgement of Others by

Eleanor Anstruther

(2025)The Midhurst Amateur Dramatic Society are putting on a production of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Tessa has agreed to play a part. But when she suffers a psychotic episode, Ros, a C-list celebrity and new to the community, takes her place. In this darkly comic tale of psychosis in the Home Counties, the stage is set for a blistering examination of mental illness, how we treat it and why we don't. While Tessa is sectioned in a secure psychiatric hospital, the relationships in the community unravel, and by the time she's released, all that we thought we knew, and all of our judgements, are thrown into question.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (2023)In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (2025)Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

If you’d like further inspiration, Backstory bookshop’s theme for the month is “Books set in the future.”

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

Ann in my writing group recommended Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison. I’m enjoying this exploration of more organic, nature-inspired narrative structures compared to the typical narrative arc, three-act setup, or hero’s journey.

This month’s guest, Eleanor Anstruther, who champions all writers as independent artists, suggested joining ALLi: The Alliance of Independent Authors. My browser tab is open to sign up so I can get help reviewing my publishing contract (!!).

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard of

Jane Friedman

. This authority on all things publishing recently featured on the London Writers’ Salon podcast. I love her 30,000-foot view of the publishing industry: in these times of nervousness about AI, she reminds us of naysayers of the word processor (which would take away women’s typing jobs!!) and even the printing press itself. She considers AI as an intern: it can do legwork for you, but you need to check its output. If you want to know more about routes to publication, it’s worth perusing Jane’s super-useful Key Book Publishing Paths.

The Hope Prize is open for submissions, deadline October 31.

The lovely folks at Collaborist are offering a review of 25 pages of your writing to give their intern Maddy more experience. Email them at [email protected].

👣 My moseying

Some friends from my Bologna days in the 1990s got in touch and asked to write about my experiences. The article in vox@bo is followed by my flash fiction story, “His Bones.” More info and links are on my website.

I submitted the first 5,000 words of my work-in-progress novel to three prizes: the Bridport First Novel Award, the BPA (Blue Pencil Agency) First Novel Award, and the First Novel Prize. These deadlines at the end of May fueled me to write and edit the first three chapters of my book. Many thanks to the beta readers who gave feedback. The Bath Novel Award would require a full manuscript of longlisted entries, so I didn’t enter that one: I didn’t want to enter it hoping not to get longlisted since I don’t have that many words finished. The others require 10,000-15,000 more words by the end of July, which is feasible.

I’ve ordered four more copies of Tomorrow There Will Be Sun directly from Australia since the UK copies are sold out.

My Instagram account name was the16stories, the original title of my short story collection. Now I’m myself: @madelynpostman.

📊 Tracked on Chill Subs

Short story collection submissions to small presses⏱️ 12 pending🚫 6 rejected🎉 1 publication offer!🟰 19 total

Novel prize submissions of my work in progress⏱️ 3 pending

🎙️ Author interview with Eleanor Anstruther

I came across Eleanor Anstruther on The Write and Wrong Podcast and she’s also been a guest on the London Writer’s Salon podcast. She has published both traditionally and independently, in that unusual order, and is working on a kitemark for indie authors. Listen to the Patreon supporters’ full version of The Write and Wrong episode for more on that initiative.

Eleanor was born in London, educated at Westminster School and studied History of Art at Manchester University where she was distracted from finishing her degree by a trip to India. She was lost and found for the next twelve years, starting a commune and traveling the world before finally settling down to write. Her acclaimed debut novel, A Perfect Explanation, was long listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the 2019 Not The Booker Prize. Her memoir, A Memoir in 65 Postcards & the Recovery Diaries, first serialized on Substack, was published in 2024 and her latest novel, In Judgement of Others, came out in January 2025. On Substack she writes The Literary Obsessive where she champions independent artists and runs the interview series 8Q.

In the interview, she mentions The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B Hughes. Here’s Eleanor’s 8Q (eight questions) with Chris Best, co-founder and CEO of Substack.

Eleanor’s website is eleanoranstruther.com.

📙 Where to find my writing

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, the Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Featuring an interview with memoir, fiction, and nonfiction writer Tessa McWatt.

This May, add some great reads to your list, submit your debut manuscript for awards, and see if my novel is indeed writing itself. For the full interview with Tessa McWatt, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

One young adult book, a literary novel, and an upmarket tale of an ill-fated couple.

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

Check out Eleanor Anstruther on Substack. I came across her on the Write and Wrong podcast and love how she champions self/indie publishing. Great news: she’ll be my guest in June!

Top tip for reviewing your writing: pop it into Word if it’s not there already, go to the Review tab and then choose Read Aloud. Great for catching awkward phrases and repeated words.

If you’re writing your debut novel and can get together a 300-word synopsis and 5,000 words by the end of May, check out the Bridport, Bath, Blue Pencil Agency, and First Novel prizes.

👣 Updates on my moseying

I’ve been busy putting together an application for a grant. More news about that in July, be it yay!! or nay.

My writing group is going strong, with our third meeting this coming weekend. I haven’t spent much time writing since last month’s update. So far, I’ve written a synopsis of my novel and am about 3,000 words in, aiming to get my submission ready for the four contests mentioned above.

Short story collection submissions to small presses — tracked on Chill Subs 📊⏱️ 15 pending🚫 4 rejected🎉 1 accepted by a hybrid publisher—I’m waiting to see what happens with the others🟰 20 total

🎙️ Author interview with Tessa McWatt

Tessa McWatt's memoir, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, won the OCM Bocas Prize for NonFiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor-General's Award. A professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, she is also the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, the OCM Bocas Prize and the Society of Authors' Volcano Prize. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a librettist, and she works on interdisciplinary projects and community-based life writing. Born in Guyana, she grew up in Canada, and now makes her home in London, England.

Here’s the Instagram account for her new book, The Snag.

Tune into the The Spark podcast for the full interview!

Photo by Bill Knight.

📙 Where to find my writing

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, the Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Featuring an interview with memoir and short story author An Ngo Lang.

This April, add some short story collections to your list, sign up to a free writing sprint, and discover what I’ve dived into. For the full interview with An Ngo Lang, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Three short story collections to add to your “To Be Read” list.

You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead

A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Share The Spark

✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

The London Writers’ Salon is holding a free 24-hour writing sprint from 7pm BST (11am PT, 2pm ET) on Friday 25 April to 7pm BST on Saturday 26 April. Join for as few or as many 1-hour sessions as you’d like, starting at the top of each hour. See you there?

I heard Sanam Mahloudji, whose debut novel is The Persians, say on The Write and Wrong Podcast that writers should aim for 100 rejections per year. I love that reframing, in the “every no is one step closer to a yes” mindset. Or: “You’ve got to be in it to win it”!

Last autumn, Jessica Payne wrote “A How-To Guide: from Pantser to Plantser” on The Payneful Truth About Being a Writer. I’m finding it to be a very helpful reference.

👣 Updates on my moseying

In past episodes, I had mentioned my plans to write a nonfiction sustainability handbook for small businesses. This is now on the back burner because…

…I’ve started working on my novel! The inspiration is from a short story I wrote about a year and a half ago during a short story course at City Lit. I used Jessica Payne’s guide and hopped back and forth between Story Genius by Lisa Cron and Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. I now have a logline, the synopsis, and a chapter outline. My aim is to have 25 chapters of about 3,500 words each and breaking it down into little chunks like this seems to make it “easy” (??) to write. (I think I’m going to end up eating these words.) I’m more than 1,500 words in!

I recently caught up with a friend from high school who, like me, spent a lot of time in Bologna. She did a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia and I wanted to ask her about it. One thing led to the next and we’ve now formed a writing group together with a friend of hers and a fellow writer from the City Lit short story course. We’re all working on book-length manuscripts: fiction and memoir.

Short story collection submissions to small presses — tracked on Chill Subs 📊⏱️ 14 pending🚫 3 rejected🟰 17 total

Story submissions — tracked on Chill Subs 📊🏆 6 accepted🙅‍♀️ 7 withdrawn (accepted elsewhere)🚫 58 rejected🟰 71 total

🎙️ Author interview with An Ngo Lang

An Ngo Lang was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and fled with her family in 1975, resettling in Kansas and now living in Australia. She is a writer, actor, and model. Her writing appears in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, Leatherneck, The VVA Veteran, Kill Your Darlings, diaCritics, and more. To find out more about An, please visit her website anngolang.com. She is also on Instagram and Facebook.

Tune into the The Spark podcast for the full interview!

📙 Where to find my writing

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, the Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who!

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And if you know other writers and readers, please share it!