I don’t know that I was able to fully realize what this novel wanted to be until in 2019, I came up with the idea of combining the story of this isolated family with the story of someone falling into the gravity of an extremist militia group. The Proud Boys and other groups like that had been around for a while before then but were just beginning to break through into the public consciousness, and it seemed like a natural progression for the characters. When those two ideas combined, the novel came together very quickly.

River Selby’s Hotshot: A Life on Fire is a tremendously smart book about the interrelations of contemporary American societies and land relations, woven through their personal history of working as a woman in the highly gendered space of a wildland hotshot crew.

I've always been interested in nontraditional paths towards queerness and especially trans identity, as my own path was not linear in the way I thought it should be as a young person, and dramatizing an even weirder path than I've ever looked at before with Joan was one of my aims with the book.

For the third interview in my series on writer-publishers, I got in contact with the brilliant Courtney LeBlanc, whose most recent collection is Her Whole Bright Life. I first met Courtney when I hosted her for reading in the Fall of 2023 at the bookstore I ran in Orlando, Florida. She is one of those writers that is instantly memorable, funny, and leaves the room a little brighter than when she entered it (even if her poetry is raw and at times heartbreaking.)

Michael Tager's Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection, out now from akinoga press, is a wonderful collection of contradictions: fun, accessible, smart poems that examine our cultural and personal connection with celebrity. Funny and sad, jokey but not a joke, these poems take subject matter like Justin Bieber, Patrick Swayze, and the Golden Girls just seriously enough. We sat down to talk with Michael about the book and making real art out of, as the Barrelhouse tagline goes, pop flotsam and cultural jetsam. 

Barrelhouse Editor Dave Housley sat down to talk with Neema Avashia about her big-hearted and absorbing memoir, Another Appalachia, one of the featured books at Barrelhouse’s Conversations and Connections: Practical Advice on Writing conference in DC on April 15, 2023.

When I’m reading submissions, I find myself looking for the heart of the questions each manuscript is asking. Are they messy enough? Are they risky enough? Are they beautiful enough? Are they questions I want to end time with?

Tessa Yang’s debut collection of fiction, The Runaway Restaurant, was released last fall by 7.13 Books. Jen Michalski’s third collection of fiction, The Company of Strangers, was released this January by Braddock Avenue Books. In many ways, that is where the differences end.

I love, love, love a memoir that’s also more than a memoir. A memoir (or essay collection) that’s also a work of cultural criticism, that uses research to deepen and complicate a personal story. A book that makes you rethink the boundaries between genres.

Aaron Burch is many things: literary magazine founder, editor, publisher, teacher, all around literary Mister Peanutbutter, inventor of the “we’re open right now and will be responding in real time” method of taking submissions. Now he can add novelist to the impressive range of titles. I sat down with Aaron around a Google document to talk about most of those things, but mostly his new novel Year of the Buffalo.

I’ve been into the Weird and Unknown my whole life. I grew up Catholic, and all of the strangeness and magic really stuck with me.

When I read a collection, I like to feel like I’m on a rollercoaster. Ups and downs, time and space to breathe before I sail (and maybe flail) down a hill again.

For all the in-your-face judgment of the title, it's not a judgment. We are all fallible, deeply flawed, and perhaps doomed — we are both the turtles of Barnegat Bay and the predatory forces of extinction.