Q&A with Kim Suhr, author of Nothing To Lose

“Poetry has gotten them into this and poetry will have to get them out.”
~ from “Right Place, Right Time” in Nothing To Lose


In the heart of Wisconsin right now, we are covered in white. Winter continues to show up with force, shutting down the city and leaving us staring at a monochrome image broken up only by a line of trees or the red tail lights of slow-moving traffic.

You might think, The midwest–all that cold and snow! How does anyone survive? But there’s more to living in Wisconsin.

There are the people and the places and the poetry of stories. Read anything by Michael Perry: Population 485 or Visiting Tom, both great books of nonfiction about captivating characters in real life.

Or, pick up Kim Suhr’s new collection of short stories, Nothing To Lose (Cornerstone Press, 2018), which features an eclectic mix of fictional characters who hail from all over the state.

Sure, these may not be people you’d meet in the street, but as Albert Camus says, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” So be prepared to wonder.

Suhr’s stories will ring familiar with things you know about the midwest, but they will also surprise you, keep you turning the page, and leave you considering if the bits and pieces of strange don’t ring true in one way or another.

I’m honored to host Kim Suhr and thrilled to offer a book giveaway. Click HERE to enter by Tuesday, February 19th, noon for a chance to win a copy of her new collection. Now welcome Kim Suhr!


Christi Craig (CC): In your book, you introduce us to so many different characters: a teacher turned poet looking for love, a mother desperate to save her drug-addicted son, two friends set on starting up a “Paintball for Jesus” business, and more. Where do your ideas for such diverse characters come from?

Image of Kim Suhr: woman looking at camera, wearing blue shirt and beaded necklace.

Kim Suhr (KS): Honestly, I wish I knew. On a global level, they all come from my desire to understand people who are different from me, what makes them tick, what they wish for and regret.

Some stories started with an image: A man standing in a doorway wearing night vision goggles; cross-dressing deer hunters (don’t ask); a video camera in a kid’s face. One started with an overheard conversation: “My friend decided to follow the advice on every Dove wrapper.” “Dry Spell,” about a paintball range for Jesus, came from a real advertisement I happened across. What could be the story behind that? I asked myself, and I was on my way…

CC: Your book is also filled with a wonderful mix of very different stories that constantly surprise the reader. I’m thinking in particular of the story “Brush Strokes,” which begins with the simple image of an artist painting on a canvas. Mid-way, the story—the artist—takes a dangerous turn, and there’s no way a reader will close the cover before reaching the end. As the writer, were you clear as to where each story was headed?

KS: That’s a great question and one that gives me pause. I think, subconsciously, I know what direction I want each story to take, but it isn’t until I’m in the thick of writing it that I realize where it needs to go. Everything is in service to the story. I may personally want a character to undergo a life-changing epiphany and live happily ever after—and I keep trying to write stories where that works—but often the stronger story demands something different: remaining in homeostasis, a change in vision, harsh consequences. Even my “happy” endings have room for ambiguity. Some of my darker stories, I think, have moments of humor and hope. That’s what I love about the short story form.

CC: Your book is published by Cornerstone Press, which is an independent publisher and teaching press housed at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. How was your experience working with up and coming editors, artists, and publishers?

KS: It was a true joy. You really can’t beat having a staff of over 20 people dedicated solely to your one book. The staff’s enthusiasm for the project was infectious, and they jumped into becoming “experts” very quickly—learning what they needed to know to fulfill their various roles and applying it punctually and professionally. They were as invested as I was in making this the best possible book it could be. Of course, none of this happens without the leadership of a skilled, dedicated person at the top, and that’s exactly what I found with the Publisher-in-Chief, Dr. Ross Tangedal. I would highly recommend Cornerstone Press.

CC: What are you reading these days?

KS: I just started A Gentleman in Moscow for my book club. Just finished The Stupendous Adventures of Mighty Marty Hayes (a fun novel for young readers by Milwaukee author, Lora Hyler) and a wonderful collection of short stories by Susanne Davis, The Appointed Hour, who also happened to publish with Cornerstone Press. Next on the list, The Gift of Our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate, by Milwaukee authors, Arno Michaelis and Pardeep Singh Kaleka.

CC: Favorite notebook for writing new stories: spiral? hardbound? Moleskin?….

KS: The good old Composition notebooks, college-ruled with a nice, glidey pen.Thank you so much for reading, Christi, and for your wonderful questions. It’s an honor to be among the many wonderful writers featured at your website!

Kim Suhr is author of the Nothing to Lose (Cornerstone Press, 2018), Maybe I’ll Learn: Snapshots of a Novice Mom (2012) and co-author of the as-told-to memoir, Ramon: An Immigrant’s Journey. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Solstice Program at Pine Manor College where she was the Dennis Lehane Fellow in 2013. Her writing has appeared in various publications. Kim is Director of Red Oak Writing where she leads Writers’ Roundtable critique groups, provides manuscript critiques  and coaching, and leads the summer Creative Writing Camps for youth. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys gardening, time outdoors with her family and being a fan-girl for her almost grown children in their various pursuits.


Don’t forget! Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, February 19th–noon sharp, for a chance to win a copy of Nothing To Lose.

Q&A: Stevan Allred,
author of The Alehouse at the End of the World

“Pride,” the pelican said, “is at the bottom of all great mistakes.”
~ from The Alehouse at the End of the World


Fiction is often based on reality in one way or another, which is how and why it appeals to us so. But once in a while you come across a story so fantastical, you forget about the real world for a moment; you get lost in the imagination of it all. You read first for entertainment, but later, upon reflection, you return and read it again for insight. Because certain stories–like Stevan Allred’s new novel, The Alehouse at the End of the World (Forest Avenue Press)–strike a familiar chord, hitting on the absurdities of society, the pride of man, the risks we take for love and companionship.

cover image for Stevan Allred's new book, The Alehouse at the End of the WorldPublishers Weekly calls Allred’s book one that is “sparked with risqué humor. . . . underscored with a strong thematic element of hope.” In pages full of devotion, humility, carnal desire and spiritual conquest, Allred gives readers a delightful tale of one man, his lost love, a congregation of birds who welcome the dead into the underworld, and a quest to save man and bird alike from consumption by a crow.

There are bigger monsters, sure, but I won’t reveal too much. Besides, sometimes the most dangerous are those who look the most like us.

Such a story can only be written by a writer full of wit and craft who himself is willing to take risks, who is unafraid of the strange and unexpected that often comes in giving ourselves over to story.

I’m thrilled to host Stevan to talk about his new novel and excited to offer a book giveaway! CLICK HERE to enter by Tuesday, November 20th, for a chance to win a copy of The Alehouse at the End of the World.

Now, welcome Stevan Allred!


Christi Craig (CC): The Alehouse at the End of the World reads like great mythology, with its old gods and new gods, demi-gods and mortals, and a healthy dose of promiscuity in the mix! But what makes this novel unique is that there isn’t only one hero’s journey to save the world. Each character has his or her own trajectory full of risks, mistakes, sacrifice, and love. You have woven all of this—every character’s move—so seamlessly and beautifully together. I’d love to know more about the seed of the idea for this novel. Where—with what?—does such a complex and imaginative story begin?

Stevan AllredStevan Allred (SA): I was between writing projects, stumbling around on the internet, looking for something to write about, when I discovered the story of James Bartley, a man who claimed to have been swallowed by a whale in 1891. So I started with that, the idea of a man swallowed by a whale, and I gave the man a quest, to find his long lost beloved. Where was she? I was looking to write something free of the tethers of ordinary reality, and I already had the whale bit in mind. I figured if readers were still with me after I had my fisherman swallowed by a whale, I could go anywhere from there, so why not to the Isle of the Dead?

The bird gods in Alehouse are all based on birds that I have some fascination with–crows, pelicans, frigate birds, cormorants. I simply elevated them to the physical, emotional, and intellectual stature of humans, and them gave each of them some extraordinary powers. The needs of the story itself dictated, in some cases, what these powers would be. The cormorant is Alehouse’s google–he has all the answers. The frigate bird was my Costco and Home Depot combined–whatever the characters needed on the Isle of the Dead, he could provide.

CC: The pages of your novel are filled with great imaginative detail and exemplifies your skill in world building. Much of the story takes place in the belly of the Kiamah beast with no curve, corner, or niche ignored in your use of landscape. How best do you visualize such a place? Do you draw a map, sketch an outline, build it from your own experience with the outside world?

SA: In the beginning it feels like I’m climbing a rope that I am braiding together as I climb it. That’s a mysterious process, and it requires an act of faith on my part, but as the details accumulate, each imagined detail makes the fictional world a little bit more real to me. Those details often have consequences, and the consequences will lead me to other details.

An example is that I decided early on that the sun rose in the west and set in the east on the Isle of the Dead, and that has consequences for how the rise and set of the sun light up features of the physical landscape. For most of the time I was writing the novel I kept this landscape in my head, but fairly late in the process I had to make a map of the Isle of the Dead, so I could be sure that I had the lighting right.

CC: You’ve said that in writing this novel you learned to step aside and let the story lead you as you wrote it. What’s your secret to letting go of the reins?

SA: I think of the story as a living entity with whom I have a relationship. That’s a bit fanciful, I know, but it works for me. Because I confer a sense of being on the story I can then listen to the story, and pay attention to what the story needs instead of imposing something on it. Sometimes I dance with the story.

All of these things–“living entity”, “listen to the story”, “dance with the story”–these are metaphors for internal processes. I don’t stand up and pretend to dance with my metaphor, but in my psyche, I make room for that playful notion. I have to get quiet for it to work, shutting out distractions. Sometimes that happens because I rise early to write, and move from sleep to desk relatively quickly before the noise of the everyday world kicks in. Other times I get to the quietness I need by walking the dog, or folding laundry, or pulling weeds. Any fairly mechanical task will do as long as it occupies the front of my mind so the back end can go wandering. You invite the solution to appear, and it does. You have to be patient. And grateful–be sure to thank the story for giving you the answer.

CC: What are you reading these days?

SA: I just finished one of the classics of science fiction, Kindred, by Octavia Butler. It’s a terrific time travel novel, and I’ve followed it up with An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones, which I’m really enjoying.

CC: What’s your favorite background noise as you write: music, the rumble of neighborhood traffic, coffeehouse chatter, or…?

SA: I write early in the morning, often before dawn. I like things to be very quiet when I’m writing. Writing in coffeehouses is impossible for me. I love sitting at my desk as the sun rises, feeling the light change around me while I’m burrowed in deep to my own imagination.

Stevan Allred lives halfway between Hav and the Isle of the Dead, which is to say he spends as much time burrowed into his imagination as he possibly can. He is the author of A Simplifed Map of the Real World: The Renata Stories, and a contributor to City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.


Don’t forget! Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, November 20th,
for a chance to win a copy of Stevan’s new novel.

Q&A with Virginia Pye, author of Shelf Life of Happiness

‘Some people seem willing to do anything to be happy, even if it means becoming colossally dull,’ Gloria continued. ‘But everyone knows it’s fleeting. There’s always a shelf life of happiness.’
~ from “Shelf Life of Happiness”

Being happy should be easy. We have plenty of resources around us that make it so: podcasts set on discovering it and books built around cultivating it, just to name a few. Yet Happiness is fleeting. While other authors are writing about reclaiming it, maintaining it, and preserving it, Virginia Pye has written short stories that define it in simple terms and give us a view into our own humanity, how we tend to overlook it, exploit it, or misinterpret it.

cover for Shelf Life of HappinessIn her new book, Shelf Life of Happiness (just out from Press 53), Pye fills the pages with unexpected sensations of affection, of freedom in truth, of realizations about what it means to be happy–or in love–but sometimes a little too late. Jim Shephard calls these “deft and moving stories.” Kelly Luce says these are “stories crafted with a sharp eye for the absurd intricacies of modern life…remembered later with such clarity and feeling that they seem like one’s own memories.” I call them tiny revelations packed in 169 pages. (Sure it could be 170, but would that really make you happier?)

I’m honored to host Virginia Pye to talk more about her book and her writing. There’s also a giveaway, courtesy of the author.

CLICK HERE to enter by Tuesday, October 30th for a chance to win a copy of Shelf Life of Happiness. And welcome Virginia Pye!


Christi Craig (CC): While Shelf Life of Happiness isn’t your first book, this is your first collection of stories after two successful novels (River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix). Considering how you’ve taken a path opposite of many authors, who begin with a collection and journey to longer works, what has been the most rewarding or compelling aspect of writing and publishing this new book?

Virginia PyeVirginia Pye (VP): I’ve written stories from the start, way back to high school or earlier. Like a lot of beginning writers, I tried to channel Hemingway and Faulkner, Calvino and Carver. But the nine stories in Shelf Life of Happiness were written over ten years more recently. I wrote them from an impulse to explore a particular moment or thought. Some irony of life, or question, strikes me and I need to flesh it out. Writing my novels is much more involved and immersive, but the stories can be every bit as exacting. I rewrite them over months and years as I send them out to literary magazines. When a story is returned, I often revise it before sending it out again.

I loved pulling together this collection, because it showed me that I’ve been chewing on some of the same themes for years—the illusive nature of happiness, the bittersweet nature of love, the struggle to ever know another person fully. And also, how a dedication to art—which to me means writing as well as visual art—can help guide a life and make sense of it. Some of the stories in Shelf Life of Happiness are about writing itself—the redemptive human effort to find order and beauty.

CC: One of my favorite quotes from your book is in the story, “White Dog:” 

[Dunster] struggled to understand why he’d pulled the trigger. Rob Singh had wanted to preserve his impeccable vista, but didn’t he know that perfection smelled like death? With that one shot, Dunster had upped the ante and shown Rob that he was wrong not to make his peace with the smudge on the horizon, the mistake on the canvas.

So much of your collection is about accepting life’s imperfections and coming to peace, and you tell your stories from the perspectives of a variety of characters: an elderly artist, a young skateboarder, a mother on the verge of breakdown. Where do your ideas for characters–their strengths and their flaws–come from?

VP: Like many writers, I transpose my life and everything I’ve ever read into fiction, though how exactly, or why, isn’t clear to me. It helps to be a bit older and to have had years to work things out. These days I keep remembering things my father told me near the end of his life that turn out to be wise in a pragmatic way. I didn’t realize at the time that what he was offering was valuable, but I see it now. My characters seem to come out of an accumulation of understanding.

But, to be more specific, the stories in Shelf Life of Happiness are about people I could know, and maybe the reader could know, as well. I cull details especially from those I love. The skateboarder in my story, An Awesome Gap, is definitely not my son, but my son does happen to be a skateboarder. I’ve seen his dedication to his “art,” though he’d never use such a glorified term for skating day in and day out in all kinds of weather. Also, I think we all know how even a good kid has to struggle to break free from his or her parents’ expectations. The teenage character in that story deals with that issue, too.

I’ve known artists like Dunster from White Dog, but that particular character is more than an amalgam of all the male artists I’ve ever sat next to at art museum dinner parties (my husband is a long-time curator and art museum director). Combine those experiences with everything I’ve ever read about artists, plus what I’ve learned myself about sustaining an artistic life, and you have Dunster. Though I suppose that doesn’t fully explain where my characters come from, either.

CC: In your essay, “A Zealot and a Poet” (on the Rumpus), you write–so beautifully–about discovering your grandfather’s journals that detail his experiences as a Congregational missionary in China during the early 1900s, and the surprise in finding he was much more than a missionary. He was a writer. In fact, he became the inspiration for the protagonist in your first book, River of Dust. How does his writing, his presence in your writing, continue to influence your work?

VP: Thanks so much for reading that essay. I’m proud of that one and appreciate you tracking it down. I don’t think my grandfather influences me much any longer, though his actual words and their cadence did help me create the voice for my debut novel, River of Dust.

But, since I mentioned my father earlier and now you offer this question about my grandfather, I wonder if you might be onto something: perhaps there is some way that I’m writing to keep up with them. They both believed their voices deserved to be heard. That sense of confidence may have come from white, male privilege, or a misplaced entitlement. But they, and my mother, were great readers and books crowded just about every surface in our home. My father wrote his many books and articles in long hand on yellow pads in the midst of our family activity, sometimes with the Celtics or Red Sox on the TV. Writing was something “we” did. I’m grateful to him and my mother, and even my grandfather, for that.

Though, to share more, it took some determination on my part to claim writing for myself. I remember distinctly that my father didn’t think I was a good writer when I was teenager—he thought of me as scattered in my thinking, which I was, and considered me more of a “people person” than a writer. As a girl and a youngest child, I’d been trained to be helpful and accommodating, not assertive with ideas and words. To convince my parents to help pay for grad school, I told them I needed an MFA to teach writing. They could see me as a teacher, but not as a writer. I remember reassuring them I wasn’t trying to win the Pulitzer Prize. That seemed to set them at ease. I think they didn’t want me to deal with the disappointment that writers inevitably face. But also, they didn’t think I could do it because I was a girl.

CC: What are you reading these days?

VP: I read several books at once, all novels or short stories. Some are for research for my next novel, which is set in 1890s Boston. Katherine Howe’s historical novel from several years ago, The House of Velvet and Glass, is entertaining and smart. But right now I also have Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel and Susan Henderson’s The Flicker of Old Dreams on my bedside table. As always, there’s too much to read!

CC: What is your favorite season in which to write?

VP: When my children were young and we went on vacation to Maine in the summer, I’d get up early in the mornings to write. It was so peaceful and rewarding because I knew the rest of the day would be packed with family outings. I loved the quiet as the birds started to stir and the sun rose over the ocean, followed all too quickly by the cacophony of young voices and little feet pounding on floorboards.

But these days, as an empty nester, I have lots of time and tend to buckle down in the colder months, when there are fewer distractions. Boston turns out to be a great book town, not just because of the wonderful bookstores, or because of GrubStreet, the writing organization, but because the weather is so lousy so much of the year. You simply have to stay indoors and write!

I feel lucky to join the throngs of writers, both past and present, who have made this city their home. As we head into winter, when mornings start out cold and dusk comes early, I look forward to hunkering down at my desk.

Virginia Pye is the author of two award-winning novels, Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust, and the forthcoming short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness. Her stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The North American ReviewThe Baltimore ReviewLiterary HubThe New York TimesThe RumpusHuffington Post and elsewhere. She lived in Richmond, Virginia for many years and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Find her online at www.virginiapye.com.


Don’t forget: enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 30th,
for a chance to win a copy of Shelf Life of Happiness.