Unruly Humor: Damon Young on the Truth in Black Humor
“That this is bloody and Black-as-fuck honesty is where the best comedy is born. It’s lowbrow. It’s midbrow, it’s highbrow. It’s every brow.”
Inside Stewart O’Nan’s Eclectic Imagination
“Every city is about change—even Pittsburgh, which for so long we thought of as stuck or static.”
The Language Equation
A conversation with Patrick McGinty on new language, narration, and queer identity in his new novel “Town College City Road.”
Considering Consequences with Sherrie Flick
A conversation with Sherrie Flick, in which the author talks the mystery of bears, the art of joy in writing and life, and her new collections of stories, "I Have Not Considered Consequences" (Autumn House Press, 2025)
MC5, Detroit’s Godfathers of Punk
Bill Morris interviews rock journalist Jaan Uhelszki of CREEM Magazine about MC5.
Talking to Novelist Sharon Dilworth
An interview with novelist Sharon Dilworth about her new campus novel of Upper Peninsula intrigue, To Be Marquette.
A Poet in the Rust Belt – An Interview with Mary Quade
"As a writer in the rust belt, I’m quite aware that being a writer is a strange and privileged way to spend time."
Barbara Kingsolver’s Appalachian Epic
It took a long time for Kingsolver to be able to write a book that goes right at the hardest parts of her home. The notion that everybody in Appalachia is hanging out on their porch, eating cornbread and drinking moonshine is certainly a stereotype, but there is some truth to it.
Fungus Among Us: An Interview with Sara Rich
So it would be hard to overestimate how growing up in rural Kansas, whether you call it the Midwest or the Plains, has shaped everything that I am, let alone everything that I write—fiction and nonfiction.
Charting the Pittsburgh Novel with Jake Oresick
"I do appreciate titles that use the terrain instead of making their characters sit inside. I also enjoy titles that reveal the parts of our region that outsiders are unlikely to see, like Homewood, Butler, or old school, residential Oakland. Yinzers don't gaze down from Grandview Avenue all day like the movies would have you believe."
Any Power that Holds: An Interview with Stacy Jane Grover
"Rarely do we get to simply live our lives, to be taken for granted. Our existence in the world has to be extraordinary, and we lose our mundanity and so much of our humanness in this process."
Novelist Idra Novey on the Places That Made Her
"I came from somewhere that has a lot of character and really fascinating people who have carved out really beautiful lives, and they don't fall easily into the caricatures that we see of rural Pennsylvanian people in the news."