Authors Electric

There are fantasy novels built on spectacle, and then there are fantasy novels built on emotional truth. Shattered Energy: A Memory in Time by Athena Plencner manages to deliver both. At its center is Ariyana, a woman whose terrifying dreams begin to unravel the reality she thought she knew, forcing her to confront loss, identity, and the dangerous truths buried inside her own memory. As we celebrate Mother’s Day here in the United States, it feels especially fitting to talk about a novel whose heroine remains, through all the chaos and revelations surrounding her, a fiercely loving and deeply protective mother. Even while facing impossible choices, Ariyana’s concern for her children never leaves the emotional center of the story. I spoke with Athena Plencner about memory, dragons, fear, vulnerability, and building worlds that feel both epic and deeply human. Dianne Pearce: The idea that Ariyana’s dreams are actually memories is so compelling. What sparked that concept for you? Ariyan...

  The New York Times today published a fascinating interview with author George Saunders .  Saunders, born December 2, 1958, is an American author known for short stories, essays, novellas, novels, and books for children. His work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GQ . From 2006 to 2008, he also wrote a weekly column titled “American Psyche” for the weekend magazine of The Guardian. Saunders is a professor at Syracuse University and has received multiple National Magazine Awards for fiction, winning in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004. He earned second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His debut collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and received the World Fantasy Award for his short story “CommComm.” His later collection, In Persuasion Nation , was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award in 2013 and w...

  Ellis Elliott is a poet, author, and the founder of  Bewilderness Writing , a weekly online workshop where writers gather to explore the fertile wilderness of their creative subconscious through freewriting from poetry prompts. Since 2020, she has cultivated a brave and supportive community that values expression over perfection, helping participants quiet their inner critic and discover their authentic voices on the page. This year, Ellis released the first  Bewilderness Journal , showcasing the powerful, intimate work that has emerged from these sessions. I sat down with Ellis to talk about how the workshops began, what it took to grow this community, the inspiration behind the new journal, and what’s next for  Bewilderness Writing .   Dianne Pearce (Dianne):  Thanks so much for the meetup Ellis. I was lucky enough to be in one of your Bewilderness sessions, and I have always wondered w hat inspired you to start Bewilderness Writing back in 2...

  My sister is staying with me at the moment, and we went to see The Roses the other day, in the movie theater, which people don't seem to do as much, but which we especially like to do. My sister is eight years younger than me, did not go to college, but worked her way up in the field of TV production, chose to not have children, and has a long-time domestic partner because she's not into marriage. I could not wait to get married and have kids almost as much as I couldn't wait to go to college, have gotten a few degrees, in fact, I'd still like to be in college. I have one child through adoption because of infertility, and would love to have a thousand more if I had the means to do so. I put this out there, because our "takes" on life are often very different, and were very different on this film. I should also out myself and say I have a major crush on Benedict Cumberbatch since I first saw the Sherlock series. My sister does not, and she thought the Sherl...

When we write novels, we often imagine an ideal reader, someone smart, curious, and eager to dive into our worlds. But there’s an important fact many authors overlook: the  average  American adult reads at about a seventh to eighth grade level. And more than half of U.S. adults read below a sixth grade level. That doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy complex stories, but it does mean that overly dense prose or elaborate sentence structures can make a book harder to access. If you use Microsoft Word, the built-in Editor can give you a readability score based on the  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level . This tells you the U.S. school grade needed to understand your text on first read. A score of “8” means the average eighth grader could easily follow it. You can turn this feature on in  File → Options → Proofing → Show Readability Statistics  after running a spelling and grammar check. Another measure you may hear about is the  Lexile Framework for Reading . The Lexile scor...

Old Scratch Press (OSP), a poetry and short-form collective that I started in 2022, is seeking two new members to join us starting at the end of 2025. I began the press because authors who I had published in  Instant Noodles Lit Mag  asked me to publish a book of poetry for them. But, as a small indie publisher without a university backing me, it was a big ask to publish one-author-only books of poetry, because books of poetry typically do not sell in a press-sustaining way. I run my various publishing things with my long-suffering husband Dave , and we looked at what the major costs of producing a book are, beyond our time. We decided that, to do it, we'd pay some costs, and some of the labor that had costs associated with it beyond our personal time we could avoid if a group would come together and take on the labor. Basically I went to all the authors I'd worked with in anthologies or the lit mag, and asked them, "If you could trade a little labor for a published book,...