By Shannon Glass Fans of Sara Marchant’s work will find the setting and characters of her first novel, Becoming Delilah, familiar. The Coachella Review recently spoke with Marchant about how she expanded her previous novella, The Driveway Has Two Sides, to create the new book. The story follows Delilah Ortiz as she moves to a village on an island off Cape Cod, where she must navigate her new neighbors’ reactions to her vibrant garden and her married lover. It’s a delightful journey to selfhood for Delilah, filled with equally moving depictions of plants and people. During our chat, we also…
By Karen A. Parker “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” These words from the late, great Octavia E. Butler open the New Suns anthology series, edited by the legendary Nisi Shawl. As a founder of the Carl Brandon Society, a Clarion West board member, and an award-winning speculative fiction author, they have fought for increased diversity, equity, and inclusion inside the speculative fiction genre and outside of it. In 2005 with Cynthia Ward, they co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, which remains a seminal text on how writers can craft inclusive stories and characters…
By Tamara MC For fans of Educated by Tara Westover, Maid by Stephanie Land, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Michelle Dowd’s debut coming-of-age memoir Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult contains echoes of all three, yet it is wholly unique unto itself. Dowd was born in the 1970s into a survivalist cult called the Field, governed by her grandfather, who was seen as God’s prophet. Much of the memoir is set in the Angeles National Forest at a place Dowd calls the Mountain, as the family prepares for the world’s end. Education became her liberation, and plants played a role in her survival.…
By Dannah Elizabeth In her first full-length poetry collection, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, UC Riverside-Palm Desert alum Mag Gabbert explores the fragmented meanings of language. With striking imagery, she transports readers into a dreamy world where words might be mistaken, misused, or reduced. Drawing from etymological research, Mag Gabbert uses experience and associations to create new portraits of relationships and sex. Playfully weaving myths and research, she challenges readers to examine their own word histories. We spoke to Gabbert about the power of language, her journey to getting the collection published, and how the collection’s title came to be. THE COACHELLA…
By Betty-Jo Tilley Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing journeys back and forth from the 1970s through the ’90s in the US and China. Protagonist Tang Yitian—his surname given in honor of the author’s family—has spent fifteen years in the United States as a college math professor. In the opening pages, he receives a frantic call from his mother, begging him to return to the small rural village he has not seen since he left home, because his father has gone missing. Outside this mystery, the book is also a tale of brotherhood, featuring Yitian’s older brother, Yishou,…
By Rebecca Lauer Paul Tremblay has been speaking to so many interviewers lately that when I started our interview, he responded by discussing the wrong book: after I asked my first question, he answered by mentioning the point of view of Wen, the little girl in his novel The Cabin at the End of the World, which was adapted by M. Night Shyamalan into the movie Knock at the Cabin, which premiered earlier this month. “Oh,” I interrupted him. “I mean for The Pallbearers Club.” He was happy to change the subject. In The Pallbearers Club, the book’s fictional author,…