All posts by Vance

04Apr/25

Marshall Moore

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April 4, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 11: Marshall Moore!

Marshall Moore returns to share his books: Sunset House and The Scholarship of Creative Writing Practice. We enjoy some laughs while talking about writing a book of essays, and the idea of creative practice.

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Marshall Moore is the author of four novels, four short-fiction collections, and the memoir I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Litro, Storgy, Passengers Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He is also the co-editor of three academic books on the pedagogy of creative writing and publishing. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. A native of eastern North Carolina, he lives in Cornwall, England.

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March 31, 2023

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 8, Episode 14: Marshall Moore + our “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” review!

Marshall Moore shares his memoir, I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing. We discuss everything from cosplaying normalcy, to his upcoming projects, to driving around Penzance. We then review Brooklyn Nine-Nine and share what won our weeks!

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Marshall Moore is the author of four novels and three short-fiction collections. He is also the co-editor of three academic books on the pedagogy of creative writing and publishing. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Litro, Storgy, Passengers Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. A native of eastern North Carolina, he lives in Cornwall, England, and teaches creative writing and publishing at Falmouth University.

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21Mar/25

Wayne Scott

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March 21, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 10: Wayne Scott!

Wayne Scott joins us to share his memoir: The Maps They Gave Us. We scrutinize society’s expected marriage script, and unveil how accepting one’s self and working with your spouse to craft the new story of your marriage can lead to having an unconventional family based on love.

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Wayne Scott’s writing has appeared in The Sun, Poets and Writers, The Psychotherapy Networker, Huffington Post, and The Oregonian, among others. His New York Times essay, “Two Open Marriages in One Small Room” (January 2020) was adapted for the Modern Love podcast and read by Edoardo Ballerini (summer 2021), then “dutchified” for Modern Love (Amsterdam), the television series, in 2022. Some of his more notable tweets are included in Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace (A Public Space Books, 2021). He was a Tin House Fellow in 2019. He is a writer, psychotherapist, and teacher in Portland, Oregon.

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14Mar/25

Donna Minkowitz

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March 14, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 9: Donna Minkowitz!

Donna Minkowitz joins us to share her first fiction novel: Donnaville. We discuss backdrops of the mind, growth of the self through the parts of self, character struggles, and yes… there are authoritarians who are trying to bring about a stricter society.

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Donna Minkowitz is a writer of fantasy, memoir, and journalism lauded by Lilith Magazine for her “fierce imagination and compelling prose.” Science fiction great Terry Bisson called her writing “rich and wild, dark and funny, as fearless as her legendary journalism and as scary as a fairy tale.” And she’s proud that Kirkus has praised the “defiant and playful energy” of her work.

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28Feb/25

Robert Bruegmann

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February 28, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 8: Robert Bruegmann!

Robert Bruegmann joins us to share his first fiction book: Roman Ivory – A Novel. We discuss men loving men in the 19th century. It leads to a discussion of coded signals, generational discover, the author’s expertise in art & architecture, and the backdrop of murder.

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Robert Bruegmann is an historian of architecture, landscape and the built environment. He received his BA from Principia College in 1970 and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. In 1977 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia College of the Arts, MIT and Columbia University. He is author or editor of numerous award-winning non-fiction books and articles and a novel, Roman Ivory.

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14Feb/25

Lewis DeSimone

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February 14, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 7: Lewis DeSimone!

Lewis DeSimone joins us for the first time with his book: Exit Wounds. We discuss middle age, the disappearance of gay touchstones in culture, and jury duty as a lens for seeing life.

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Lewis DeSimone has supported his writing habit through a long career in marketing and academic publishing. His debut novel, Chemistry, investigated the impact of mental illness on a gay couple. In subsequent works, The Heart’s History and Channeling Morgan, he tackled subjects as diverse as AIDS, drag, cults, and the celebrity closet. At the core of all of his work is the hard and necessary struggle for self-knowledge and acceptance. As his latest novel, Exit Wounds, demonstrates, that effort doesn’t end at some magical point of “maturity,” particularly in turbulent periods like the present, when cultural shifts happen so quickly we don’t have time to fully grasp what we’re losing in the process.

A frequent panelist at the Saints and Sinners Literary Conference, Lewis has published fiction and nonfiction in the Advocate, Christopher Street, Chelsea Station, and a range of other journals and literary anthologies.

Lewis grew up in Boston and earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. He also has a master’s in creative writing from the University of California, Davis. After spending 25 years in San Francisco, he retired to Minneapolis, where he lives with his husband.

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31Jan/25

Rob Osler

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January 31, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 5: Rob Osler!

Rob Osler returns to share the first book in his Harriet Morrow Investigates series: The Case of the Missing Maid. We discuss the parallels between the Progressive Era (1890-1920) and current events, writing an exemplary and queer woman in a historic setting, and the unfolding of the series.

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Rob Osler writes traditional mysteries featuring LGBTQ+ main characters. Believing that relatability is as important as representation, he strives to showcase our shared humanity across individual identities. Rob’s just-released historical novel THE CASE OF THE MISSING MAID is a USA Today Bestseller, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and is an Amazon Editors Pick for Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense. His other work has been a finalist for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Lefty, and Macavity Awards, a CrimeReads Best of the Year, and a winner of the Mystery Writers of America Robert L. Fish Award. After living in Boise, Chicago, and Seattle, Rob resides in California with his husband and a tall gray cat.

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March 8, 2024

It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 10 Interview – Rob Osler

Rob Osler returns to share his latest Hayden & Friends Mystery, Cirque du Slay! We discuss the importance of characters living their authentic lives and the growth of the “quozy” genre!

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Rob is a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Authors’ Guild, Sisters in Crime, and Queer Crime Writers. He is a graduate in philosophy from the University of Puget Sound and earned a master’s degree in business from the University of Washington’s Foster School.

After many years living in Chicago and Seattle, he resides in California with his long-time partner and a tall, gray cat.

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May 12, 2023

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 8, Episode 20: Rob Osler + Our Review of And Then We Danced!

Rob Osler brings his energy to the show to discuss his “quozy” mystery, Devil’s Chew Toy. He shares his 2-minute pitch poem and we discuss what it means to be queer in the cozy genre. Then Baz and Vance discuss the foreign film And Then We Danced, followed by who won their weeks!

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Rob writes traditional mysteries featuring LGBTQ+ main characters. His novel Devil’s Chew Toy was a 2023 Left Coast Crime Finalist for Best Debut Mystery and an Agatha Awards Finalist for Best First Novel and named a 2022 Year’s Best by Crime Reads, BOLO Books, PopSugar, and Book Riot. The sequel to Devil’s Chew Toy, titled Cirque du Slay, comes out March 9, 2024. His first publication, Analogue, (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), won the 2022 Mystery Writers of America Robert L Fish Award for best short story by a debut author as part of the Edgar Awards. Forthcoming works include Miss Direction in Ellery Queen’s September/October edition, and Red Shoes in the Brutal and Strange, an anthology based on Elvis Costello songs from Down & Out Books, Jan 2024. Also on the horizon is The Case of the Missing Maid, book one in a new historical series featuring a queer female detective in Chicago in the Progressive Era from Kensington Books.

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24Jan/25

MW Lindberg

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January 24, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 4: MW Lindberg!

MW Lindberg shares their book: Black Hole Recess. We discuss writing children for adults, as well as children facing violence, non-binary characters in fiction, and finding one’s self in a story.

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MW LINDBERG (he/they) is a queer author, husband, gamer, tea-drinker, and support person to an anxious chihuahua. He is the author of unusual novellas and other short works. He spent a few decades in the theater as an actor, director, writer, and teacher and has since pivoted to fiction. He lives in Queens, NYC.

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17Jan/25

Scott Hightower

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January 17, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 3: Scott Hightower!

Scott Hightower shares his book: Imperative to Spare. We discuss oral storytelling and poetry, touching on topics of grief journeys and rebuilding ones life after loss, and expanding your internal self by expanding your world.

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Scott Hightower is the author of four books of poetry in the US. He has published two bilingual collections in Spain. He is also the editor of the bi-lingual (English/Spanish) poetry anthology 2012 Women Rowing: Mujeres A Los Remos, Mantis Editores, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Hightower’s awards include a Hayden Carruth Book Award and a Barnstone Translation Prize. Originally from Texas, he has itinerantly sojourned in India, Italy, Spain, and now lives in Manhattan where he teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

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10Jan/25

Zachary Pace

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January 10, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 2: Zachary Pace!

Zachary Pace shares their book: I Sing to Use the Waiting. We discuss how the turning points in the careers of several women singers informed and shaped the author’s life through topics like identity and how artists code genders to tell our stories.

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Zachary Pace is a writer and editor who lives in New York City, whose first book is I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am, and whose writing has been published in the Baffler, BOMB, Bookforum, Boston Review, Frieze magazine, Interview magazine, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the PEN Poetry Series, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.

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03Jan/25

J.M. Frey

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January 3, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 1: J.M. Frey!

J.M. Frey helps us ring in the New Year by sharing her recent novel: Time & Tide. We discuss time travel and time slip stories, the Regency/Georgian era, and lesbian/bi romances, all while keeping an eye on causality of changing the first lesbian kiss in literature.

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J.M. is an author, screenwriter, and lapsed academic. With an MA in Communications and Culture, she’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on radio and television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. She also has an addiction to scarves, Doctor Who, and tea, which may or may not all be related. Her life’s ambition is to have stepped foot on every continent (only 3 left!)

J.M.’s also a professionally trained actor who takes absolute delight in weird stories, over the top performances, and quirky characters. She’s played everything from Marmee to the Red Queen, Jane Eyre to Annie, and dozens of strange creatures and earnest heroines as a voice actor.

Her debut novel Triptych was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.

Her sophomore novel, an epic-length feminist meta-fantasy titled The Untold Tale, (book one of the Accidental Turn Series), debuted December 2015, and was followed up by The Forgotten Tale in 2016 and The Silenced Tale in December 2017. The Skylark’s Song, book one of The Skylark’s Saga, a steampunk action novel about a girl vigilante and her mysterious rocketpack, soared into bookstores in 2018, and was followed up by The Skylark’s Sacrifice in September 2019. The Skylark’s Saga was signed to a shopping agreement for an animation series in 2018. All six of these novels were reprinted under Frey’s personal backlist imprint Here There Be in late 2023.

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