Interview at Bmore Art

Thanks to Tyler Mendelsohn and the folks at Bmore Art for interviewing me about my second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, and also my work as host of the Starts Here! reading series in Baltimore, which is moving to a new time and location in 2017. 

“The great thing about Baltimore,” says Michalski, “is that if you see a need for something, there’s nothing to keep you from creating it. [When I was starting out] I didn’t have anything to lose—the worst people could say was no, not respond. And I’d be no worse off. But I wound up gaining so much. And so, I think, did the community.” 

 To read more, go here.

Interview and Review of Summer at Baltimore Magazine

I sat down with Arts & Culture editor Gabrielle Souza to talk about my new novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, for the November issue of Baltimore Magazine (in addition to the interview in both formats, there's also a review in the print edition):

"I think a lot of people and families everywhere deal with these kinds of issues that there aren’t easy answers for, and you just have to make the best of the situation."

To read more, go here:

Interview at Change Seven

I was interviewed at Change Seven by the amazing Curtis Smith today. We talked about my latest novel, The Summer She Was Under Water:

“I don’t make the characters do what I would do in facing these situations—as I’ve already illustrated, my characters seem to thwart me on every level—but I do wind up learning a lot about myself when writing about others. It reminds me of how psychologists say that children play as a way to learn to navigate social situations, that they’re sort of practicing for the real thing. And I guess, in a way, writers are people who have just never stopped playing.”

To read more, to here.

Interview at Washington Independent Review of Books

I had so much fun talking to author Ed Aymar at Washington Independent Review of Books about my new novel, The Summer She Was Under Water. 

 "And then when I was finished [writing it], I felt good but also horrified, like, What have I done? And I still feel that way, some days, like, did I just put that out in the world?"

 To read more, go here.

Interview at Meet the Writer

My second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, is publishing August 9th with Queens Ferry Press! In the meantime, I was interviewed by the wonderful Melanie Page of Grab the Lapels about it and some writerly stuff:

I also have discovered that I enjoy writing novels more than short stories. Short stories are like a fling to me — a one-night stand. They feel good, but they are what they are. You’re not going to get married and have kids with them.

To read more, go here. 

Interview at Late Last Night Books

I was interviewed by Sally Whitney at Late Last Night Books about the magical realism in my debut novel, The Tide King, and my forthcoming novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, about labeling writers, about loneliness, and more:

[finding home] I think, being comfortable with yourself, loving yourself. Trusting yourself to know your needs and know how to fill them. Like I said, there’s a great fear, I think, to go deep inside, to find that you’re lacking. It’s such a scary, terrible feeling to open that door and find a dark, empty closet. So much so that we try to fill the closet with other things from the outside. But to be in the closet, alone, and feel safe and strong and content. And discover there’s actually a window in there covered with dirt that just needed a little cleaning.

To read the interview, go here.

Writers on Craft at Fictionaut

Thanks so much to the lovely and gifted Heather Fowler for talking with me about craft on The Fictionaut Blog. I love talking about writing almost as much as writing!

As a writer, I've kind of evolved over the years from short stories (with a small detour into flash for a year or two) into novels. I always like to think of it as when I was a little younger, I was more interested in distilling the essence of things into the short form, making a statement, because I didn't have much experience in the world and I was still learning myself. Now that I’m older, I still haven’t learned much, but I find I like to linger in places instead–the process interests me more than an overarching statement. I no longer feel writing has to be about something. For me, I've always written as a way to understand things, but I don’t even necessarily care what the outcome is anymore. Even if I set out to write about a complicated relationship with a relative but wind up writing about a blue hippopotamus instead, I no longer feel as if I've failed as a writer. I might try to reverse-engineer how I got from point A to point B, but even that doesn't matter anymore. Writing is just something that is, like breathing. It doesn't have to wind up in the Barnes & Noble or in the trash it. It’s just output, thoughts. It’s my process.

To read the entire interview, go here.

Radio interview, WBJC 91.5FM Baltimore, Monday, February 3rd, 5:15 pm

I'll be interviewed by the gracious and lovely Judith Krummeck today on WBJC, the classical music station of Baltimore City Community College. You can tune it at 5:15 pm on 91.5 FM. I have been a fan of Judith's for years and have faithfully listened to her drive-time broadcasts here in Baltimore. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to meet her; it's a great feeling to discover that someone you're a huge fan of is kind of a fan of you, too! A podcast of the interview can be accessed here.

7/29/13: Interview at The Baltimore Review

 

 The Baltimore Review was kind enough to post this interview I did with Stevenson University graduate Ian Lashley McIntosh. A lot of great questions!


I think, because I started out as a poet (even though I was a pretty terrible one), I pay more attention to the sound and rhythm of my prose—there’s a beat, a syncopation as it moves along, and sometimes I hear what the sentence sounds like and then add the words to it. Language is so much more than moving ideas from point a to b. It’s a song—it has notes, a beat. It has volume. It was arrangements. It has a vocalist and sometimes a choir



To read more, go here

7/2/13: Interview in Potomac Review

The Potomac Review was kind enough to interview me about my just-released debut novel, The Tide King. Here is the first of three parts:

The book took about three years to write, which isn’t very long. I try to set small goals, maybe 5-10 pages per week. Between my full-time job, editing the journal, and running the 510 Series with Michael Kimball. I don’t have much more time than that. I don’t want to be the person who holes up in a cave to write and then emerges–I want to be actively involved in the scene. It helps me from living in my head, which I do too much of already.

To read the entire interview, go here.

6/17/2013: Featured Writer at Connotation Press

Connotation Press, the wonderful monthly journal run by writer Meg Tuite, was kind enough to honor me as their featured writer for June. In addition to publishing an excerpt, "1945," from my forthcoming novel The Tide King, Meg also interviewed me about my writing process, music, inspiration, and more:

There were actually a lot of threads that wound up becoming The Tide King. A few years ago, I began to tentatively to write a short story based on an old National Geographic article I read about a search-and-recovery mission of the German World War II battleship The Bismarck. As my curiosity grew, my short story idea became a novel idea that included 17th-century Poland and World War II, and my research expanded. I began to read and watch everything I could about World War II. At the same time, I was cleaning out some of the files in my writing folders and found fifty pages of a novel I’d begun five years before that and forgotten about. It included an enchanted herb brought over from Poland, burnette saxifrage, which gave eternal life to those who ate it. Suddenly, I saw the possibilities in combining the novels together, and they culminated in The Tide King.

To read more, go here.

6/10/13: Interview and Excerpt of The Tide King in Cobalt Review

Andrew Keating, a Baltimore writer and founder of the high-trajectory Cobalt Review, was kind enough to interview me about The Tide King in the current issue (issue eight). Also included is an excerpt, "1949." From the interview:

In this excerpt, in 1949, Calvin Johnson heads to Helena, Montana, in search of a fellow solider, Stanley Polensky, with whom he served in WWII. Johnson can’t be sure, but after waking up in a mass grave of dead soldiers after getting shelled, he dimly remembers Stanley shoving something in his mouth before he lost consciousness. He doesn’t understand the correlation between Stanley did and how it came to be that he’s still alive and has this uncanny ability to heal. He gets roped into helping put out the Mann-Gulch fire. In the actual fire, 12 smoke jumpers were killed, and Norman Maclean wrote a beautiful and haunting book, Young Men and Fire, in which he tries to piece together what happened many years later. It’s one of my favorite books, and I knew I wanted to included it somehow. In fact, a lot of the book is like that–a lot of things that I was interested in (female country music singers of the 1940s, World War II, Partition-era Poland). Fortunately, I was able to make it all work–I think.

To read more, go here. To read the excerpt, go here.

5/28/13: Essay in Psychology Today

I was thrilled to contribute an essay to Psychology Today in commemoration of Memorial Day about my grandfathers, who served in World War II. I wrote about their service and how they were the inspiration for my forthcoming novel, The Tide King, out this month:

As Mitch Albom so aptly wrote, “It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.” Likewise, it took some time before I began to consider the sum of my grandfather’s life outside of his narrow role in mine.

To read more, go here.

4/10: Baltimore Magazine Feature

Baltimore Magazine ran a story on me in their April issue! I talk to Baltimore's veteran music, culture, and lit feature writer and critic Michael Yockel. But it's really not about so me: it's about Baltimore's fantastic literary scene. Read it to find out more about our town:

For Michalski, writing, more than anything else, crystallizes her sense of self. “I understand through writing the same way that some people understand through reading,” she says. “It’s part of how I interpret the world.”

 To read more, go here

Self-Interview at The Nervous Breakdown

I had the pleasure of interviewing myself today at The Nervous Breakdown:

"Writers are not glamorous. We pretend to be on Facebook and Twitter, but mostly we’re sitting at home trying to be brilliant (or imaging what would happen to us if we actually were). I don’t own skinny jeans; I wear activewear and furry socks every day. And our spouses are publicly proud of us, but behind closed doors we get a lot of “you write all the time. You care more about your writing than [husband/wife/favorite child/favorite pet/favorite parent].” In that way, we are slightly above drug addicts and alcoholics on the obsessive behaviors scale. We’re self-absorbed except we don’t know it because we’re too busy being self-absorbed. We will be better people, we promise! 1) after we finish the novel; 2) after we get an agent; 3) after we sell the novel; 4) after we write the second novel; 5) after we win a prize for the second novel. 6) After we write the third novel, etc."

To read more, go here.

(You can also read an excerpt of Could You Be With Her Now at the same site here.)

Interview with Paula Bomer in Rain Taxi

A couple of summers ago, novelist Paula Bomer interviewed me in Rain Taxi about one of the two novellas that would eventually comprise the couplet in my collection Could You Be With Her Now. "May-September" had just one first prize in Press 53's 2010 Open Awards in the category of novella. Little did I know then that "May-September" would be destined for even greater things:

I think both the young and the old tend to underappreciate the other. Neither thinks the other understands their unique challenges, but we all sort of go through the same things. It was sort of a challenge to me, coming from a close-knit family, to write about a mother and daughter who aren’t close, and to write it from the mother’s point of view. But I understand their fear and pride in not extending the olive branch. I’ve seen so many broken families operate on this principle. And I feel so sad for them. It was hard to write Sandra and her daughter without wanting to make them kiss and make up at some point, but they never do.

To read more, go here:

Interview at Necessary Fiction

Thanks to Amber Lee for interviewing me at Necessary Fiction about Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books), which just released today:

How do you decide when a piece you’ve written is “finished” enough to publish?I think they tell you. I think all stories have their own souls, or flames, and sometimes they’re very fragile and apt to extinguish if you don’t work fast and ride their waves all the way to shore. I’ve even abandoned short stories during later revision stages because the energy that drove their initial writing has dissipated. There’s just nothing to be done then, no matter how you try and fix it—you can tell when a story has lost its soul and a writer keeps revising it over and over anyway. Thankfully, I’ve finished a lot of stories before their flame went out. But it is something I need to be aware of—that when the inspiration strikes, I’d better stop what I’m doing and start writing.

to read more, go here.

My First Book Love: Harriet the Spy

On David Abrams' blog, "The Quivering Pen," I wrote an essay for his "My First Time" series about my first book love, Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy.

When I was younger, bands like REM, The Pixies, and Siouxsie and the Banshees crowded my mix tapes, and Salinger, Bukowski, and Kerouac lined my bookshelves. I thought I was queen shit. It wasn’t until I was older when I realized that the bands I listened to uncritically as a child, like Fleetwood Mac, with their perfect pop, emotional masterpiece Rumors and new-wave forerunner Tusk, influenced my music pedigree way more than the cool kids from Sire and Matador Records. And it wasn’t until I was way, way older when I realized the book that influenced me most as a reader and writer was not some Faulknerian or Russian masterpiece, anything written by Gertrude Stein, or even some stream-of-conscious beat paperback but a children’s book—about a girl who wants to be a spy.

To read more, go here

Related: My story, "Excerpts from the New Adventures of Harriet the Spy" at This Zine Will Change Your Life.

Ten Interview Questions for The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop is a chance for authors to tell you what they're working on. The author answers 10 questions about their next book and tags the person who first tagged them plus at least five other authors. Thanks, Christine Stewart, of The Real Writer, for tagging me!

What is the working title of your book?

Rabbits Singing. 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I was vacationing in Newport, Rhode Island, and had just read Kristin Hersh's memoir, Rat Girl. She's in the band Throwing Muses, who formed in the early 80s while attending Salve Regina College in Newport. Anyway, a particularly interesting part of Hersh's memoir was the friendship she formed with the legendary Betty Hutton, who lived in Newport and decided to complete her education (earning a bachelor's and then master's) at the same time Kristin attended Salve Regina, even though she was in her  seventies at the time. Sometimes Betty Hutton would go to the Throwing Muses' shows, but she'd bring her priest along with her to the clubs.

What genre does your book fall under?

Literary fiction. But I guess it could also fall into that women's catch-all, upmarket women's fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Good question! I'd want someone someone a little boyish and independent to play Kate, the main character, like a seventeen-year-old Clea Duvall:

This guy (or someone like him) could play Charlie:

As for Grace, I think Judi Dench would return my call: 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

In 1974, 17-year-old Kate Reich drives an ice cream truck for the summer in Newport, Rhode Island, and dreams of becoming an artist. On her routes she befriends a young autistic boy, Emory, and Grace Huston, a reclusive aging movie star. When the Emory is accused of drowning a young girl, Kate and Grace set out to prove his innocence. (Okay, that's three.)

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About a year. I'm working on the second draft now.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I like to think of it as Donna Tartt's The Little Friend but set in New England instead of the South.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

Being in Newport and Betty Hutton. I started a short story about a girl who befriends a Betty Hutton-type recluse one summer, and it quickly became too big for the frame I'd created.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Of course, there are competing love interests for Kate (a surfing college boy and a local police officer). And the little girl who Emory is accused of drowning, Anne Barney, is not the only person to die in this book.

Making the Rounds

We had a couple of nice PR pieces for The Lit Show this week. First, on Tuesday we sat down with Tom Hall for WYPR's Maryland Morning. The podcast should be up shortly.

The City Paper also ran a nice piece, interviewing me and Betsy:

“When you think of Canton and Fells Point, you think of drinking and sports,” Michalski, who lives near Greektown, says. She also wanted to cast a wider net than does your average literary reading. “There are a lot of readings series in the city now, and they’re all great,” she says. “But there’s still a swath of people you see in other places that never come to the readings.”

The semiannual Lit Show, which launches at the Creative Alliance on March 22, is an attempt to change that. It will mimic the form of a classic late-night talk show, with Michalski and fellow fiction writer Betsy Boyd as co-hosts. Interviews with guests will alternate with readings, fast-paced repartee, music by a guest band as well as the house band (Howard Markman’s Palookaville), and “stupid human tricks”—in this first show, for instance, one guest will sing an Appalachian death ballad and accompany himself on wine glasses. The show will feature author Cathy Alter; Aaron Henkin of WYPR-FM’s The Signal; comedian, writer, and City Paper contributor Jim Meyer; musical guest Height With Friends; and a mystery guest.

Finally, we made number 2 on b Magazine's weekly "10 Spot." You can read a PDF copy of the issue here.