"How to Host a Reading Event" in LitHub

I'm honored to partake in Lithub's new series on literary events, "Reading Across America," curated by Franklin Park Reading Series organizer and overall badass literary organizer Penina Roth. My piece is "How to Host a Reading Event," and I talk about my experiences as a host for both the 510 Reading Series (now defunct) and my current series, Starts Here! in Baltimore:

"To me, the most important thing about a reading series is not the readers, but the listeners. You aim to create not only a unique, exciting event, but also a welcoming one."

To read more, go here.

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 with Laura van den Berg at Baltimore Fishbowl

I had so much fun interviewing Laura van den Berg at The Baltimore Fishbowl, and I'm even more excited to host her and fellow writer Katharine Noel at Starts Here! (An Ivy Bookshop reading series; January 7th, 7 pm, Artifact Coffee). Laura's second collection of fiction, The Isle of Youth (FSG), a collection of "lost" narrators in often-exotic vistas, is fantastic. Although she is unsentimental, there is a particularly sensitivity to her stories that devastates. Each word has the weight and height of a water balloon and bruises your heart like a brick. So what is Laura's isle of youth?

A place where Law & Order is on every single channel day and night and where there is an infinite supply of red wine and gourmet tacos and good, weird books.

I actually think each story is its own kind of “isle”—a place where I go to at once get away from something and to discover something that surprises me.

To read more of the interview, go here. For more information on the reading, go here.