Review of The Summer She Was Under Water at Baltimore STYLE

Many thanks to Eric D. Goodman for his review of The Summer She Was Under Water at Baltimore STYLE!


In the compassionate and tender prose Michalski has become known for, she shares Sam’s desire to “save people from themselves.” Sam sacrifices her own emotional well-being to help heal her family.


To read more, go here.

The Summer She Was Under Water Acquired by Black Lawrence Press!

Proud to announce that my second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water (2016, Queens Ferry Press) has been acquired by Black Lawrence Press and will be available in paperback in December 2017. You can preorder now, and I would be so grateful if you did. It's an amazing feeling to have both of my novels (The Tide King, 2013) in the same great family.

Summer She Was Under Water the July pick at Vibrant Margins!

Excited that my novel The Summer She Was Under Water was chosen as the July selection of the online book-of-the-month club, Vibrant Margins. You can order my book singly through the site or choose a six-month subscription of selected small press titles curated by the Vibrant Margins staff.

Editor Ben Winston talked to me about the writing of Summer at the Vibrant Margins website and about the strain of family relationships:

"I think, at some point in our lives, we’ve experienced strained relationships with our loved ones. And I am familiar with the dynamic of the blue collar family. My twin brother and I, third-generation Polish Americans, were the first in our family to go to college. So it’s often felt like I live in two worlds at times. But I think, while you might grow apart from friends with whom you don’t have much in common any more, you’re always connected to your family, for better or worse. They’re a lot like slinkys; you are all growing at different rates, apart and together, and the spring stretches and contracts continuously, but they’re always connected."

To read more, go here. To order Summer from Vibrant Margins, go here.

Review of The Summer She Was Under Water at The Nervous Breakdown

Kurt Baumeister reviewed The Summer She Was Under Water as part of his Microbrew Reviews at The Nervous Breakdown.

"The Summer She Was Under Water is a quick, dark book, one in which life offers many questions, few answers. Lurking always are Sam’s memories of her brother Steve, memories that have come to dominate every aspect of her life, from her work to her relationship with her boyfriend, Michael. Both in terms of prose and dialogue, Michalski’s writing is vivid and true to life, perfect for a world in which connections to other humans seem tenuous, always one wrong word or action from being cut, perhaps forever."

To read more, go here.

Review of The Summer She Was Under Water at Atticus Review

Thanks to A. K. Small for this thoughtful review of The Summer She Was Under Water today at Atticus Review:

"Michalski packs a fascinating amount of material into four fictional days, all of which changes Sam’s perspective on life. Until this reunion, Sam had chosen to recoil from the nest, but the visit to the lake house wakes her. Michalski’s attention to detail and to the frail human psyche shines throughout these pages. There are no simple heroes or ogres here. Each character slips in and out of these polar opposite roles, exhibiting a complexity and depth, a beautiful gift in a novel. I also enjoyed the rich setting of the cabin, the lake holding its secrets, the parallels between what’s been drowned below the surface and what remains above it."

To read more, go here.

Review of The Summer She Was Under at Ploughshares

Thanks so much to Kira Frank for her review of The Summer She Was Under Water at Ploughshares:

 "...how can we heal when loved ones don’t even realize they’ve hurt us? Jen Michalski’s second novel is an intense emotional commitment, but a worthwhile 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.

Review of The Summer She Was Under Water at Small Press Picks

Thanks so much to Small Press Picks for this smart review of The Summer She Was Under Water:

"In certain respects the very structure of the novel—the way it weaves together the present and the past, and draws on excerpts from Sam’s surreal novel—echoes Sam’s process of mulling over her past, with all its conflicts and confusions, and her efforts to come to terms with it. Although The Summer She Was Under Water provides no neat resolutions, it offers hope that people can find ways to move forward with the realities of their lives, with or without each other."

To read more, go here.

Review of The Summer She Was Under Water at The Rumpus

So excited to read Stephanie Bento's review of The Summer She Was Under Water today at The Rumpus:


"the story pulls the reader into a dark and uncomfortable place. This is where Michalski’s ability to engage the reader’s compassion and sensitivity is most profound. The Pinskis, to be sure, have their problems, but Michalski invites the reader to consider the family in a softer light as they navigate the currents of time and loss."

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:

Review of Summer She Was Under Water at Washington Independent Review of Books

I was surprised and flattered to read Emily Mitchell's review of The Summer She Was Under Water at the Washington Independent Review of Books today:

"In the novel as a whole, there is a scrupulous lack of sentimentality and no recourse to easy resolution or redemption. Instead, we see the way that, in the long arc of parental and sibling relationships, each change begets new complexities and entanglements. Even when you try to force a crisis or stage a reckoning, it does not always provide the catharsis you anticipate. 

Your relatives, the novel seems to say, whether or not you like them or accept them, go right on being your relatives, regardless. The result is a stark but absorbing portrait of the complex intersection of love, frustration, forgiveness, and anger that make up this — or any — family."

To read more, go here.

Goodreads Giveaway: The Summer She Was Under Water

There's still time to enter for a chance to win 1 of 5 copies of The Summer She Was Under Water at Goodreads! You can enter here.

Praise for Summer:

“There are no easy answers here but instead a family's dysfunction laid bare in all its messiness and heartbreak—and also its moments of occasional, near-accidental grace.”
—Katharine Noel, Halfway House

Guest Editor at Smokelong Weekly

I'll be guest editing this week, 10/3-10/9 at Smokelong Weekly the best flash fiction site on the planet (and also Smokelong Quarterly) Send me your work! Guidelines are here, and here's a bit of the interview I did with Smokelong's Executive Editor, Megan Giddings, about what I look for in a submission. I'm giving away a free copy of my new novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, to the author whose work I choose.

"You have to make sure your work stands out immediately, whether it’s the words, the imagery, the acoustics. I love reading work that immediately pops out over the static of “generic-literary-short-fiction-submission”

To read more, go here.

Review and Excerpt of The Summer She Was Under Water

The first read of The Summer She Was Under Water appeared yesterday at The Collagist. Michael Tager writes a stirring, lyrical analysis of brother-sister tensions:

"What is it about siblings that brings out the worst in people? Is it the way they entwine familiarity and contempt? Is it the inherent power dynamic that so often pits elder against younger? Maybe it's the favoritism that parents so often (and rightly) refuse to acknowledge but is still often self-evident. In the case of The Summer She Was Under Water, it's all of the above, and more."

To read more, go here.

Also, at The Nervous Breakdown, you can find an excerpt of Summer:

"Everything feels all right, right now. Perhaps Steve would be lighthearted and charming and teasing and they’d spend their days trying to fish and maybe they’d fish for their father’s old beer cans and the lost city of Conowingo. And Steve would be the person Sam always hoped he would be, was capable of being, and maybe their family would close ranks around each other and there would be a tacit understanding that they each would rise their tide a little and all their boats would float comfortably, not mired in the muck or run ashore. If they all did their part and dammed their happiness in, here, this summer, there would be plenty to drink from, to siphon, in the lean times."

To read more, go here.

Win a Copy of The Summer She Was Under Water from Amazon!

Yes, you are a busy bee. Yes, I know it's after Labor day and you're swamped and you just haven't had a chance to pick up my new novel, The Summer She Was Under Water. I forgive you. I do. I want to make your life easier, it's true. That's why Queens Ferry Press and I in conjunction with Amazon are giving away copies of The Summer She Was Under Water absolutely free! You have a minute to enter, don't you?

You can enter here. Now, back to your busy life.

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.

Don't Kill Your Darlings

I have an essay today at Women Writers, Women's Books about not killing your darlings. Thanks to Barbara Bos and her excellent crew for letting me contribute!

"Often we cling to our darlings because we lack confidence in our own abilities (“I’ll never write something so fantastic again—how could I?”). However, by doing so, we’re both challenging ourselves to create another, more beautiful darling and proving that, yes, we are capable of another darling—many more, in fact.

So they say. Between us, I’ve never actually killed my darlings."


To read more, go here.

"The Hard Truths" at The Nervous Breakdown

I have this essay at The Nervous Breakdown on writing about controversial subjects in fiction: 

"If I do have a responsibility to my readers, it’s to be the best spokesperson for my characters, to make them as fully realized as possible, to discover their hard truths and not shy away from them."

To read more, go here.

Today at David Gutowski's awesome site,  Largehearted Boy, I got to share my music playlist for my new novel, The Summer She Was Under Water (Queens Ferry Press) on Book Notes:

"My second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, is actually two books: one I started years ago and put away because the themes of family dysfunction (specifically, parents and their adult children spending a weekend at their lake cabin to relax but instead creating a powder keg of built-up grievances) seemed so overdone, and the other a magical realistic novella, called Water Moon, I wrote about a man who discovers he is pregnant. Although completely different in tone and subject matter, they seemed to be speaking to each other, and it was only when I wove them together did I discover the terrible secret hidden in an already broken, blue-collar Baltimore family. (I don't recommend you always plan novels this way, but it seems to work for me.)

I don't remember exactly what I was listening to years ago when I wrote The Summer She Was Under Water or Water Moon, and they were separated by years of other projects, but when I was going over the edits of the final book with Erin McKnight at Queens Ferry Press and seeing the novel fresh again, I viewed it like a movie, and since I love music scores, I wondered how someone would score it, scene by scene."

To read more and listen to the playlist, go here.