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Author Update 2024: Michael Backus

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Author and creative writing instructor Michael Backus is an essayist, novelist, short story writer and screenwriter as well as a memoirist. His latest release, The Heart Is Meat: An 80s Memoir (Oil on Water Press, August 2024), is a “raw…tender…self-portrait of the artist as a strung-out young meat market worker in the throes of a volatile love affair” and “vividly evokes the carnival seaminess and romance of pre-gentrified downtown New York.” You’ll find Mike on his website MichaelJBackus.com and on Facebook and Twitter. For more about his work, read SWW’s 2017 and 2022 interviews.

Why did you write The Heart Is Meat and who did you write it for?
In my synopsis/pitch for the book, I wrote:

In 1982, NYC’s meatpacking district was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft, NJ mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French resistance and Holocaust survivors.

It was a startling new world for a 22-year-old who grew up in a small town in Indiana. I never dreamed of moving to NYC; if my sister hadn’t moved there in 1978, it wouldn’t even have been on my radar. I got a job tossing meat at Adolf Kusy Pork and Provisions through my sister’s boyfriend; it was 1982 and NYC was still an exciting and scary place and the Gansevoort Meatpacking district on the north edge of Greenwich Village was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was pure chaos from 3:00 to 10:00 am, the streets clogged with hundreds of men in white coats, trucks blowing their horns, semi-trailers wanting to get unloaded and gay men frequenting the Mineshaft and the Anvil, two heavy leather clubs. More than anything, I wanted the book to be a document of that time and that place, a world of drugs, violence, levity, desperation, and hard work. I wanted to recreate the ongoing profanely aggressive dark comedy that was the meat market in general and our meat house in particular. Jimmy, my old boss at Kusy’s, had t-shirts made up that read “Adolf Kusy Pork and Provisions, we have the meat and the motion, the wild and craziest meat house in NYC.” A few years ago, I tracked down Jimmy and he said;

“I wish now I had a tape recorder and had just recorded every day down there. Just the…stories alone, the shit people came up with every day, the insanity of that place.”

If you go to NYC’s meatpacking district today, it seems almost impossible to believe my market of the early 80s ever existed. There’s the new Whitney museum, a seemingly endless number of high-end stores and restaurants, the lovely High Line park built on the old High Line railroad tracks (weedy and abandoned in the 80s). Today, a Van’s shoe superstore sits where Kusy once did. So first and foremost, I wrote the book because working there was a central experience in my life and I wanted to honor that. But I also felt some responsibility to make the book a document of a place and a time that’s so long gone, it’s hard to imagine it ever existed.

When did you know you wanted to write this portion of your life’s story? What prompted the push to begin the project?
I wrote a fiction short story back in the 90s called “Meat” that is loosely based around my experiences in the market in the 80s. It was published in the Portland Review, a literary magazine out of Portland State University and for a long time, I considered that my best short story. At that time, I wasn’t very interested in memoir. I resented its place in our literary culture, the idea that memoir was somehow “more true” than fiction, which is a ridiculous simplification. If I thought about it at all, it was as a possible novel and as a possible novel, I wasn’t interested in imposing an invented plot on what had been my life.

Then life intruded. I got older, people close to me started dying of old age and at some point, it was like someone threw a switch and I found myself writing short memoir pieces which eventually led to beginning the book that would become The Heart is Meat. One thing I learned about memoir is it’s easier to structure your narrative if you simply commit to a chronological approach, the structure takes care of itself and you can concentrate on content. With fiction, structure is never a given and the sheer number of ways you can approach a fiction narrative are daunting. That wasn’t an issue in writing this book and I found that very freeing.

I should also mention that a large part of the book is about maintaining a live-in relationship, living in the East Village of the early 1980s, going to art shows and dance clubs and guerilla art installations on the Hudson River piers. I try to capture what it was like to live in a New York City very different from today; how it could be scary, but it was also lively and exciting.

How is the book structured and why did you choose to put it together that way? How did you decide when to end the memoir?
I structured the book chronologically more or less but I made a couple of decisions about structure. For one, I wanted to start on action, just jump right into the moment so I didn’t detail how I ended up in NYC in the beginning, I started right in the middle of a day at work in the market, a day when my character was expected to apologize to a meat inspector I’d had a run in with a few days before. Adolf Kusy Pork and Provisions carried only boxed meat, so meat inspectors never bothered us, but they could cause problems if they wanted to which was why I was being forced to say “I’m sorry” for something I considered the fault of the inspector. This forms the first 30 pages or so of the book.

After this opening, I mostly moved forward chronologically but about halfway into the book, I have a second structural section where over a five-day period (the overall section is called “The Great Stakeout” and is broken down into sections marked Day One, Day Two…to Day Five) I detail two dramatic events happening at the same time. At work, there had been a holdup and murder in a nearby meat house and Adolf Kusy had the most ready cash on hand (we did more retail business than anyone else in the market) and everyone was sure we would be next. Plainclothes cops spent five days wearing white butcher’s coats and pretending to work among us while waiting for the robbers to strike. At the same time, the mother, father and sister of the woman I lived with were visiting from overseas and staying with us in our cramped East Village apartment. Each of the five days, I navigated work and cops and possible danger from 4:00 am to 2:00 pm, then after, when normally I’d be napping, I hosted her parents, running around the city, doing touristy things. It was a lot going on at the same time, but it ended up being a central structural part of the book.

About the ending, I struggled with it for some time and I still don’t think it’s perfect. If the book is partly about working in the Gansevoort meat market and living in a very different NYC, it’s also about the slow dissolution of a relationship. I used that final breakup as the end of the book, but after I was done, I interviewed my old boss Jimmy and added an Epilogue with information on what happened to some of the characters in the book over the previous 25 years. Jimmy remembered some things differently than I did and I included those memories without changing my own, this memoir being how I remembered my life back then. The epilogue also allowed me to include one of Jimmy’s memories about the market then, which helped me make one last point about the uniqueness of that particular time and place, which worked as the actual ending to the book.

Tell us more about how the book came together.
Writing took a couple of years; I mentioned a fiction short story “Meat” earlier, that story had an aggressive, profane and hopefully comic voice and I was able to find that voice very early on in writing the memoir. That was a huge help. But after multiple rejections, I’d more or less given up on publishing the book. It had some of the best writing I’ve done in my writing career, but it seemed out of step with our literary and social culture; the meat market world in 1982 was often over the top in how people expressed themselves, how they acted (toxic masculinity sums up the market nicely), and while I’m totally on board with our larger culture’s attempts to embrace a more open, inclusive approach to everything, I wasn’t sure my book really fit into the American literary world of today. Oil on Water Press is out of England and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that an English publisher accepted my book. I’m not convinced an American publisher ever would have. In terms of the book cover, the publisher came up with it after I sent them a photo from the 80s of Adolf Kusy’s sign outside the meat house. I liked it from the start and after I was able to get a couple of blurbs from known authors, the cover was complete.

Any “Oh, wow!” moments while doing research for this book?
Nothing so dramatic, but when interviewing my old boss, I discovered that a couple of guys I worked with had died just a few years after I left the job. And he had details that were different from mine. For example, in “The Great Stakeout” section of the book, I remembered the two killers being described as Serbians. He remembered them as Jamaicans, and while I acknowledged that in the Epilogue, I didn’t change anything in the body of the memoir. It seemed useful to acknowledge the reality that memoir is as created a world as fiction; that the moment an event is over, it becomes a memory and all memory is subjective.

One last sad thing; I always imagined finding Jimmy, my old boss, and giving him a signed copy of the book, that he more than anyone would appreciate the details. It was one of the reasons I wanted to get the book published in the first place. But just a couple of months ago, while trying to figure out how to get the book to him, I found out he died in 2023 at the age of 73, which was a surprise since he seemed healthy and robust his whole life.

Did you ever feel you were revealing too much about yourself while writing The Heart Is Meat? If so, how did you push past this feeling and continue?
Absolutely, I freaked out fairly regularly about it. I published a novel, The Vanishing Point, a couple of years ago and while the main character has a lot of me in him, I could always hide behind the idea that this is fiction and that character is NOT me. But in the memoir, the character literally has my name. It IS me. There’s a genuine vulnerability to that and I can’t claim to have fully come to grips with it, though in the end, it is what it is. In terms of pushing past this fear, when writing, I always tell myself that I need to be as open and honest as possible and if at some future point, someone wants to publish it, then I’ll worry about it then. And I’ve been writing a long time now, I’ve taught creative writing for over 20 years and I’m still teaching it. I’ve long ago come to peace with the notion that I might at times be showing too much of myself, which isn’t the same as saying I never have moments of doubt and worry.

There’s another consideration. The girlfriend who I was living with (Maya in the book) is alive and well. I met her in college, we both ended up in NYC, we lived together for five years on 12th Street and Avenue A. I still know her, mostly in a “like your post on Facebook” way but she didn’t ask to be a character in a former boyfriend’s memoir and I feel some trepidation about that. I have not talked to her about it and part of me has to be selfish and say, “This is my story,” but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware that I’m revealing intimate details about someone who hasn’t been part of my life for 30 plus years.

How did you pick the title of the book?
I worked on the title with my sister and her partner; they came up with the Heart is Meat part, I wanted to add something about what it was so I added An 80s Memoir to the end. I sometimes go back and forth even at this late date on the title, but here’s the thing. When I published my novel The Vanishing Point, I had changed the name a couple of times and The Vanishing Point was the original title and I was eager to return to it. But now in retrospect, I find The Vanishing Point kind of mundane and mostly forgettable. It sounds generic. Whatever else, The Heart is Meat is not generic.

What was it about New York City that first drew you to it? Has your view of the city changed?
My sister moved to the city from Indiana in 1978, she still lives there. I visited her in 79 and while I was not the kind of kid who ever imagined himself living in NYC, something about the vibrancy of the place interested me. It was dirty, it was dangerous, but the streets were also full of people at pretty much any time of the day or night. There were artists and writers everywhere, so in 1982, thinking of myself as a fiction writer, I moved to the city because it seemed the best city for a fiction writer to live in. And it was, pretty much in every way other than doing the work itself. I wrote almost nothing in my time there but much of what I experienced informed everything I eventually did write. I left the city in the late 80s to go to grad school in Chicago but returned in 1998 and spent the next 16 years there and it was a totally different city. Still lively and crowded, but not in any way scary anymore (despite what certain politicians say, NYC is one of the safest cities in the country), I built a fine life around working for a college on the upper east side (both in the administration and teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor), I rode my bike everywhere, I played basketball four times a week at the 92nd street Y. In so many ways, it was an idyllic lifestyle and totally different from my experience in the early 80s. But one of those differences was how expensive it had become and when I lost my apartment in 2014, I literally could not afford to live there anymore. If I could have afforded it, I’d probably still be there.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



Author Update: Michael Backus

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Michael Backus is a fiction and nonfiction author who teaches online writing courses for Zoetrope Fiction and Gotham Writers. His newest release, The Vanishing Point (Cactus Moon Publications, 2021), has been called “lyrical and stunning…readable and relatable. Subtly masterful without showing off…Utterly absorbing, it works along that interesting line that marries plot and artistry.” You’ll find Mike on his website MichaelJBackus.com and on Facebook and Twitter. For more about his work, read SWW’s 2017 interview and watch a book reading from The Vanishing Point.

What would you like readers to know about the story you tell in The Vanishing Point?
In the most basic way, it’s a book about trauma; about how a 10-year-old boy went through a tragic event that splintered and destroyed his family and how he as an adult visited this trauma on his own child, though in a much different way (he essentially abandons his daughter when she’s two). But it’s also about how easy it is for someone to drift away from all human contact (hence the title, The Vanishing Point, referring to that dynamic when some people seem to just disappear from everyone and everything they know) and how difficult it can be to come back from that. I think of my main character Henry as a moral character who in his 40s has found himself stranded in a New Hampshire town where he knows no one and he seems content to essentially find a corner of the world and wait to die.

Then through a series of circumstances, he finds himself in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he abandoned his child Cadence eight years before and slowly and haltingly, he gets to know her. So it’s also a redemption story of sorts and not just with his daughter but with his mother, who is a sad, alcoholic geriatric still living in the town where Henry grew up.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
At one point, this book was over 700 polished pages long! It was ridiculous. I always remember showing it to an agent in NYC and she liked the writing but said “it just keeps going on and on.” So my own verbosity was something of a challenge. But I also ended up with a lot of plotting problems. I’ve been teaching creative writing (at the college level and for a place called Gotham Writer’s Workshop out of NYC) for over 20 years, and I’ve often talked about the idea of “writing as an act of discovery.” That you figure out who your characters are and where the story is going AS you write. And I wrote this book that way, but when I finally reduced it to more or less its current length, I hit a lot of plotting problems with two timeline narratives (a past narrative with Henry as a child and the present narrative with Henry as a lost 40 year old) because I never planned for that past/present back and forth. I spent so much time making sure the chapters fit together and that a past chapter flowed into a present chapter and the juxtaposition of past and present carried some meaning of its own. This was not easy. On a practical level, I simply didn’t have enough “past” material to balance out the “present.” This caused me a lot of grief and, if I’m honest, I still don’t think it’s as good as it could have been had I planned the structure of the novel a bit more beforehand. My larger point is when you’re writing a novel, I think it makes some sense to figure out who your characters are as you write, but it can be helpful to have a little clearer, more laid out sense of the book’s plot.

How did the book come together?
Originally, I had this (quite possibly idiotic) idea of writing a story about a man who has abandoned his child, ends up meeting her and makes a moral decision not to be part of her life, a decision the readers would ultimately agree with. That went away once I started writing from 10-year-old Cadence’s POV. She was such a lively child (I felt freed up writing from a child’s POV) that halfway in, I realized there was no way I could have Henry just take off again. So the book became about something different, about a grown man pushing aside his own past and finding a way to be there for his daughter and also, by the end, his mother.

It took me maybe two years to write this, edit it, cut it in half, etc., but for ten years, I struggled to do anything with it. I have a lot of minor connections in the literary world and got this to a number of high-powered agents, all of whom turned it down. I had an agent for a micro-second after the short story magazine One Story published something of mine, but he never loved the book or the life and he quit the agency and while he passed the book onto his boss, the boss was not interested. So for years, I just let it be until I found Cactus Moon, a small publisher out of Arizona, willing to publish it.

Tell us about your main protagonists. Did they surprise you as you wrote their story?
Like I said, I knew I wanted to get Henry and his daughter together at some point, but I was surprised at how well Cadence came out as a character once I decided to write from her POV and once I’d started writing her chapters, I knew there was no way I could have Henry take off and leave her a second time. Cadence was just too lively to abandon a second time. Oddly, a lot of Cadence came indirectly from my mother. I have this photo of my mother when she’s 12 (she looks ferocious, determined, and sad) and by then, both her parents had died (in rural Kentucky in the 30s) and she was cast adrift into a world of despotic foster families and periodic stays in an orphanage. And in her diaries, she wrote about meeting her bus driver as an adult who said her and her sister were “the two fighting-est kids he ever met.” So I took that photo and that memory and fashioned a far less traumatic backstory for Cadence, but her general prickliness remained and that’s how Cadence’s character developed.

I also wrote a short story around the same time imagining the night my mother’s mother died from TB and there’s a lot of Cadence in that character. This story was published as a stand-alone chapbook, Coney on the Moon, a few years ago. (**See note on this at the end of the interview.)

While writing, I realized I needed to add something for Henry. This is a guy who had a bad relationship with his wife (Cadence’s mother, who is long out of the picture — Cadence is being raised by her maternal grandparents in Eldorado outside Santa Fe) and had abandoned his own child. I needed there to be some hiccup in the process of getting to know his daughter, something that hints at a personality able to do what he did. So I added an old friend of Henry’s who has a wife and Henry kind of pursues her romantically for a while as a way to not have to deal with his daughter This added a lot to the story and is something I only realized I needed after the early drafts were done.

One last thing. At one time, I called this book Double. Henry’s central trauma is he was a twin who lost his beloved brother to a freak accident when he was 10. That’s the incident that splintered the family. So in revision, I developed this idea that Henry as a young man was obsessed with reincarnation and decided he’d just wait until his brother is reborn somewhere in the world. But by the time the book begins, he hasn’t thought about his brother or reincarnation in decades. At some point in getting to know Cadence, he gets an idea and, as he puts it, you can’t “unthink a thought” once you’ve had it, that thought being that Cadence might be the reincarnated soul of his long-dead brother. The book never takes a position on this, it remains in Henry’s head (which is why I quit using that title, it’s not a major part of the book, more a character shading) but it adds nuance to Henry’s character.

How did you know you had taken the manuscript as far as it could go, that it was finished and ready for publishing?
At some point, I just had to admit, this is as good as I’m capable of doing at this time. When Cactus Moon accepted the book, I did a tightening revision where I lost seven whole pages simply by excising unnecessary words and phrases. I didn’t change anything fundamental about the story but I made it tighter. That was gratifying. That said, since I’ve published this, I’ve had to do a number of readings and I wish I’d been more ruthless in cutting. This is still a wordy book and even when I’m happy about the music of the writing, I see places all the time I wish I’d cut back.

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
Besides the writing, I really enjoyed working on the cover. I wasn’t that happy with what Cactus Moon suggested for covers so I got an idea, hired an artist, and along with my literary brain trust (essentially my sister and her partner, both writers and excellent editors), shepherded the creation of the cover. I was thrilled with how it came out.

Is there something that always inspires you or triggers your creativity?
Reading. Here’s an article I published in The Writer magazine many years ago about what reading the right thing can do for your writing. There’s nothing like a book or story that wows me to get me wanting to write and often it’s not the entire story, but a scene or moment that depicts something I recognize (an emotional dynamic for example) but have never seen described that way before. I go into that specifically in the article “The Trick of Reading the Right Thing While Writing.”

Do you prefer the creating or editing aspect of writing?
I’m a firm believer that the art of a story or a novel comes in revision. This is NOT how everyone works or should work (I always remember going to a reading by Joy Williams, who is an amazing writer, in the early 90s and she claimed she doesn’t revise at all. That she thinks about a story constantly for about a month and then writes it and when she’s done, it’s done.), but it is how a lot of us work. Get a first draft down any way you can by pushing through it and not stopping, THEN step back, see what you have and start adding details and nuance in the revision phase, which lasts much longer than the first draft phase.

What writing projects are you working on now?
A couple of years ago, I finished a book-length memoir about living in NYC’s Lower East Side in the early 80s in general (a time when the city was vibrant, full of art and artists, and much much scarier than it is now) and working in the Gansevoort Meatpacking district specifically. In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting the S&M clubs The Mineshaft and The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. It was a lively, insane world so long gone, it’s hard to believe it ever existed. The Meatpacking district in Manhattan today is a landscape of high end restaurants, shops, the new Whitney Museum, and the High Line elevated park. I’ve sent this book to a lot of people, both agents and publishers, and it remains stubbornly unrepresented and unpublished, though I feel it has some of my best writing.

I’ve started a new novel, but it seems way too early to talk about it, otherwise I’m like that person at a party going on about a book (or screenplay) they want to write but have barely started. No one wants to hear about that.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
**Earlier in this interview when I wrote about publishing a story with Redbird Chapbooks, I mentioned a note. This is it. When I first sent that story to Redbird (it’s called “Coney on the Moon”), I entered it in an Excel spreadsheet I’ve kept for 20 years detailing everything I’ve submitted and when I went to type in “Redbird” it filled in! So I looked and sure enough, I’d sent this exact story to Redbird a year before and had been rejected. I contacted the editor right away and apologized and said I’d withdraw it. She wrote back and said did I want to withdraw it? This was a different editor and I could just leave it, so I did. And they took it! The moral of the story is acceptance of publication is often a matter of timing and chance. The same story was rejected by the same publication but then a different editor took it. Good to keep this in mind when submitting.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



2021 New Releases for SWW Authors #2

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SouthWest Writers (SWW) is full of authors actively working their dreams. Michael Backus, Darynda Jones, Neill McKee, and Pat Moorman are a few SWW members with new releases for 2021. The releases in this post couldn’t fit into this year’s interview schedule, but look for interviews or updates for most of these authors in 2022.

A list of interviewed SWW authors with 2021 releases is included at the end of this post.

Michael Backus’ newest release, The Vanishing Point (Cactus Moon Publications, September 2021), is about disappearance, trauma and memory, and the possibilities of redemption through a great American road trip and a peek into a mid-western childhood. It is a meditation on Karma and the way we lose and find ourselves over and over again. How did Henry Dolan end up here, heading to Santa Fe, New Mexico? The one place in the world he swore he would never set foot in again—the town where he lost his wife and daughter nearly a decade ago. Maybe it’s the eleven pounds of high-grade weed in the trunk of his car that he can’t sell anywhere else. Maybe it is something much deeper. It is time for him to finally meet his daughter and reckon with the harm he caused. Cadence, now ten, helps Henry open his long locked-away heart, exposing the wounds he has kept concealed. In healing, he finds a mysterious connection between his daughter and his own tragic childhood.

The Vanishing Point is available on Amazon.

Darynda Jones released three books in 2021 with a fourth set to publish in mid-December. In Beguiled (Betwixt & Between Book Three, February 2021), newly indoctrinated witch Defiance Dayne discovers there’s more to life after forty than she’d ever imagined possible. Especially if one is a charmling with enough magics to make her a target for every power-hungry warlock out there. When one of them sends a hunter to town, she knows it’s time to take her talents seriously before the hunter takes her life. The Gravedigger’s Son (1001 Dark Nights Press, May 2021) is a Charley Davidson Novella that follows demon hunter Quentin Rutherford and private investigator Amber Kowalski as they try to stop a supernatural entity before it kills again.

A Good Day for Chardonnay (St. Martin’s Press, July 2021) is book two in the Sunshine Vicram series. All small-town sheriff Sunshine Vicram really wants is one easy-going day. The kind that starts with coffee and a donut and ends with take-out pizza and a glass of chardonnay (or seven). Before she can say iced mocha latte, Sunny’s got a bar fight gone bad, a teenage daughter hunting a serial killer and, oh yes, the still unresolved mystery of her own abduction years prior. Moonlight and Magic is the fourth book in the Betwixt & Between series. Available for pre-order, it will release on December 17, 2021. Darynda also has several other books on pre-order set to release in 2022.

For all of her books, visit her website at Darynda.com and her Amazon author page.

Kid on the Go! (August 2021) is Neill McKee’s third work of creative nonfiction. The memoir is a standalone prequel to his award-winning Finding Myself in Borneo. In this new book, McKee takes readers on a journey through his childhood, adolescence, and teenage years from the mid-40s to the mid-60s. McKee’s vivid descriptions, dialog, and self-drawn illustrations are a study of how a young boy learned to play and work, fish and hunt, avoid dangers, cope with death, deal with bullies, and to build or restore “escape” vehicles. The author recalls his exploding hormones, attraction to girls, rebellion against authority, and survival of 1960s’ “rock & roll” culture, emerging on the other side as a youth leader. He describes his intensely searching university years, trying to decide which career path to follow. Except for a revealing postscript, the story ends when he accepts a volunteer teaching position on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia.

Visit NeillMckeeAuthor.com and his Amazon author page for all of his books.

Pat Moorman’s debut mystery novel, Mad Beach, was released in September of 2021. For Claire Chapman, life in Florida in the 1970s is anything but boring as she spends her days managing the employees of a Publix delicatessen and finessing the art of dealing with some of the deli’s quirkier customers. And though her work-life may be hectic at times—especially around the holidays—she’s happy, spending her nights at home with her cats, wondering what shenanigans her beloved husband, Matt, will get into after work. But when her normal life takes a sudden turn following the disappearance of one of her employees, Claire is determined to find out what happened to her, not knowing the potential cost.

Mad Beach is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

SWW Author Interviews: 2021 Releases

• Jeffrey Candelaria
TORO: The Naked Bull
• Marty Eberhardt
Death in a Desert Garden
• Melody Groves
When Outlaws Wore Badges
• Holly Harrison
Rites & Wrongs
• Robert Kidera
A LONG TIME TO DIE
• BR Kingsolver
Soul Harvest
• Marcia Meier
Face, A Memoir
• Victoria Murata
The Acolyte
• Barb Simmons
The War Within: A Wounded Warrior Romance
• Gina Troisi
The Angle of Flickering Light

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



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