It’s said water flows to the path of least resistance. But do writers? That’s but one of the topics I tackle during my Burmese lunch with the award-winning writer Emily Mitchell.

Mitchell is author of the novel The Last Summer of the World (published by W. W. Norton in 2007), which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award, as well as two collections of short fiction, Viral (published by W. W. Norton in 2015) plus The Church of Divine Electricity (published last year by the University of Wisconsin Press not long before our conversation). That latter collection won the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Sun, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman (in the UK), Guernica, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Can Serrat International Artists Residency. She serves as fiction editor for the New England Review, and teaches at the University of Maryland.

We discussed why she felt the need to flip the first and last stories of her recent collection, the gaps which can sometimes occur between a writer’s intentions and a reader’s perceptions, the appeal of the ambiguity which comes with open-ended closure, how a writer’s career is defined as much by who chooses to publish them as by what they choose to write, why she loves working in the present tense (and why one of her stories originally published that way shifted to the past tense in her collection), what she learned about writing by being an editor, why leaving out much of what writers know about their characters improves what they choose to put in, her story which required the most drafts (and why), how writing longhand has gotten her unstuck, why it’s important to have many writing projects going at once, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at the Mandalay Restaurant Cafe — (more…)