{"id":38475,"date":"2026-02-03T09:51:28","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T14:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/?p=38475"},"modified":"2026-02-03T09:51:28","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T14:51:28","slug":"emily-mitchell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2026\/02\/03\/emily-mitchell\/","title":{"rendered":"Share green tea leaf salad with writer Emily Mitchell in Episode 274 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mitchell is author of the novel The Last Summer of the World<\/em> (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<\/em> (published by W. W. Norton in 2015) plus The Church of Divine Electricity<\/em> (published last year by the University of Wisconsin\u00a0Press not long before our conversation). That latter collection won the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in\u00a0Harper’s<\/em>, The Sun<\/em>, The Southern Review<\/em>,\u00a0Alaska Quarterly Review<\/em>, Prairie Schooner<\/em>, The Missouri Review<\/em>, American Short Fiction<\/em>,\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times<\/em>, the New Statesman<\/em>\u00a0(in the UK),\u00a0Guernica<\/em>, and\u00a0the Washington Independent Review of Books<\/em>. 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<\/em>, and teaches at the University of Maryland.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how you can join us at the Mandalay Restaurant Cafe <\/a> — <\/p>\n

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts<\/a> — or wherever<\/a> you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 273 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Listen via the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on the device of your choice.<\/p>\n

3) Or simply use the embed below.<\/p>\n