Big Other

The Reading & The Room

#LiteraryCocktails
by Megan Rickerson

  • Critical Mass in honor of Richard Gilman for Priscilla Gilman’s The Critic’s Daughter 
  • Relativity for Ada Zhang & The Sorrows of Others
  • Menu Water for Leigh Newman & Nobody Gets Out Alive
  • Conversation Piece for Howard Fishman & To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

Open Mic Readers:

Initially drawn in by the Fried Wisconsin Cheese Curds on Someday Bar’s menu, Matt was excited to read at his first ever #OpenMic, and he was prepared to buy the audience’s forgiveness and applause in the form of said cheese curds.

Matt’s favorite childhood book: Revolutionary Road. That seemed mature to us, we commented. He responded that he must have a broad definition of childhood, looked back further, and offered: “Are You My Mother?” by P.D. Eastman.

Sue Mell’s story collection, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, and is forthcoming from She Writes Press Fall 2024. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the Madville Publishing Blue Novel Award, and was selected as a 2022 Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association, and a 2022 Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the 2022 Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize. Other work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, was a 2020 BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook, and lives in Queens, New York, where she cares for her aging mom and a gray tuxedo cat named Poppy. Find her at www.suemellwrites.com

Sue’s favorite childhood book is Stuart Little by E.B. White. She read from her novel Provenance. 

Amy Grech has sold like a zillion stories to a million anthologies and magazines including: A New York State of Fright, Apex Magazine, Microverses, Punk Noir Magazine, Hell’s Heart, Hell’s Highway, Hell’s Mall…ETC.!  She lives in Forest Hills Queens. Here’s her website.

Her favorite childhood book was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle because “it gave me all of the feels!”

Rapid-Fire Q&A

Meet the Authors