Reader Introductions
If you're reading Lit in One Sentence, I'd love to know more about you! And here, I share more about myself.
Lit in One Sentence exists because I’m obsessed with how stories work, and if you’re at all interested in this project, chances are you care about stories and storytelling too. I’d love to know how this thing we both care about shows up in your life!
If I haven’t taken this message down, LIOS is still small enough that I have the capacity to get to know and connect with individual readers. And the opportunity to do this is a huge part of what drew me to Substack in the first place! Of course, I want my readership to grow over time, but there’s a certain kind of 1-on-1 connection magic that can probably only happen in the early stages, and the time for that is now.
About Me
Outside of LIOS, I’m an associate editor for the literary magazines Recommended Reading (short stories) and The Commuter (poetry, flash, graphic, and experimental narrative) at Electric Literature, the Whiting Award-winning daily online publication that landed 3 out of the 20 Best American Short Stories 2023, as selected by Min Jin Lee (the only online magazine ever to pull off the hat trick).
For two years, I helmed a 1000-participant national writing conference for another nonprofit organization, hosting over 600 manuscript consultations with over 50 different literary agents and editors annually. I had the pleasure of interviewing keynote authors including Ingrid Rojas Contreras (along with her agent Kent Wolf and editor Margo Shickmanter), Silvia Moreno Garcia, RF Kuang, Victor LaValle, Rebecca Makkai, Ottessa Moshfegh, Steven Rowley, and Maggie Shipstead.
Other author interviews I’ve done are available to read online, including with: Rowan Beaird, Christy Edwall, Joshua L. Freeman, Yaa Gyasi, Forsyth Harmon, David Hernandez, Hari Kunzru, Nancy Chen Long, Keija Parssinen, Sanjena Sathian, Alyssa Songsiridej, Taymour Soomro, Shilpi Suneja, and Kevin Wilson.
I hold an MFA in fiction from Louisiana State University, where I served as an editorial assistant at wonderful The Southern Review literary journal. About a quarter of the prose pieces we published that year received at least an honorable mention in the Best American series, as well as winning numerous other prizes such as the O’Henry, Pushcart, and PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prizes.
Before migrating to the literary world, I was a math and science person. I earned my BA in astronomy at Swarthmore College, where I focused on astrobiology, which is the study of life in the universe. I spent a summer as a research assistant at the SETI Institute, studying slope streaks on Mars that eventually proved to be liquid water currently flowing on the planet’s surface. I was also accepted to Dartmouth’s PhD program in social neuroscience to study the neural underpinnings of social decision-making, and spent a summer putting subjects in an fMRI machine and examining their emotional reactions to global brand logos. I was also a math teacher for eight years at independent schools in the New York and Boston areas. The ways of thinking and analyzing that I learned across all of these disciplines informs my approach to literature at Lit in One Sentence.
About Me — The TL;DR
I’ve joked that emotional superstructure and Lit in One Sentence are what you get if you take someone trained to reduce the universe to a single equation, peer into people’s brains, and solve complex systems for simple variables — turning that lens onto literary works and the essential emotional structures underlying stories.
And reader, I am exactly that person. This is precisely how Lit in One Sentence was born.
Care to Introduce Yourself?
I’m also excited to hear what, if anything, you feel comfortable sharing about yourself with me. How do you engage with stories and storytelling in your daily life? What brings you to this little story-structure-obsessed corner of Substack? Do you have an Instagram handle that LIOS can follow?
If I already know you in real life, and you’re here mostly to support me (first of all, THANK YOU!!!), I invite you to take a moment to share ✨one thing✨ I don’t already know about how you engage with stories and storytelling these days. For example, I would love to know something about your writing practice and how you work (if you’re a writer, especially tools or techniques you find helpful that other writers could use), a story whose emotional vibes you really loved recently, or anything else that would be fun for you to tell me.
There are a couple ways you can answer:
If you’re a paying subscriber and are open to engaging with other paying subscribers over time, leave your answers in the comments below. I promise to respond individually to each one. Add any social media handles that you would welcome me and other subscribers following, and feel free to follow other subscribers if they’ve left theirs.
If you’re not yet a paying subscriber or would prefer to answer privately, feel free to email me at lit.in.one.sentence -at- gmail dot com or follow LIOS on Instagram (@lit.in.one.sentence) and DM me there.
I look forward to hearing from you!