Burlington Free Press book round-up & a new interview at Cleaver

July 24, 2025 § Leave a comment

Just getting back from the inspiring whirlwind of The Afterlife Project book tour and almost missed a few things:

The Burlington Free Press featured The Afterlife Project in their “Summer Reading Guide of Books By Vermonters.” Needless to say, it’s an honor to be included!

We discuss climate fiction, deep time, research, the novelist as archaeologist, weaving together multiple timelines, the inspirations for The Afterlife Project, and more. Check it out, I think you’ll enjoy it!

New interviews, reviews, and book roundups featuring THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT

June 20, 2025 § Leave a comment

This interview with LA-based journalist, gamer, and film buff Paul Semel was especially fun because the conversation ranged into questions of film influences, including my ideal casting choices for the main characters of THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT. Read the whole interview here.

Quick excerpt: “In terms of influence, film and TV weren’t as important as other books, but my guess is that movies like Interstellar, Contact, and Arrival sort of gave me permission to pursue a story foregrounding the kind of “big” ambitious topics I was interested in, like space-time, general relativity, and the future of humanity, while TV series like Battlestar Galactica reminded me that when the survival of the human species is an open question, it can generate high stakes and robust dramatic tension. And the popularity of the great nature documentaries, like Planet Earth, showed that the awesome spectacles of life on Earth could be intrinsically riveting for mass audiences.”

Very cool: THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT was featured in a new scifi books roundup at Transfer Orbit, a newsletter run by Vermont writer Andrew Liptak that provides regular look at the latest news within the science fiction community, featuring analysis and commentary and updates about fiction, writing, and the future of reading.

Also very cool: THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT was featured in a best beach reads roundup by The Cullman Times in Cullman, Alabama—with the article also syndicated by the Rome News-Tribune in Rome, Georgia. Making inroads in the American south!

I also loved this notably glowing review from Shannon at It Starts at Midnight.

Quick excerpt: “This is hands down one of the most thought-provoking books that I have ever read. Which is saying something, because thought-provoking books are kind of my thing . . . I have so much to say about this book, but I equally want to tell you no more. Because this is the sort of story that needs to be experienced to be appreciated.” Read the whole review here.

I enjoyed reading this thoughtful and generally positive (if at times slightly grudging ;)) review from the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Finally, I very much appreciated this review of the audiobook on Instagram from @bookboundblogger.

Quick excerpt: “I am very picky about my sci-fi books. This one hit the mark! It didn’t feel like reading a novel. It felt like witnessing a slow‑motion disaster unfold with stunning imagery and quiet heartbreak. The science felt authentic. The emotion was raw. The tension never let up. It gave geography class, climate awareness, and gut‑punch storytelling all in one, but never preachy or feeling like an info-dump. Just deeply human.” Read the whole review here.

Vermont Public Radio interview with Mitch Wertlieb

June 12, 2025 § Leave a comment

What a fun and interesting conversation with Mitch Wertlieb on Vermont Public’s Vermont Edition! We talked about the inspirations and scientific research behind THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT, time travel, post-apocalyptic fiction, paleo-climatology, novel research in the great outdoors, whether stories can move the needle on the climate debate, and much more.

I drove up to VPR’s Colchester studios to record the show, and although we’ve spoken in the past this is my first time meeting Mitch in person. He’s a truly wonderful guy and a GREAT interviewer. If you’re remotely interested in any of these topics, listen to the whole interview here. (As an added bonus, the second half of the segment has beta on some great uncrowded hiking trails in Vermont!)

My thanks to Vermont Public, Mitch Wertlieb, Jon Ehrens, Andrea Laurion, Isabella Nugent, Page One Media, Podium Publishing, and the talented, lovely, and indefatigable Julia Jensen.

Television Interview: “Here We Are” with Wendy O’Connell on BCTV

May 26, 2025 § Leave a comment

Such a fun conversation! We talked about my early life, travel, writing, teaching, The Afterlife Project, and much more. Wendy is an excellent, relaxed interviewer, skilled at putting her interlocutor at ease. The words and laughter flowed, and the thirty-odd minutes went by so fast. This will be up on YouTube indefinitely, so if you’re interested bookmark it, and if you’ve got half an hour some time, give it a watch!

Podcast: The Rocky Mountain Writer

October 16, 2018 § Leave a comment

podcastlogo-ORIGWhat a pleasure it was to spend part of a recent afternoon having this wide-ranging conversation with Colorado novelist Mark Stevens on The Rocky Mountain Writer podcast.

We discussed many topics of interest to writers and readers, including A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, travel and fiction, Ecuadorian volcanoes, Venezuela’s Orinoco basin, Eastern Cuba, fiction vs autobiography, the importance of place in fiction, dropping acid and pushing the bounds of objective reality, interiority and loneliness, The Grateful Dead and the Eleusinian Mysteries, fly fishing as metaphor, Ursula K. LeGuin, William Golding’s The Inheritors, Newport MFA & the Cuba Writers Program, and a recap of a talk I gave on “The Essentials of Voice” at RMFW’s Colorado Gold conference in September, 2018.

Listen to the entire podcast here. Mark also did a wonderful followup print interview here, in which we talked about life experience as a point of departure for fiction, the deep sources of story ideas, more on why I think dreams and hallucinations shouldn’t be off-limits for fiction writers, place-based writing as a response to environmental crisis, the challenge of endings, some of my favorite writers, and more. Enjoy!

A conversation about writing with James Scott of TK Podcast

August 29, 2017 § Leave a comment

TK-Podcast-LOGOReally enjoyed my conversation with James Scott on the latest episode of his terrific series of literary conversations known as the TK Podcast. James is a bestselling novelist (The Kept) and an excellent interviewer, with a real knack for asking questions about writing and life that lead to interesting places.

We talked about travel, the writing life, the binary nature of solitude, National Geographic, short fiction, how to sequence stories in a short fiction collection, the Cuba Writers Program, Ingmar Bergman, drug writingGreen Writers Press, Denis Johnson, The Grateful Dead, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Paul Bowles, and much, much more. Highly recommended if you’re a writer and/or a fan of literary podcasts! Here’s the link.

 

 

 

New interview up at Fiction Writers Review

May 8, 2017 § Leave a comment

logoReally enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with the perceptive Art Hutchinson at Fiction Writers Review. We discussed, among other things, extreme sports, the supernatural, foreign and historical settings, pushing the boundaries of conscious perception, and why the inner landscape is something fiction can do better than any other art. Read the whole interview here!

Author interview: Inside Historical Fiction

April 21, 2015 § 2 Comments

cropped-screen-shot-2015-01-26-at-4-57-33-pmIt was a pleasure to be interviewed recently by the author M.K. Tod for her Inside Historical Fiction series. We had a nice talk about the ingredients that go into the making of great historical fiction, the research process, recent trends in the genre, and more. Here’s an excerpt:

MKT: Are historical novels inherently different from contemporary novels, and if so, in what ways?

TW: There’s a quote that I love from Andrew Miller, writing in The New York Times Book Review a few years ago, about the appeal of distance, and of “the strangeness such distance produces and of the lives lived recognizably in the midst of that strangeness.” He compared historical fiction to science fiction, pointing out that both genres require the writer to depict the only world he or she can possibly know—“the here and now”—in other terms.

To me, this notion captures much of what I love about historical fiction, both in the writing and in the reading: it’s at once a dream we have to enter and an oblique reflection of ourselves. In my experience, this kind of mind-altering immersion is harder to find in contemporary novels—if by “contemporary” we mean novels that are set in times and places very similar to the quotidian spheres in which we tend to live out our lives.

Read the full interview here.

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