"I drink an enormous amount of coffee. When I do readings for children, I drink even more than that. Teenagers—that’s a tough crowd. I’d use a megaphone but I don’t think they’d hear me." 

 I grew up back in the day, 1970’s and 80’s NYC. A simpler, dirtier, and decaying iteration of the now mega-rich metropolis. Subways were cheap, offered a convenient escape from school and family. I wasn’t a “bad” kid exactly. I hid my true nature from most adults. Looking back, I must have been a freak kid. Quiet and always observing what the adults were doing. I cut school for the first time when I was nine or ten. I lived at the end of the “A” subway line, near 207th Street and Inwood Park. I felt so free riding the subway by myself that soon I was doing it at least once a week.

"Will an MFA make you a better writer? Who the fuck knows? Like Rilke said: 'Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.'"

You could call Allie Marini Batts Wonder Woman, but you’d be wrong—she more like Wonder Woman’s busier, more colorfully coiffed sister. Dig this—in 2014 alone, Marini Batts has graduated from the MFA program at Antioch College, moved from Florida to the San Francisco Bay Area, worked for NonBinary Review and Zoetic Press, while continuing to publish her own short fiction, and work on a novel. And all of this without an invisible jet.

" ... because the stories I write now have more of an emphasis on relationships between women (sisters, primarily, or women lashing out and being transgressive towards patriarchal structures like marriage, religion, and identity), that tends to make a lot of male writers uncomfortable, because they don’t see themselves in these stories. But to that I say, welcome to the rest of the world, where if you’re not a cis-gendered hetero white male, you don’t always see yourself in THEIR stories, either. Mainly, the conflict I’ve gotten is about the transgressive nature of a lot of my female characters. They don’t bend; they lash out." 

Cape Cod native Caroline Kepnes is having the year most writers dream of. Her novel, You, a dark tale of obsession in the modern age, is roaring its way up the bestseller charts, and garnering rave reviews. Elle UK called the book “clever and chilling”, and PopSugar was one of many outlets to suggest that it might be the next Gone Girl.

"I like beginnings. I will rewrite the first few pages over and over and memorize them and carry them in my head. And then if I get stuck midway through, I will go back to that beginning and look for a crack in the foundation. That’s just something that works for me, in part, if anything, because it’s a fun fantasy, that all narrative problems can be fixed by one sentence in the first five pages!" 

Every experience helps shape a writer. I haven’t written any stories with a Minnesota setting yet. At least I don’t think I have. The novel I’m working on now is set in St. Louis, but I started on that back when I still lived in St. Louis. I think the setting makes more sense now that I don’t live there anymore.

"I think my subjects are universal, but I don’t like writing about universal things in a universal way. Some people can, but I can’t. I have to do the unconventional. So I bring in the most absurd things I reasonably can."