Our Story
We first came together as a team in 2012, when we co-created the essay series “7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life” at Hunger Mountain. The intense collaborative process that produced those essays re-shaped us as writers and taught us how we wanted to approach our writing lives. And that work is still teaching us, as we continue to apply the revelations of those essays to our daily writing practice, process, and business. The series, which was published over the course of eight weeks, has since been archived and can be accessed by the following links (in order of publication): Introduction, Envy, Sloth, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Pride.
Editors
Claire Guyton is a southern transplant to Lewiston, Maine, where she works at the city’s library, co-organizes the Local Writers Read series at the local bookstore, and teaches a workshop in very short fiction for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. She has been a Maine Arts Commission Literary Fellow and a finalist for the Maine Literary Award, and her work has been selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology and nominated for a Pushcart. Her short fiction appears in Crazyhorse, Mid-American Review, Vestal Review, River Styx, Sliver of Stone Magazine, and many other journals, as well as in the Maine anthology Summer Stories. After earning an MFA in fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts, she served for several years as an editor and writing life blogger for the program’s journal Hunger Mountain. She’s currently revising a linked story collection and researching a novel set in 1890s Maine. Claire lives in a pumpkin-colored house with her husband and two queenly sister-cats.
www.claireguyton.com
Suzanne Farrell Smith’s debut memoir, The Memory Sessions, which recounts her years-long attempt to excavate lost childhood memory, was published in August 2019. Her education book on the teaching of writing, The Writing Shop, was published in March 2019. Her work appears in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Hippocampus Magazine, and numerous other journals and anthologies; has been listed as Notable in Best American Essays and Special Mention in Pushcart Prize; and won a Pushcart in 2019. With an MA from The New School and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Suzanne teaches creative nonfiction at Westport Writers’ Workshop. She was the creative nonfiction judge for AWP’s 2020 Kurt Brown Prizes; served as a mentor in AWP’s Writer to Writer Program; has been a reader, peer reviewer, and editor for several publications; and is creative advisor to Longridge Review. She lives in a creek-cut valley in Connecticut with her husband and three sons.
www.suzannefarrellsmith.com
Cheryl Wilder is the author of Anything That Happens, a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection (Press 53, 2021), a collection that examines how to reconcile a past grave mistake and a future that stretches into one long second chance. Her chapbook What Binds Us (Finishing Line Press, 2017), explores the frailty and necessity of human connection. Her work appears in the anthology Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath, Barely South Review, and Architects + Artisans, among other publications. In 2018, she served as writer-in-residence at SistaWRITE; and in 2019, she was granted residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts. She earned her BFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Cheryl lives near the Haw River in North Carolina, where she gives talks and workshops on art and writing, chairs the Burlington Writers Club student writing contest, and owns a small web development company. She’s a mother of three boys and the wife of one grateful man. www.bornwilder.com