• Interview with Machado from last fall (conducted by a high-school junior — well done!)
• Machado’s occasional Substack: Cup of Stars
• And a list of her online essays for diving into

I’m in the midst of an online lecture series organized by American Short Fiction, comprising three fiction writers teaching two classes each. Sandwiched between two writers I am familiar with and admire — Lauren Groff and Luis Alberto Urrea — is one I confess I hadn’t heard of, Carmen Maria Machado. (Why yes, I have been living under a rock for a few years, why do you ask?) As it happened, Machado’s talks were the pair that interested me most and persuaded me to sign up. They were jointly titled Every story is a haunted house story, and — breaking news — I’m (allegedly) attempting to write fiction these days, and one of the things I’m working on seems to have a ghost-story aspect to it. Regardless, I was particularly intrigued with the simple implication right there in the class’s title, and couldn’t wait to hear her elaborate on it.

Machado is a prize-winning short-fiction writer, essayist and memoirist — author of the story collection Her Body and Other Parties, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and In the Dream House: A Memoir, among other things — and a lecture she gave during the first of her sessions was so utterly moving and inspiring and mesmerizing that you could sense the entire unseen Zoom room swooning. We weren’t given a copy of the text, and although I cherish an ephemeral experience I’m not-so-secretly hoping it’s because it’s due to be published in some form. (If I ever see that, I will let you know!) But her imagination, vulnerability and storytelling capacity were on full display even in lecture form, and it made me eager to read her work. I started with a short story that was mentioned in class, and it’s so good I wanted to share it with you. It’s called Eight Bites (it also appears in her story collection linked above) and I hope you’ll find it as gripping and moving as I did. 

If you’ve already read her, let me know what you think!

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[ IMAGE: Carmen Maria Machado publicity photo by Art Streiber/August ]