We’re excited to share a new series of interviews exploring craft. In these conversations, we’ve asked writers to take us behind the scenes of their finished works, showing us the process behind the poem, the scene, and the story. 

Last month, we spoke with Jessica E. Johnson, on her memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home. This month, we’ve spoken with Salvatore Pane, author of The Neorealist in Winter, a collection of short stories that focuses on what it means to be human in an age of media saturation. For this interview, we focused, in part, on two specific short stories: “The Absolutely True Autobiography of Tony Rinaldi, the Man Who Changed Pro Wrestling Forever” and “The Complete Oral History of Monkey High School”. The Neorealist in Winter is the winner of 2022 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, selected by Venita Blackburn. 

Considering the focus of these conversations is on process, we’d be remiss to overlook our own process in conducting the interview! We’d like to give special recognition and thanks to our 2024 summer intern, Kirby Wilson, who helped shepherd these conversations from initial readings to their final form. Kirby was instrumental in crafting the conversations you now see before you. 

Enjoy!