For the full interview with Virginia Evans, tune in to The Spark wherever you listen to podcasts.

📚 Recommendations for ravenous readers

Here are my pick ‘n’ mix recommendations for July.

Stoner by John Williams (1965)William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

Misspelled Paradise: A Year in a Reinvented Colombia by Bryanna Plog (2014)What does “Colombia” bring to mind? This South American country has sometimes been misrepresented, only known for cocaine, guerrilla groups, coffee, and Shakira’s hips. In 2011, Bryanna Plog spent a year in the country to find out what the headlines might be missing (headlines, that let’s face it, sometimes misspelled the country as “Columbia.”).As a volunteer middle school English teacher in an impoverished community outside of Cartagena, Colombia, Plog recounts with delightfully understated wit her year traveling Colombia’s cities, deserts, and rain forests (fairly successful ventures), her attempts to hold class on a regular schedule (less successful), and her quest to eat meals that didn’t include rice (a complete and utter failure).Through her teaching and traveling, Plog realizes Colombia is a place closer to a paradise than a country supposedly off-limits to travelers. Instead of having to survive encounters with drug cartels or avoiding kidnappings, Plog discovered her biggest problems included trying to get her students to pay attention in class, the country’s strangely undrinkable coffee, and the searing Caribbean heat.

Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin (2023)As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Chin traces the story of the pioneering family members who emigrated from the Pearl River Delta, crossing an ocean to make their way in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and of the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows their paths to New York City.In New York’s Chinatown she discovers a single building on Mott Street where so many of her ancestors would live, begin families, and craft new identities. She follows the men and women who became merchants, “paper son” refugees, activists, and heads of the Chinese tong, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws. She soon realizes that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one.

If you’d like further inspiration, Backstory bookshop’s theme for July is books published in your birth year.

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✏️ Resources for wonderful writers

The lovely folks at Collaborist are still offering a review of 25 pages of your writing to give their intern Maddy more experience. Email them at info@collaborist.org.

Split Lip Press is open for submissions of novel and novella manuscripts until September 1st.

C&R Press is open for three categories of book awards—poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction—until September 16th.

👣 My moseying

Yesterday I had an hour-long call with Jason, Ben, and Maddy at Collaborist to review the first 25 pages of my work-in-progress novel. They had some really insightful points about having too many characters in the first scene, upping the tension and stakes in my second scene, and not writing to a word count…

…which is great advice—except that I’m aiming for 20,000 words by the end of July, in case I get long-listed for any of the prizes I submitted to in May. I’m almost at 9,000 words now and scribbling away on it.

I’m finalizing my contract to publish my short story collection, Staring into the Sun. The plan is to serialize it for free on Substack, then pull the online version before publication, which should be May 2026. And I’ll be narrating the four memoir chapters of the audio book, with another narrator covering the other five chapters. I’m super excited about all of this and can’t wait to tell you more.

Also near the end of July will be the news from the Arts Council about my application for the Developing Your Creative Practice grant. Fingers crossed!

📊 Tracked on Chill Subs

Short story collection submissions to small presses⏱️ 9 pending🚫 9 rejected (some of which were super lovely)🤫 1 secret something🎉 1 publication offer!🟰 20 total

Novel prize submissions of my work in progress⏱️ 3 pending

🎙️ Author interview with Virginia Evans

The S**t No One Tells You About Writing podcast (my daughter says that the only time I swear is when I mention the podcast) helps find comparative titles to authors’ works-in-progress. These comps, as they’re known, are included as references for genre, voice, tone, and setting (i.e. vibes!) in letters to prospective agents and publishers. When I asked for comps for my novel, Emily from East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C. suggested The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

I promptly listened to the audiobook, which is masterfully narrated by a huge cast, and loved it.

Virginia Evans attended James Madison University for her bachelor’s in English literature. After starting a family, she went back to school for her master’s of philosophy in creative writing at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where she had the good fortune to study under Carlo Gébler, Eoin McNamee, Claire Keegan, Harry Clifton and Kevin Power. She now lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband, Mark, two children, Jack and Mae, and her Red Labrador, Brigid.

In the interview, Virginia mentions Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr, and Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller.

You can find Virginia at virginiaevansauthor.com and on Instagram as @virginia.l.evans.

Tune into the The Spark podcast for the full interview.

📙 Where to find my writing

"Things My Dad Told Me" in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, the Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US |

12 Time Removed from Real Life