Day 2: Allison Amend & Shilpi Suneja—From India to the Galapagos: Representing Place

How to represent place with good research, good intentions, great details, an ear for the nuances of criticism and nostalgia (your own and those of others), and as always: humility. To help us out, we hear from Allison Amend and Shilpi Suneja, both writing about places they know well and places less familiar to them and to their readers.For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.Allison Amend debut short story collection, Things That Pass for Love, won a bronze Independent Publisher’s award. Stations West, a historical novel, was published by Louisiana State University Press  and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday published her most recent novels A Nearly Perfect Copy  and Enchanted Islands. Allison lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College in the Bronx and at the Red Earth MFA.Shilpi Suneja was born in India. Her work has been published in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Cognoscenti, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. Her writing has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, and a Grub Street Novel Incubator Scholarship. She holds an MA in English from New York University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Saul Bellow Prize. Her first novel, House of Caravans will be published in September 2023.Thank you for reading The 7am Novelist. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com