Sad Me of the Past Podcast
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Hello listeners, and welcome to another episode of Sad Me of the Past! The University of Iowa students have left Iowa City for the summer, and there are so many parking spots now! Today we have Megan Cummins on the pod for our second episode of the new season. Megan shares her journey from writing fantasy stories in suburban Detroit to attending the Iowa Young Writers' Studio at 17 years old. She talks about her unintentional path into the world of publishing (she is now an editor-at-large at A Public Space,) and eventually publishing her debut novel Atomic Hearts. She reads a prose poem from her senior year of high school, reflecting on youthful ambitions and imagined adulthood. The conversation also explores her career as managing editor at A Public Space and how balancing editorial work with writing shaped her creative process.
Megan Cummins lives in New York, where she writes and edits. Her debut novel ATOMIC HEARTS is out now from Ballantine. Her story collection IF THE BODY ALLOWS IT (University of Nebraska Press) was awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has also appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Okey-Panky, and elsewhere. She's the managing editor of Public Books and an editor-at-large at A Public Space.
Links
- BUY: ATOMIC HEARTS
- BUY: IF THE BODY ALLOWS IT
- Megan Cummins: website
- Check out A Public Space
Music: Sailing Away by HoliznaCC0, free for use under a Creative Commons license.