Featured Mentor: Lindsey Drager
We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Lindsey Drager! Lindsey Drager is the author of three Dzanc novels, two of which have been translated into Spanish and Italian. The recipient of a 2020 NEA Fellowship and the 2022 Bard Fiction Prize, she is the fiction editor of West Branch and an assistant professor at the University of Utah.
Lindsey has a lot she’s looking forward to with the mentorship program: “I'm most at home as an editor, teacher, and reader in the middle of a manuscript-in-progress. I love reading finished work -- that is what got me into the world of fiction to begin with, after all -- but when I am situated in a manuscript that hasn't yet come into its fullest state of fruition, a manuscript that is full of unrealized potential, a manuscript that is currently in the process of teaching the writer where it needs to go: that is when I am most energized and excited by this strange artform called writing. The mentorship program is not only a chance to dig into work at that stage (a rare thing, as most of our readers only get access to a piece when it is finished or when we think it is finished, a difficult thing to know) but also a chance to engage in a conversation with the mind and heart of the person endeavoring in the elusive and enigmatic practice of telling. That is what excites me most about the mentorship program: the chance to engage in a dialogue about a piece of writing that might help cultivate the work, and maybe help cultivate the writer producing it, and (hopefully) help cultivate the reader who (at least at this stage) gets to be me.”
Lindsey couldn’t pick just one recent book as her favorite, but a few from her list are Rone Shavers's Silverfish; Samantha Hunt's The Unwritten Book; Keith Tompson's Fossils: A Very Short Introduction; Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure, and two books she “was lucky enough to see in their rawest form,” Alyssa Quinn's Habilis and Jesse Kohn's the book of webs.
Click here to sign up for a mentorship from Lindsey!
Check out Lindsey’s fantastic books: The Archive of Alternative Endings, The Lost Daughter Collective, and The Sorrow Proper.