A New Day is a collection of stories set between 1982 and 2012. Linked by their personal and professional relationships, the characters in these thirteen stories struggle to achieve happiness and success. A coke-fueled night with a photographer costs a young woman her job in the display department of Bloomingdale’s, but holds a hidden promise. A sculptor tries to resurrect his relationship with an old flame on the same day her best friend is undergoing a bone marrow transplant. An aspiring actress drifts from house-sit to house-sit until an armed robbery at the restaurant where she works makes her question a lifelong pattern of impermanence.
Moody, elegiac, and full of longing, with ricocheting themes of desire and loss, these stories are steeped in the highs and lows inherent in the pursuit of love and creative expression.
Author Bio:
Sue Mell’s story collection, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, and is forthcoming from She Writes Press September 3rd, 2024. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Award, and was selected as a Great Group Read by the Women's National Book Association, and as an Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize. Other work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, was a BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook, and lives in Queens, New York, where she cares for her aging mom and a gray tuxedo cat named Poppy.
Moderator Bio:
Megan Staffel's new novel, THE CAUSATIVE FACTOR, won the Petrichor Prize at Regal House Publishing and will be published by Regal House in the Fall, 2024. She is the author of two recent collections of short fiction, THE EXIT COACH and LESSONS IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (Four Way Books) and two novels, THE NOTEBOOK OF LOST THINGS (Soho Press) and SHE WANTED SOMETHING ELSE ( North Point Press) and a first collection of short stories, A LENGTH OF WIRE AND OTHER STORIES (Pym-Randall Press). Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals including multiple times in the New England Review and Ploughshares, and single publications in The Woven Tale Press, The Common, Cortland Review, Northwest Review, Gargoyle, The Seattle Review, Kansas Quarterly and others. Her stories have been short listed in Best American Short Stories and nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Her novel was a finalist for the AWP prize.
Megan teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Previously, she taught at the University of Iowa, Kansas State University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Vermont College. She lives with ceramic artist Graham Marks and has two adult children. She splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and a farm in a small town in western New York State.