Shoutout Q&A with Grace Spulak
Author of “The Four Winds” in Blackbird Journal
Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A.
Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from March: an appreciation of Grace Spulak’s riveting “The Four Winds” in Blackbird Journal.
A writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico, Grace holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work was awarded Witness Magazine’s 2021 Literary Award in Fiction and has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, Nimrod International Journal, and Southwest Review, among others, and her work has received support from Trillium Arts, New Mexico Writers, and Poets & Writers.
Her story collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think (April 2026), received the 2025 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize.
First things first, I want to direct folks to your fantastic interview with Sam Schieren at Blackbird Journal, which, having read it, made me feel like a total Q&A neophyte (props to Sam). Here’s a quote of yours from that interview that I’d like to go a little deeper on:
“I’ve been in a lot of workshops where I’ve been told, why don’t you make this story about something else? Or, make it happier. This story is going to be too hard for X, Y, or Z reasons.”
One of the things that’s so bracing about your work is you clearly haven’t been hampered by that kind of feedback. For having been there, how would you recommend writers who face similar commentary respond in the moment in order keep the focus where it belongs: on the writer’s particular vision?
This is a really good question, and also something that can be really hard to do. One thing I’ve tried to do in advance, when possible, to head this off and obtain feedback that’s targeted toward what will help me move a piece forward, is give guidance about what feedback I want. For example, I may say “I’d like feedback on perspective and how the reveal of information is working in this draft.” And then I can point back to that if it feels like the feedback is not responding to that. I also have a group of trusted readers, where I have the opportunity for this targeted feedback.
But I also want to keep an open mind and understand how a particular draft strikes a reader, even if the feedback might not be responding to my particular requests. So, for me, it’s not necessarily about responding to feedback that feels unhelpful in the moment, but having an understanding of my own goals for a piece, and then thinking carefully about how feedback might support or might undermine these goals.
Sometimes it’s not possible to address feedback in the moment, especially in some workshop models and settings, where the writer doesn’t get to speak or offer guidance. Fortunately, I think there is a movement away from these workshop models. But in certain educational settings, the writer may not have much choice about the model and who is reading their work. Unfortunately, in those situations, we just have to recognize that these readers may not be the audience for a particular story and understand what feedback does not feel helpful. And this is where it’s important to be resilient and stubborn.
The thing that first struck me about “The Four Winds” – speaking as a “recovering screenwriter” :) – was how conscious you are of scene dramatics. That’s not something I’m used to seeing in most literary fiction, where the text can be a lot more…ponderous. Do you have any experience writing for the stage or screen? And if not, what do you think accounts for your ability to create scenes that are so infused with tension, with a kind of “what’s going to happen next?” energy?
Thank you! I don’t have any experience writing for stage or screen, but one of the things that is so interesting to me is how revealing action often is, both in story and life. I write often about characters who are not able to be honest about their desires and motivations, either with themselves or with other people in their lives for various reasons. And because of this, I can’t look to interiority or direct dialogue to help readers understand their characters. I have to look to action or the subtext in their dialogue. And so, I think this has helped me be very aware of what characters are doing, how they are doing these things, and where.
I also think that creating tension is critical to engaging readers. Because I’m often writing about difficult subject matter, I’m thinking about how I can keep readers engaged. And that “what happens next” pull is one way to do this.
It’s fascinating that you use dialogue subtext and character action to get there, as you say. It’s the same thing dramatists do, but for different reasons. When Hollywood (or whatever / where ever the next “Hollywood” is) comes calling, consider doing your own adaptation. You’re more than halfway there already :)
Can you please share a literary magazine submission and/or acceptance story? Anything that you think is indicative of (or is a complete outlier to) the tilting at windmills that so many short story writers are engaged in?
I feel like a have a lot of tilting at windmills stories. And this is probably the wrong week to ask me this since I’ve gotten several rejections in the past few days!
I think so much of my submission experience has made me realize just how arbitrary our system of literary publishing really is. For example, this week, I had a story rejected the day after I submitted it with a form rejection (which makes me wonder if I really screwed up with the submission guidelines or something…Or maybe the reader is someone who knows me and really dislikes me…). This same story was a finalist in a contest and got me some other personalized rejections so I don’t think it totally sucks. But clearly it really, really did not resonate with the person who opened it this week.
I have so many of these stories where I’ve gotten a form rejection or negative response from one outlet and a very positive response from another. What this has made me realize is that rejection actually has nothing to do with the quality of my writing. If I can get such wildly different responses from the same piece of writing, something else is going on. All of which is a long way of saying that I’ve found it’s really important to have goals for my writing that don’t involve external validation that I have no control over. That’s what allows me to keep writing and not let rejections get in my way.
Can you shoutout a fellow writer / story / book that you think the world needs to have its eyes on now?
One writer who I really admire and who has been hugely important to my thinking about how to write about trauma and violence is Ecuadorian writer Maria Fernanda Ampuero. She has two books that have been translated into English, Cockfight and Human Sacrifices, and she uses formal experimentation and horror genre tropes to explore how stories about violence get told and who gets to tell them.
What specific practice of your work as a lawyer has most affected your writing, and conversely, how has your instincts as a writer and storyteller influenced your lawyering?
One of the things that has been most important to me both as a lawyer and writer is thinking critically about who is telling a particular story and why. As a lawyer, I represented children and young people in rural New Mexico for close to ten years, and often my clients were people whose stories the court did not take seriously. I felt like much of my work involved trying to frame their stories with the right legal structure so that they could be taken seriously. And the legal system is full of language that is designed to exclude people who don’t have legal training. So this work made me very cognizant of how language gets used, not only as a tool to tell stories, but as a way to exclude particular stories. This is something that I’m very interested in as a writer as well. What assumptions are built into our language and our ideas about stories? Who do those assumptions benefit? What happens when a character’s experiences don’t fit with those assumptions? This has been the jumping off point for a lot of my writing.
Now that your short story collection Magdelena Is Brighter Than You Think is out in the world (buy it here), what can you tell us about its path to publication? Were you approached to do it, or did you have to pitch / submit the idea of it to publishers?
I submitted my collection to a number of small press contests, because I admire a lot of story collections that have won these prizes (and admire the work of these presses generally). A small, independent press felt like a good fit for this collection, because it is formally experimental, it deals with socially complicated topics like trauma and violence and gender. I think small presses are more willing to take risks and public books that don’t fit a lot of mainstream boxes.
This isn’t to say that Big 5 publishers don’t publish this kind of work as well, but there are so many wonderful small presses that are publishing outstanding work in this vein. And small press contests are a really accessible path to publishing, in my opinion, because a submission doesn’t require an agent. It doesn’t require that someone has had prior publications or a certain type of education. This is another way that small presses are bringing outstanding books into the world that might not otherwise get published.
What should readers be on the lookout for from you in the future?
I’m currently working on a novel set in Fourteenth Century Siena, Italy, that takes the life of mystic Catherine of Siena as its inspiration. I’m very fortunate to have been awarded a Fulbright Grant to research this novel so I’ll be spending much of the rest of 2026 and 2027 in Siena working on this book!
Like everything else you’ve shared here, it sounds fascinating, can’t wait to check it out. Thanks so much for your time and insight, Grace!
For more on Grace Spulak and her work, visit her website.
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