Margaret Hutton – If You Leave

With the intrusive, catalytic forces of two wars, World War II and Vietnam, Margaret Hutton’s debut novel, If You Leave, tells of two women who mother one baby girl into her own young womanhood. Each of the three discovers the strength of herself as an individual as well as the strength of unity. Thus does this quietly vibrant story illustrate the way one life impacts others, decisions made either quickly or slowly can have similarly devastating consequences, and the need of the human heart for love competes with the need to find meaning.

Margaret Hutton’s short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Sun, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, the Antioch Review, and Abundant Grace. She earned an undergraduate degree with honors from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA from George Mason University. She is a native of North Carolina and formerly was an environmental reporter. She divides her time between Washington, DC, and her art studio in Chester County, PA. If You Leave was published by Regal House Publishing and is available wherever books are sold.

Hosted by William Miller

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1. War as a Turning Point for Women
2. If You Leave examines how World War II and Vietnam temporarily expanded women’s independence and opportunity—while exposing how fragile those gains could be.
3. Art, Agency, and Interruption
4. Through Audrey’s life as a painter, the novel explores how women’s creative ambitions are often disrupted, underestimated, or constrained by social expectations.
5. The Power and Cost of Leaving
6. Every major character is shaped by acts of leaving—home, relationships, or identity—revealing how personal choices ripple across generations.
7. Interiority and Empathy in Fiction
8. Margaret highlights fiction’s ability to reveal inner lives, inviting readers to understand characters beyond surface-level judgment.

#LiteraryFiction

#HistoricalFiction

#WomenWriters

Find out more about Margaret Hutton on her website.

Purchase her book here.

Follow her on Instagram.

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© 2026 Upstart Crow Podcast – All Rights Reserved

Linda Chavez – A Novel of the Spanish Inquisition: The Silver Candlesticks

Linda Chavez began working on The Silver Candlesticks after appearing on the PBS series Finding Your Roots during which she discovered that members of her family were Converso Jews who fled Spain in 1597. Using details the PBS researchers uncovered as well as her own work on the Spanish Inquisition, she created a fictional weave of love and faith, and the perils of ardent religious faith transformed by the obdurate endurance of a persecution.

Earlier, Linda spent decades in politics and the media, having served as a White House official in the Reagan administration and been a syndicated columnist. She is the author of three previously published nonfiction books and individually published short stories. She earned her MFA from George Mason University.

“No matter how good you think your life is, it isn’t unless you are actually free.” — Linda Chavez

Hosted by William Miller

The Silver Candlesticks is published by Wicked Son, an imprint of Post Hill Press. You can purchase a copy on their website here, or anywhere that books are sold.

1. History brought to life through fiction
2. Linda Chavez discusses how The Silver Candlesticks uses meticulous historical research to humanize the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how fear, power, and persecution shaped everyday lives.
3. Hidden identity and inherited trauma
4. The novel explores the dangers faced by Jewish converts in 16th-century Spain and how secrecy, forced assimilation, and inherited identity ripple across generations.
5. Villains, morality, and belief systems
6. Chavez unpacks the challenge of writing morally complex antagonists—especially religious figures who commit atrocities while believing they are acting righteously.
7. Personal history as creative catalyst
8. The story is rooted in Chavez’s own family history, uncovered through archival research and her appearance on Finding Your Roots, demonstrating how personal discovery can inspire powerful storytelling.

This episode is also available to watch on our YouTube channel: @upstartcrowpodcast

Check out more about Linda on her Substack.

#HistoricalFictionPodcast

#SpanishInquisitionHistory

#AuthorInterview

#TheSilverCandlesticks

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© 2025 Upstart Crow Podcast – All Rights...

W. Ralph Eubanks – When It’s Darkness on the Delta

Some today would cross off the Mississippi Delta as a backwater beyond redemption or a region where bad history happened, but W. Ralph Eubanks drives the area roads and small-town streets, meets the people who live and work there, some of whom strive hard to make it more than it is, and through his evocative writing he portrays not just the economic oppression but also the area’s resilience.

In his newest work of nonfiction, Eubanks, a son of Mississippi, looks at the region with a clear, if not dispassionate eye. Seeking further knowing about this particular area, he finds insights into the soul of America. Slavery got turned into sharecropping. Civil rights were cruelly suppressed under Jim Crow. Poverty became so entrenched, it has resisted any number of efforts to eradicate it—even the spending of millions of dollars.

He finds the pervasive inequality that hinders the expansive possibilities. As he writes, “The story of the Delta is not just a Mississippi story. Nor is it just a Southern story. At its very core, the Delta’s story is an American story. The idea of American exceptionalism has rendered the Delta and other places like it invisible since the story of the Delta is exceptional in only disturbing ways. By reckoning with the story of the Delta, we as Americans, can also begin to confront the other disadvantaged places like it that dot the American landscape, from sea to shining sea.”

W. Ralph Eubanks is a faculty fellow and writer in residence at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where his work focuses on race, identity, and the American South. He is the author previously of two other works of nonfiction, Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road, as well as A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, as well as a recipient of the 2023 Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature.

“To change what we see on the landscape, we have to change what we know about it.” — W. Ralph Eubanks

Hosted by William Miller

Key Takeaways:

1. The Mississippi Delta is not an isolated regional problem but a national mirror, reflecting economic, racial, and political systems found throughout the United States.
2. Race in America operates as an economic construct, with policies after slavery preserving inequality by separating political rights from economic power.
3. Romanticized narratives of the Delta obscure the structural forces that created generational poverty, allowing poverty to be blamed on individuals rather than systems.
4. Lasting change depends on sustained local leadership and historical truth-telling, not outside saviors or short-term philanthropic fixes.

#MississippiDelta #AmericanPoverty #RaceAndEconomics

You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel here.

Find out more about Ralph Eubanks and his books, you can visit his website here.

His books for sale here.

Follow and connect with him on Instagram, and

Mary Kay Zuravleff – American Ending

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author most recently of the novel American Ending, a story inspired by the experiences of her grandparents, Old Believer Russian Orthodox emigres. She combined those experiences to tell the story of immigrants recruited into the dangerous work America needs to have done but which workers are reluctant to do. The book seems entirely appropriate to our times.

Her characters live in the Appalachian mining town of Marianna, Pennsylvania, during the early years of the twentieth century. The narrator of the novel, Yelena, wants more for herself than the limited life patterned out for her. This is a place where the girls are married off by the age of 14, soon start to have babies and try to manage their households with limited incomes and young husbands who themselves dropped out of school to go work in the coal mines. Their story is one of compromised goals and dreams, and grasping at whatever opportunities come along.

The title suggests a simple divide that may not always be so visible in the world: In the American ending, stories end happily. The prince rushes in, slays the dragon, and he saves the princess. That’s versus the Russian ending, where things are not so happy. There is at least compromise, loss, diminishment. The prince might rush in and slay the dragon but he might find the princess is beyond saving in some way.

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of the previous novels Man Alive, which was a Washington Post notable book; The Bowl is Already Broken, which the New York Times called a “tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming;” and The Frequency of Souls, a story of love, electricity and life after death. She has won the American Academy of Art’s Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts.

“If your people aren’t on the shelf, you need to write that book.”

• Immigration stories are American stories. American Ending explores the lived experiences of Russian immigrants in early 20th-century coal towns and how questions of belonging, labor, and citizenship echo into the present.
• Identity is shaped by place and pressure. Though Elena is born in America, her sense of self is constantly challenged by family, religion, labor systems, and cultural expectations.
• Historical fiction requires restraint and rigor. Mary Kay discusses how deep research—rather than limiting creativity—opened new narrative possibilities while grounding the story in reality.
• Community memory matters. The novel has sparked powerful conversations in book clubs and communities across the country, revealing how many families still carry untold immigrant histories.

#ImmigrantStories

#HistoricalFiction

#AmericanIdentity

Connect with Mary Kay Zuravleff:

Website

Book

Instagram

LinkedIn

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Upstart Crow: Library Reads Special Edition – Fairfax Local Author Festival

In this special edition of Upstart Crow, host Jennifer Disano visits the Fairfax Regional Library for the Local Author Festival, recorded November 15, 2025 in Fairfax, VA. Jennifer sat down with 16 talented authors and received submissions from 2 additional writers, exploring a wide variety of books, from memoirs and children’s stories to historical fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Each author shared insights into their creative process and delivered a captivating synopsis of their work.

Authors and Featured Books:

• Carolyn Belefski – Curls, Black Magic Tales (artwork), Adventures of Roxy and Dean
• Kristen Amundson – Grandparent Effect: Helping Children Thrive Through Love, Support and Connection
• Rebecca Hayden – Murder of Maggie Slipper, The Second Life of Brencie Jessup
• Kacy Cooney – Seeking Solace, In the Maze of Imagination
• Roy Whitehurst – Teaching Media Literacy with Social Media News
• Karma Shri P Murti – Lanka’s Forgotten Lives, Lully series
• Kayla Sanders – Mojada: Memoir of a Honduran Immigrant
• Leslie Lautenslager – My Time with General Colin Powell: Stories of Kindness, Diplomacy, and Protocol
• Jerry Markowitz – Hugs Poetic Life, Exploring Kindness and Respect
• Henry Brinton – War Bug
• Rick Spees – Capital Gains, Capital Losses
• Eric Smolinski (E.R. Smo) – Accrue's End series: Affliction, Provenance
• Kat Needham – Shepherd Girl: A Dog Story, Una and the Fox
• Beka Wueste – The Unsent Letters of Lucy Pryor, Fireflies in a Jar, My Side of the World and Other Tales of Death
• Keisha Strand – I Need a Friend, What If We Went?
• Dave Hatcher – Son of the Heartland: On the Way to the Promised Land
• Deanna Reina – MENtal: A Preposterous Pursuit of Love
• Janet Macreery – The Falls

List of all authors at the festival here.

Fairfax County Public Library and the Fairfax Library Foundation made this festival possible, supporting local authors and ensuring the community could engage with these incredible stories.

#FairfaxLocalAuthors

#LibraryAuthorFestival

#CommunityReads

#FairfaxVA

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Thank you for listening to Upstart Crow, a part of Watershed Lit Radio.

© 2025 Upstart Crow Podcast – All Rights Reserved

Hosted & Recorded by Jennifer Disano

Edited & Produced by Jon D PodCom

Andy Shallal – A Seat at the Table

Andy Shallal has been a voice for social causes in and around Washington, DC, so consistently and for so many years that many who stop in at one of his Busboys and Poets restaurants, bookshops and event spaces may think of him more as a social activist than as a restauranteur. But he grew up in a restaurant. His father, who came to the U.S. as a diplomat, bought a pizza restaurant in Northern Virginia when Andy was 13. His father hired someone to run the restaurant six days a week, but on Sundays, Andy, his brother, and his sister helped their father run the place. Andy would do whatever task had to be done and dream of what he would do if the restaurant were his own.

Some years later, after working for several other restaurants, he indeed was running his own place. In those days, the food might have come first. Even if the political activism was not far behind as a consideration. Today, 20 years after he opened the first Busboys, Andy now operates eight locations, each of which is a haven for writers, thinkers, performers of the literary and musical arts—as well as people who like well-prepared, congenially served food and drinks. In his memoir, A Seat at the Table, he tells how it all came to be, and how he came to create and helm it.

You can get a copy of Andy Shallal’s memoir at any of the bookstores in Busboy’s or from the publisher, O/R Books (orbooks.com). https://orbooks.com/catalog/A-seat-at-the-table/ and is also available in audiobook.

Hosted by William Miller

“Food is basically a way to bring people together to the table… people remember experiences much more than they remember the actual food.” -Andy Shallal

Key Takeaways

• Andy’s lifelong relationship with restaurants began at 13, helping his father run a small family pizza shop on Sundays.
• His early experiences as an immigrant shaped his worldview and later inspired his commitment to building inclusive, human-centered gathering spaces.
• After years of working in different restaurants, Andy opened his own spaces—each blending hospitality with art, community, and social engagement.
• Busboys and Poets was created as a place where food, conversation, books, and civic dialogue could thrive together.
• His memoir A Seat at the Table explores not just the creation of Busboys and Poets, but the deeper cultural, political, and personal forces that guided his journey.

#BusboysAndPoets #ImmigrantStory #SocialEntrepreneurship

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Thank you for listening to Upstart Crow, a part of Watershed Lit Radio.

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© 2025 Upstart Crow Podcast – All Rights Reserved

Recorded & Produced by Jon D PodCom

Amy Stuber wrote the stories and Rebecca Burke edited them to produce the book Sad Grownups that won the 2025 PEN/Bingham Prize for Best Debut Short Story Collection. A big deal in literary circles, the book becomes a milestone for its publisher, Stillhouse Press, a teaching press at George Mason University staffed by students and alums who learn the book business by publishing and selling books. Together, Amy and Rebecca discuss the writing process and editing processes, book production and marketing, the content of this prize-winning collection, and the differences today between major commercial publishing houses and small presses.

Sad Grownups is Amy Stuber’s first book of fiction. Her stories have appeared separately in literary journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Tri-Quarterly, American Short Fiction, New England Review, Idaho Review, Cincinnati Review, Flash Fiction America, Joyland, and others. She received the 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction from the Missouri Review and the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and she was runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. She has a Ph.D. in English, has taught writing, and has worked in on-line education for several years. Rebecca Burke is editorial manager-production for Science Advances, for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she has worked since 2021, not long after finishing her MFA at George Mason. She received her BA from Mason in 2017, majoring in government and international politics with minors in intelligence analysis and international security. She graduated summa cum laude.

At Stillhouse, Rebecca has been a consulting editor, submissions and acquisitions manager, and graduate professional assistant. In addition to Amy Stuber’s book, she also edited In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (November 2022) and was an assistant editor for Catherine Klatzer’s book You Will Never Be Normal (May 2021), Michelle Ross’s Shapeshifting (November 2021), Phil Goldstein’s How to Bury a Boy at Sea (2022), and Josh Denslow’s Super Normal (2023). As a writer, she has published in several outlets, including Peatsmoke 2021 and Homology Lit 2019, where her work was a Best of the Net nominee. rrburkewrites.com

Amy Stuber’s book Sad Grownups can be ordered directly from Stillhouse Press. The teaching press was established in 2014 as a way for the students in Mason’s MFA, BFA, MA and BA programs in creative writing and publishing to solicit manuscripts, acquire and produce and market works from independent authors, for the educational benefit of the students and alums and also, as it says on the web site, “in an effort to forge lasting relationships and foster the growth of the greater literary community.” Stillhouse Press is part of the Watershed Lit Center for Literary Arts and Publishing Practice at Mason. The other components are the Fall for the Book festival, the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, the Northern Virginia Writing Project, and the Poetry Daily on-line poetry distribution program.

You can purchase a copy of Sad Grownups by Amy Stuber at StillhousePress.org here.

“Small presses can take risks big publishers won’t. That’s where some of the most exciting writing is happening.” — Amy Stuber

Key Takeaways

• Writer Amy Stuber and editor Rebecca Burke walk through the creative evolution behind Sad Grown-Ups, from early drafts to a PEN Bingham Prize–winning debut.

• The episode reveals how collaborative editing, motif mapping, and story sequencing strengthened the collection’s emotional arc and overall cohesion.

• Amy and Rebecca break down the realities of small press...

In his new book, Matthew Davis explores one of the most iconic monuments in America—and perhaps the world. For nearly a century, Mount Rushmore has loomed large in the American imagination, but its origin story is far more complex than most visitors ever realize. From the slow, decades-long path to its creation, to the artistic and engineering challenges faced by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and the 400 men who carved the mountain, the monument’s history reveals layers that extend well beyond its granite faces.

Davis argues that Rushmore likely couldn’t be built today—not only because of its sheer artistic ambition, but because of the changing cultural, political, and ethical landscape. How different communities interpret the monument varies dramatically, shaped by beliefs, culture, memory, and contested histories. The Black Hills themselves provoke discussions of land, belonging, and the legacy of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie—issues that continue to influence contemporary conversations about meaning, monuments, and national identity.

Matthew Davis is also the author of When Things Get Dark. His work has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Los Angeles Times Review of Books. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow. Davis holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins. He was the founding director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University.

A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore is published by St. Martin’s Press with an official release date of November 11, 2025. It will be available through Bookshop, independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble, Powells, Target, and Amazon.

• Mount Rushmore’s creation was shaped not only by artistry, but by politics, ego, and American mythmaking—its origin far more tangled than most realize.
• Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was both visionary and controversial, celebrated for his art yet entangled with the Ku Klux Klan and known for a domineering temperament.
• The history of the Black Hills, including the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie and the U.S. government’s seizure of the land, is central to understanding the monument’s ongoing controversy.
• Contemporary movements such as Land Back demonstrate that Rushmore’s story is not finished—its meaning continues to evolve through debates about justice, memory, and national identity.
• Memorials reflect their makers. Comparing Mount Rushmore to community-led memorials like Remembering the Children in Rapid City shows how public memory can shift from domination to inclusion.

Find out more about Matthew Davis:

http://matthewdaviswriter.com/

Read Matt’s Substack “About A Place”:

https://matthewdavisj.substack.com/

Purchase A Biography of a Mountain:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250285102/abiographyofamountain/

“History isn’t confined to the textbooks in the Black Hills—it’s a living, breathing organism that you really can’t escape.” — Matthew Davis

#MountRushmoreHistory

#AmericanMonuments

#MatthewDavisInterview

Hosted by William Miller

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