Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

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Today, Nora Lange discusses her debut novel, Us Fools (Two Dollar Radio), finding absurd moments to celebrate if by “celebrate” we mean “awaken,” passing anxieties down to our children, writing about the 80s farm crisis, research, committing and recommitting to the project of her novel despite life upheavals, and so much more!

From the episode:

Nora Lange: This is a book I love. I love these people. They’re important to me. I love them. And I don’t know if it’s because I was also a little girl, a kid…I want things for girls! Women! That’s really powerful. I refused to give up on [the book]. I would try to sleep, but I was just constantly roving. I was determined to live this out.

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Nora Lange‘s writing has appeared in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland,  American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGiant, LIT, The Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. An earlier iteration of her novel was shortlisted for The Novel Prize in 2020, a prize to recognize and publish novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. She comes from a long line of Midwestern farmers and lives in Los Angeles with her family. Us Fools is her first novel.