Brandi Wells on Their Muppet Baby Muses
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
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, Brandi Wells talks about their debut novel, The Cleaner, and discusses the Muppet Babies, writing a character who’s inventing her own world, what constitutes “real work,” what they love about teaching, revising by listening to their book be read to them over and over, weird coworkers, and more!
From the episode:
Brandi Wells: I think, above all, she’s a storyteller. I’ve always been fascinated by storytellers. Even as a little kid, I remember being thrilled by the Muppet Babies cartoon. They would start imagining something, and then suddenly it would be concrete and real and have real repercussions, and they’d be in it. Of course, I didn’t have the language for what that was, but I knew that was for me. That was the thing I wanted the most. I love to see any fiction that has a character building their own world.
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Brandi Wells is the author of the novella This Boring Apocalypse as well as a full length chapbook of stories, Please Don’t Be Upset. Their fiction appears in Puerto Del Sol, Mid-American Review, Tri-Quarterly and many other journals. A native of Georgia, they teach creative writing at California State University, Fullerton.
Their new novel is The Cleaner, an offbeat, darkly clever tale about a night cleaner who discovers a toxic secret about her company’s CEO—and decides to take matters into her own hands.
