Joanna Pearson on Writing a Literary Whodunnit

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, Joanna Pearson discusses her debut novel, Bright and Tender Dark, as well as branding, homesteading online, Tressie McMillan Cottom, the weirdness of Threads and Goodreads, eerie vibes, using murdered-girl tropes while subverting them, unresolved creepiness in the novel, Rachel Monroe fandom, and more!

From the episode:

Joanna Pearson: So many of my favorite literary writers are using, to good effect, that sense of threat or creeping dread or some catalyzing event–like a murder. [Murder] is a useful catalyzing event, it turns out. I love that tension, and I love that creepiness, and I thought, it’s going to be fundamentally a literary exercise where I’m really interested in all these people’s relationship to this central event, but I still want that satisfaction that you do find out whodunnit, so to speak. I like narratives constructed around a central absence, and I like how that absence becomes an echo chamber in which people are trying to make sense of things.

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Joanna Pearson’s debut novel, Bright and Tender Dark (Bloomsbury, 2024), is an Indie Next Pick and an Amazon Editors’ Pick. Her second story collection, Now You Know It All (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), was chosen by Edward P. Jones for the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and named a finalist for the Virginia Literary Awards. Her first story collection, Every Human Love (Acre Books, 2019) was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, and the Foreword INDIES Awards. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and many other places. Joanna has received fellowships supporting her fiction from MacDowell, VCCA, South Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the North Carolina Arts Council/Durham Arts Council. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Originally from western North Carolina, she now lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist.