Nini Berendt and Evanthia Bromiley on Debut Discovery

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Nini Berendt and Evanthia Bromiley about their debut novels, There Are Reasons for This and Crown.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin:  I’m curious, as people who have their first novels out in the world, if you wrote to find out who you were?

Nini Berendt: I think always and it’s something I tell my students all the time, like we’re always writing about ourselves. We’re always writing autobiographically, and we’re also never really telling the truth about ourselves. Memoir is still always fiction, right? We’re still always creating a story. And I think in a lot of ways, this novel actually is sort of the least, the most removed from, I think, figuring out who I am. I was trying more to figure out who we are as people right now, like there is a more of a collective sense of, how do we live in this world that feels like it’s burning in both a very literal and also metaphorical sense. So, I think it was more this like collective state of mind.

Evie Bromiley:  And I think for me, in a similar fashion, I didn’t really write to find out who I was, but then when the language showed me something exciting or something that felt true to me in the way it was phrased, then I was pleased to have found a turn of phrase that kind of made me see the world in a way that I hadn’t before.

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Nini Berndt is a graduate of the University of Florida’s MFA program in Fiction. Her first novel is There Are Reasons for This. She teaches writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son.

Evanthia Bromiley is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of scholarships from the Aspen Institute, a Lighthouse Fellowship, a Lisel Mueller scholarship, and Elizabeth George and Carol Houck-Smith awards. She is the 2025 Grace Paley Fellow for Under the Volcano international residency in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction can be found in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, and elsewhere. Crown is her debut novel