Mary Hannah Terzino, "Secrets and Other Hobbies" with Christine Maul Rice

About the Book: In this phenomenal collection of stories exploring the experiences of women—and sometimes men—of all ages, at pivotal moments in their lives, a child spies two women kissing at her mother’s bridge club. A young girl unwittingly contributes to terrible loss as she tries to honor her friend’s deepest wishes. A late-night drowning at a high school graduation party is mired in secrets. An older woman compulsively attends the town’s funerals, believing her presence there to be God’s calling. A retired woman finally harvests insights and breaks old habits through revelations from her daughter’s experiences. The stories in Secrets and Other Hobbies are layered with purposeful deception and poignant, hidden yearnings that cause their characters to stumble before they rise, if they rise at all. Serious and darkly humorous, noble and morally ambiguous, achingly vulnerable and always memorable, Mary Hannah Terzino’s debut lays bare an indelible and realistic Midwest. About the Author: Mary Hannah Terzino was raised in La Porte, Indiana, and now lives on the Kalamazoo River in Saugatuck, Michigan. She is a fiction and nonfiction writer whose work has been published in The Forge Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, MacQueen’s Quarterly, Hypertext Review, and elsewhere. Her story “Blank Slate” won first prize in Fiction Factory’s 2021 flash fiction contest, and “Saving the Turtles” was nominated for the Best Small Fictions 2024 anthology. About the Conversation Partner: Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called "a gripping work of Midwest Gothic" by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Best Books of 2016 So Far. Christine has been included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Detroit's Metro Times, MAKE Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of Hypertext Magazine, co-founder of ERRATICS Press, and is a Professor of English at Valparaiso University. Her latest novel, Sick Water, a reimagining of the events leading to the Flint water crisis, will be published fall 2027.