Month: April 2026

South Carolina Review Associate Editor Will Cathcart’s debut, genre-defying novel This Is How People Die will be published by Evening Post Books on Tuesday, April 28.

A Charleston native and international journalist, Will Cathcart sets This Is How People Die between a modern sanitarium in downtown Charleston and the shadowed edges of Europe and the Republic of Georgia. The novel follows Scoot and Hannah—cystic fibrosis patients who have outlived their expiration dates and every expectation that comes with being alive.

Will Cathcart will celebrate the publication of This Is How People Die with a public launch event at the Charleston Library Society on May 14, 2026. Tickets and additional details are available at charlestonlibrarysociety.org.

Pre-order: https://www.eveningpostbooks.com/products/coming-soon-this-is-how-people-die

Cyn Nooney’s story “Sterling Recruit” was the recipient of the Ronald Moran Prize in Fiction for SCR Volume 58. Here, she’s interviewed by Sage Short, former SCR assistant editor and current poetry editor of Greensboro Review.

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Sage Short: “Sterling Recruit” opens with “It was an empowering feeling being selected, especially out of the blue like that.” Where did the idea for “Sterling Recruit” come from? Did a character come to mind? An image? Did you start with the first statement or did that come later?

Cyn Nooney: I love these questions, as I often wonder about the genesis of work by other writers. It’s an ongoing fascination of mine, and I’m always down to discuss process. Usually when I begin writing a story, the igniting spark is an image that I can’t shake, or a character whose voice or behavior interests me, especially those unaware they’re ripe for the stage. I’m continuously fascinated by the human condition and our spectrum of foibles, so entering a story isn’t the hard part for me. It’s the rest that often feels insurmountable. (My partially-written story count is ridiculously high.) As for “Sterling Recruit,” the first sentence is how I began—my openings don’t change nearly as much as the rest of my stories do. This story is very loosely based on a weekend experience as a newcomer to Los Angeles and was absurdly long in the making—it took over twenty years. I made countless failed attempts to write it, and nothing worked until I finally landed on a satirical approach. Once that happened, I was able to find the tone and POV I’d been seeking, and guileless Keeley won the lead.

SS: How do you know when a story is finished?

CN: When I’ve worn down another molar. Kidding aside, this is tricky to answer because it can feel impossible to know when a story is finished. But revision is key. Revision. Revision. And more revision. Feedback from trusted readers helps too. And dogged persistence. A grad school advisor, Valerie Laken, once advised me to read my work out loud and as much as I hate hearing my own voice, this technique has helped tremendously. You catch typos that way as well as where the hitches might be, including any false notes. Once you’ve addressed those, you can turn an eye toward finishing. For me, endings take forever to get right, and I often write the final paragraph dozens and dozens of different ways. Sometimes it’s just a matter of reordering a few words or sentences, sometimes it’s heavy addition or subtraction, but intuition along with reading aloud usually lets you know when the story is done. That, and not fooling yourself. I believe most seasoned writers know when something isn’t quite ready, hard as it might be to admit. I’ve found it helpful to put stories that I’m struggling with away for a bit and usually when I return to them later, clarity is more accessible. With any luck, the ending, or whatever needs fixing, will reveal itself. Or at least raise a middle finger in a halfhearted hello.

SS: There are moments throughout “Sterling Recruit” where I found myself laughing or feeling in conversation with the narrator, like early on in the story where you wrote, “Were the deputies attractive, you might ask. It’s a natural question. It’s how we’ve been raised.” I’d love to hear your take on the importance of incorporating humor in stories like “Sterling Recruit.”

CN: I believe humor is critical to surviving this experiment called life. Especially in dark times, such as we’re currently facing. Among its many attributes, fiction can offer welcome reprieves from terror and muck, and therefore when a story has the capacity to unnerve, I’ll sprinkle in occasional levity. That might be an act of self-preservation or group-preservation, but I figure why not amuse ourselves while circling the drain. A great teacher in this regard is Kurt Vonnegut and the way he approached writing about WWII. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book I have on annual repeat, and every time I re-read the line about Billy Pilgrim being “tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca Cola” my day becomes infinitely better. Or the way Billy’s pilfered frozen overcoat is described as “so small, that it appeared to be not a coat but a sort of large black, three-cornered hat.” Humor can hold a reader’s attention while also grabbing the heart. And makes the tough stuff go down easier.

SS: Do you approach your screenplays similarly to your fiction? Additionally, do you see stories cinematically while you’re writing?

CN: Character-first is how I approach any kind of writing, however when it comes to screenplays it’s prudent to know the entire plot ahead of time, including the ending. But that’s difficult for me, and I often resist. One of my favorite things about fiction is discovering the character in real time, and not knowing the ending, let alone other components. Fiction allows the writer to surprise herself, and in turn, hopefully the reader. So, while the approaches are somewhat different, I do see stories cinematically while in the act of creating. It took me a while to get there, though, and I credit a writing instructor who offered invaluable critique several years ago about a story I wrote involving a woman who drives to the beach then stares at the water while mulling over a hard decision. “What can you have your character do at the ocean that shows what she’s thinking?” the instructor wrote. “A character can’t just look at the water. Think cinematically.”

That changed a lot for me. At the time I wasn’t yet writing screenplays but incorporating the instructor’s advice into my fiction prepared me well once I later tried my hand at scripts. The latter wasn’t anything I ever planned to do but after winning a cinematic short story contest hosted by a screenwriting platform, I challenged myself to try. Dabbling in that medium is a lot of fun and provides useful exercises for any writer—you can’t rely on interiority because characters can only be revealed through dialogue and action. Limitations like that can be instructive.

Although I enjoy hopping back and forth between mediums, fiction will always be my everlasting love and is primarily where I devote most of my writing time.

SS: How does your background as a media executive influence your writing? Do you ever find yourself pulling inspiration for content from that time in your life?

CN: Hmm, this makes me ponder. I wouldn’t say my media career influenced my writing per se, as I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I can remember—as a child I would climb a bur oak tree with my purple lockable diary, eager for a quiet place to stow away and scribble— but I do think my cumulative experiences inform and shape my writing, like I imagine they do for any author. Most days my mind feels overstuffed but when I take the time to sift through the files, then yes, absolutely, a lot of content originates from that period in my life. Much more so than what’s occurring in the present. And while I haven’t yet wholly excavated my childhood, I concur with Flannery O’Connor’s statement, “Anyone who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Within each of us is a dearth of storytelling material and for me, it’s about what bubbles up the loudest.

My former jobs offer plenty of fruit for the picking. During the early part of my career, I worked for a regional sports network that televised the Texas Rangers, Houston Astros, Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets and San Antonio Spurs, and my time in Dallas has served as a backdrop for many of my stories. The same can be said for Los Angeles, where I spent subsequent years in the media entertainment business as a marketing executive for E! Entertainment Television and the Style Network. Per your question, those experiences have greatly contributed to my writing, so I should probably amend my answer! Either that or get around to setting stories in Colorado, where I was raised, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where I currently live. But there’s only so much time, isn’t there? I believe influences and inspirations are there for the taking, all around us.

SS: What’s up next for you?

CN: I wish it would be a large tax return, but since that’s not going to happen, I’ll just keep pecking away. (I’ll keep pecking regardless, as I can’t not write despite the anguish I sometimes feel about this wacky passion.) As writers, the only thing we have control over is our productivity. Mine tends to ebb and flow, the former being the case too often! but I plan to always create—as much for my sanity as anything else. A frequent and common question I receive from well-intentioned family members and friends is, “Are you still writing?” I’ve yet to locate the perfect response so I’m all ears if anyone has one beyond, “Yes, and can you please quit asking that!”

Multiple unfinished stories are currently clamoring for my attention and meanwhile I’m assembling a collection, plus making notes for a potential novel. Hopefully I’ll somehow manage to get published every now and again in fine publications such as South Carolina Review. I’ll be forever grateful to the team at SCR for publishing and honoring my work. Thank you endlessly!

This interview was conducted by Assistant Editor Nell Kriegel with Dominique Ahkong, recipient of the Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry for her poem “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father,” featured in SCR Volume 57.

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Nell Kriegel: In addition to your work as a poet, you serve as an editor for Shō Poetry Journal—how do you navigate the balance between your editorial mindset and your creative work? Do you find it challenging to “turn off” the editor while you’re writing?

Dominique Ahkong: This was a problem for me in my 20s and 30s; pulling all-nighters before a deadline was the only way I could squeeze past my inner editor. As an editor now, I try to approach work with curiosity, and I often read poems intuitively.

Since reading submissions as well as producing and promoting the journal takes up much of my time and energy, most of my writing happens between reading periods. I tend to write in bursts and often get so caught up in the excitement that I sometimes over-edit poems as they form. I’ve learned to avoid revisiting my own poems in the evening and know when I need to leave them alone for a while.

NK: In your poem “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father” the form is a long block of text; how do you decide which poems are suited for line breaks and which ones lean into prose? What’s the motivator behind this form?

DA: I originally composed “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father” in free verse. I was working on a group of poems that each began with the title “Times I Said Nothing.” The poems sat for ten years before I took them up again, and “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father” was the first to take shape. I remember trying to write it as a duplex: the form helped me voice lines that felt true to the experience, but I was also taking broad liberties with variations on the repeated lines, and the syllabic count was off—maybe not a duplex, I thought.

When I’m feeling stuck with a poem, I sometimes box it up as a prose poem to see what’s going on. I read my poems aloud as I compose and revise; musicality is important to me. Over time, my memory of this incident has solidified into a block. On one hand, there’s a long-haul flight and the heaviness of feeling drugged, and on the other hand, there’s the active mind pushing doubt back and forth. When I changed the title, things clicked into place for me.

NK: “When I Met You” closes with the line, “I will become whatever I become.” Do you see poetry as a mode of becoming? More broadly, how intertwined is writing with your sense of identity—and how necessary is it to you?

DA: In college I had a poetry professor who championed my work but gave me very little feedback. He said: 1) You have to go deeper; and 2) You should be reading more contemporary poetry. That was it. Looking back on it now, that was exactly right. I’ve been a reader for most of my life, but at the time, I was so burnt out that I stopped reading books for a few years. I was steeped in film/video, interactive media, and photography, where my work could be personal but less vulnerable. But I missed paper, the physical page.

At some point I took an interest in book arts, which brought me back to poetry. I also left the tropics and found myself, for the first time, surrounded by space, and quiet, with a study of my own. It’s taken about 20 years for me to inhabit the practice, but yes, I consider poetry my life work—both reading/studying contemporary poetry and writing poetry.

NK: There’s a line of yours that is just so stunning— “I begged to be useful, knowing nothing is too small to be useful: brackets in a sum or a decimal point or a stub still wagging.” The attention to small details feels so essential to the poem’s impact. How do you scale in your writing, balancing both expansive ideas and those precise, intimate details?

DA: This poem came together very quickly for me. I was already in the writing zone and remember sitting down with the title to meditate on an experience. Instead, I ended up with this poem. I don’t really think about scope when I’m writing—I might think about that sort of thing if a poem isn’t working and I’m trying to approach it from a different angle, but for the most part, I write intuitively. I’d been listening to Alice Coltrane’s Ptah the El Daoud and ended up following the current.

NK: What themes do you find moving right now?

DA: I’ve been trying to carve out space to work towards my first collection. Secrecy, silence, and shame are key themes, along with migration, inheritance, and ritual. Faith and caretaking are other layers beneath that.