Today’s podcast episode is a Book Award Winner episode, where we get to know a writer who won the NAIWE Book Award.
Our guest today is David Berner.
David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning personal narrative and fiction. The recipient of honors and awards from the NYC Big Book Award, the Paris Book Festival, the Hawthorne Prize, the Page Turner Awards, Readers’ Choice Awards, The Society of Midland Authors, The Chicago Writers Association, and the Eric Hoffer Book Awards.
His short stories, creative nonfiction, and poems have been published in The Ulu Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Humans of the World, Red Noise Collective, Voices, The Lascaux Review, and others.
He has also been honored as a former Writer-in-Residence at the Jack Kerouac Project in Orlando and at the Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Home in Oak Park, Illinois.
For many years now, David W. Berner has been a writing teacher at Gotham Writers, and the editor of the writing craft website at MEDIUM—The Writer Shed. David also writes regular personal essays at SUBSTACK: The Abundance.
He has recently published a book called: The Islander, which was a winner of the NAIWE 2023 Book Awards in the Literary genre.
Q: When did you first have the idea for this book? And what inspired you to actually write The Islander?
I have always been fascinated with what are called “thin place,” those natural places in the world where we are awed. The Irish coast has always been one of those places for me. And I have also always been fascinated with how the human connection can transcend age, background, culture, and much else. I wanted to write about this.
Q: What prompted you to publish the book when you did?
I had been writing and editing it for years. Novellas are sometimes hard to find publishers, but The Shortish Project from Outpost19 Books in San Francisco was taking on a new project to publish short novels, championing the great tradition of novellas in American literature. The Islander seemed a great fit. I was lucky enough that they accepted it.
Q: What did you learn while working on this book? And what were some challenges you faced during the writing or publication of this book?
The writing was a delight. I never plan or outline, the book is already somewhere inside of me, and I just have to keep writing to let it out. Publishing, I knew might be more difficult, as it always it, but mostly because this is a novella, and what I call a “quiet” book. It’s more about character than plot. Much of popular fiction is plot driven. I don’t necessarily write with plot in mind.
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