Interview with ​Rachael Peckham

Meet NUNUM's Contributor: Rachael Peckham

8/29/2021

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with Rachael Peckham

Rachael Peckham's piece 'Upon Reading Your Ex-Boyfriend’s Obituary' messed with the questioning theme inside the Summer 2021 with a kind of perfection that made us pause here and wonder about our own lives and the things we've collectively forgotten over the years.

Rachael was kind enough to give us a bit of her time recently, and yes, you know exactly how we got things started ...

What was the first book you remember picking and reading by yourself?

The first book I remember falling in love with, as a child, is Patricia Lee Gauch's 'Christina Katerina and the Box'. It's about a girl who repeatedly reinvents a discarded refrigerator box into a castle, a clubhouse, etc. As weather and time cause the box to dwindle in size, Christina Katerina's imagination grows. I couldn't get enough of this story as a small child, and now I see why. It's about the creative process of continually re-seeing a thing, striving to make something new of it.

Another one for the list, thank you Rachael, okay let's get a touch more recent, what was the last book you read that made you say damn that was a good book?

I just finished Melissa Febos's new book, 'Girlhood'.

Every single line zings. It's smart, it's beautiful, it's true. She gets it right--she always does. I'd recommend all of her work, but especially this new title.

Is there a writing craft book that you would recommend to new writers?

Heather Sellers's 'The Practice of Creative Writing' is still the best multi genre guide on creative writing I've found. I was lucky to get to work with Heather when I was a student at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, so when she came out with the first edition of this textbook (and there have been many since then--it's done quite well), I was thrilled to be able to share with my students the same lessons and exercises that I cut my teeth on, twenty years ago.

Rachael Peckham's prose poems and lyric nonfiction

have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, the Orison Anthology, Passages North, Southeast Review, South Loop Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Peckham lives with her husband and son in Huntington, West Virginia, where she's a John Deaver Drinko Fellow and full professor of English at Marshall University.