Hillary Behrman w/ Rod Driver, LAKE EFFECT: STORIES

Hillary Behrman, Seattle writer and winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, reads from and discusses her debut collection Lake Effect, alongside comics artist Rod R Driver. These stories exist at the intersection of social isolation and fierce intimacies and call into question the limits of our well-intentioned efforts to care for each other, taking you to unmapped mountain ranges, wild urban places and the outskirts of a desert outpost dissecting the many ways we love, labor and isolate ourselves from one another

Winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Lauren Groff

A debut collection about the wild and hidden places in nature and the heart

From Seattle to Istanbul, Lake Effect, the debut short story collection by Hillary Behrman, takes you to unmapped mountain ranges, wild urban places and the outskirts of a desert outpost dissecting the many ways we love, labor and isolate ourselves from one another. In these stories characters are rarely headed where they want to be: Paula’s real and dream life become indistinguishable. Oliver can’t shed the hold of family lore as he negotiates his love affair with Daniel. Siblings, Alex and Marcie, are comforted and scraped raw by intimacy as they traverse the years from juvenile vandalism to a labor and delivery gone terribly wrong. Miles searches for his mother in a homeless encampment beneath a maze of freeways. These stories exist at the intersection of social isolation and fierce intimacies and call into question the limits of our well-intentioned efforts to care for each other.

Hillary Behrman’s award-winning stories have been described as deeply humane and unsettling and have been published in journals, magazines, short story dispensers, and anthologies. Her debut story collection, Lake Effect (Sarabande 2026) was selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Groff praised Lake Effect as a book of “great moral power and heart” by “an author of extraordinary grace." Hillary lives in Seattle where she raised two kids and worked as a children’s civil rights lawyer and public defender.

Rod Driver is a Seattle-based nonfiction cartoonist and zine maker. His books are about Indonesian collective art organizing, 19th century Canadian utopian communes, the dams of the Columbia River, and his own life. He is currently co-creating DXM, an anthology featuring artists from legendary Seattle drawing night Dune and Indonesian art collective Mulyakarya.

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