Why include real life characters, either historical or present-day (even family!), in your fiction? How might it inspire and give some valuable context to your work? And what are some of the pitfalls you might want to avoid? Authors Chris Boucher and Hesse Phillips help us wade through the answers.
This webinar recording is available for 24 hours. Missed it? Listen to the podcast version, available here on our SubStack page or on your favorite podcast platform.
Grab copies of all our guests’ books here: Bookshop.org
Hesse Phillips (she/they) was raised next-door to a chicken farm in rural Pennsylvania but now lives in Spain. Their debut novel Lightborne, about the death of Christopher Marlowe, was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and will be published by Atlantic Books in the UK in 2024, and hopefully in the US someday as well. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Bridport Review, the époque (pronounced EPOCH) press é-zine, Roi Fainéant (Wrah Fah-NAY-unt) Press, Emerge Literary Journal, Erato Magazine, and on DeadDarlings.com, and is forthcoming in Pangyrus, among others. They have a PhD in Drama from Tufts University and are a very proud graduate of Grub Street Boston's intensive Novel Incubator program.
Christopher Boucher received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 2002. Chris is the author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Golden Delicious and Big Giant Floating Head (a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award Finalist) and editor of Jonathan Lethem's More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers. He's an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College and the managing editor of Post Road Magazine.
Day 7: Creating Characters Based on Real People with Hesse Phillips and Chris Boucher