Connecting with my marvelous agent, Victoria Sanders, took about four months, which is relatively short in publishing time. Since it’s my first book, I started by looking for an agent to represent me. Like any success in life, getting the collection into the hands of Celadon Books, a new division of Macmillan, involved some luck. Getting the end right took quite a bit of work, and I was assisted in that process by Halimah Marcus, the wonderful editor at Electric Literature, a magazine where the story first appeared. The story “A Cat Called Grievous” contains black humor. One way I did that was to flash back to times when the main character’s life was full of promise and she was surrounded by love. I needed to find ways to lighten it up so the reader wouldn’t get emotionally exhausted. The story “Ghost Dogs” was difficult to write because it’s dark. Some posed greater challenges than others. Just because stories are short doesn’t mean they’re easy or quick to write.

I wrote the stories over a period of about ten years, revising them until I felt they were as good as I could make them. How did the collection start, how did the writing go, how did you get it into the hands of Celadon Books? One of the stories I’ll read from is about a Jewish actuary who suspects his cat of cheating on him with his Protestant girlfriend. The audience can also expect to hear me read from the book, to illustrate points I’m making in the talk and to help them decide if the book is one they’d like to take home. I’ll also talk a bit about empathy and how it’s created, because one of my hopes for the book is that it helps readers develop greater empathy. I’ll discuss what compelled me to write a book about outsiders, what in my background made outsiders a subject that preoccupies me. The book is about characters who are treated as outsiders because of their religion, sexual orientation, or simply because they look different.

R.L Maizes: I hope to give the audience a sense of the book, and also a sense of me as a writer. How do you approach launching a book for a local audience? What can attendees expect at the event? Westword: You're debuting your first collection of short stories at the Boulder Book Store, and reading at the Tattered Cover and Old Firehouse later in the week. In advance of that event, we sat down with Maizes to talk about the book, her writing, and everything “beautiful and vulnerable.'

Her new collection, We Love Anderson Cooper, is an emotional and quirky set of short stories that will launch at the Boulder Book Store on Tuesday, July 23. In some ways, she's a good example of what a strong literary community can produce, while still very much unique in her voice and her prose. Twitter R.L Maizes is new to Colorado’s books list, but not new to its writing scene she’s been actively soaking up all that the state has to offer would-be authors for over a decade while honing her writing chops.

We love anderson cooper short stories