Mackenzie Suess is a writer and editor based in Denver, Colorado. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Storyscape Literary Journal, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder, manages the online journal TIMBER, and writes for Longleaf Review.

Her works “The Hare and the Hazard” and “Cardinal Transfiguration” appear in Sundog Lit Issue 17. You can find her at mackenziesuess.com.

Tell us a little about your writing process (from the first word to the last edit).
I tend to write in bursts and spells; both the pieces in Sundog Lit were written in single, very brief sittings, with a few rounds of light revision. With longer pieces, I’ll spend a day (or a week, or a month) hiding out from the world to write the first draft of a piece, but then I’ll let it sit for a few weeks before circling back around to it. Revision is a long, exceedingly slow process for me in most cases until I don’t know what else to do with it. That’s when outside eyes finally get to take a look.

What is something you’re fascinated with at the moment?
Sound! Playfulness! The luxury in language! My mentor has finally brought me back around to writing more poetry again, so I’ve been particularly tuned in to the pleasure of sound and rhythm for its own sake lately.

Describe the last thing you read in five words.
Agile, bilingual cross-genre extravaganza.

What are you working on now?
At the moment, I’m cleaning up a hybrid short story manuscript which orients largely around mothers, daughters and other feminine/familial relationships. I’m also in wonderfully strange terrain working on my first novel.

Any recommendations for readers, i.e. books, movies, television, art, anything under the sun?
Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas, and anything—everything!—by Marcia Douglas (might begin with The Marvelous Equations of the Dread).