Lock and Load: Armed Fiction
What does American literature tell us about American guns? Everything.
Deirdra McAfee and BettyJoyce Nash will discuss Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, their anthology of great stories with guns in them—gripping tales by American masters and new voices, more than half of them women, that reflect not only the America behind today’s headlines but our national obsession with, and ambivalence about, firearms.
On January 10, McAfee and Nash will include RPWF in the conversation about American guns—a sensible, enlightening conversation that Lock & Load’s audiences across the country have eagerly joined.
Because stories help us talk about things we can’t talk about.
Deirdra McAfee
Deirdra McAfee’s fiction appeared most recently in Into the Void, a Canadian literary review. Other journals, including Shenandoah, the Georgia Review, Confrontation, Willow Springs, and The Diagram, have published her short and flash fiction. Her work has won national prizes, including the New Millennium Writings Short-Short Prize, the H. E. Francis Prize, the Seattle Review Fiction Prize, and Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egen Prize, as well as the AWP WC&C Scholarship. She was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
McAfee received an MFA in fiction from the New School in New York; her MA in literature is from Georgetown. Her work has won her fiction residencies here and abroad—at the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She’s also been a fellow at Le Moulin à Nef in France and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany. A professional editor and book critic as well as a writer, McAfee belongs to PEN America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Authors Guild. Since 2001, she has offered a series of creative writing courses at The Visual Arts Center of Richmond, as well as private seminars for selected students.
BettyJoyce Nash
BettyJoyce Nash’s most recent essays, “Covering the Klan” and “Eclipse,” aired on WVTF Radio in Charlottesville. Before moving to Virginia, she reported and edited for the Greensboro News & Record; she has freelanced for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Style Weekly, Elegant Bride, Richmond Magazine, Business North Carolina, Virginia Business, and the regional economics magazine EconFocus. Her essays have also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor.
As part of her studies for a master’s degree in fiction writing in 2011, she researched and presented a craft seminar on guns in literature. Her own gun story appeared soon afterward in The North Dakota Quarterly. Another story won the 2015 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Prize. Her fiction has also appeared in The Broad River Review and C-ville Weekly.
Her fiction has earned fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA-France, and the Ragdale Foundation. BettyJoyce received an MS in journalism from Northwestern, and has taught writing at the University of Richmond, WriterHouse in Charlottesville, and the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
We will have Lock and Load: Armed Fiction available for purchase at a 20% discount. If you’d like more information about the book, please visit: https://www.amazon.com/Lock-Load-Fiction-Deirdra-McAfee-ebook/dp/B075M9JDP5.