Meet our new instructor, Cara Wall.
What’s your favorite book and why?
I like long, character driven novels I can sink into, like The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert and Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett.
What do you love about writing?
I love words, I love living inside the emotional lives of my characters, I love the hard, painstaking work of living half in and half out of my own life in order to be the scribe for a story.
What do you hate about writing?
I find it really hard to move from my daily life into the creative realm. The transition always feels deeply unsettling, and I resist it more often than not—even though I know writing is my life’s work and one of the most satisfying things I will ever do.
Talk about your writing process? Are you structured? Organic?
My writing process requires a lot of baked goods. I need comfort cakes or cookies to convince me to retreat from daily life to writing.Technically, I do years of freewriting, longhand, in spiral notebooks. I don’t think or write linearly—I jump around from character to character and scene to scene. Once I feel like I know every character’s full arc, I begin the nearly impossible (for me) process of weaving everything into an order other people might understand.
What are you working on now?
I am pretty far in to my second book. It’s about a painting that is left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the people who want to discover its history. I am
Hoping it will be out in late 2024 or 2025.
Madelin Parsley grew up in the panhandle of Nebraska. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Vanderbilt University, and her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares and Narrative Magazine. She’s currently working on a novel about five siblings, two small towns, and a family dynamic that is shaped and reshaped
Instructor Michael Belanger is an author and high school history teacher. His debut novel, The History of Jane Doe, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and received a Kirkus starred review. More recently, his writing has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Pigeon Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, and the 2025 Connecticut Literary Anthology.
