Seventeen years ago, Greg Schutz was sitting in a laundromat in Ann Arbor, Michigan, waiting for the spin cycle to end, working on a short story that he had been struggling with for weeks. He decided to rewrite a scene from a secondary character’s perspective, and “the story unlocked itself,” he says. “New sources of conflict emerged, strange points of tension between two ways of seeing the same situation. Before long the story became about that tension.” The piece would go on to become the title story of Schutz’s debut collection, Joyriders (University of Massachusetts Press, March 2025), which explores those very tensions between a range of characters living in the Midwest and Appalachia. Schutz’s lyrical stories chart characters’ heartbreaks, separations, regrets, and commitments over the course of decades, with…
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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, March/April 2025