About this ebook
About the author
Johnathan Scott Sutherland is a fiction writer, editor, and writing teacher whose short stories have appeared in more than two dozen literary magazines and anthologies across North America and the United Kingdom, including *The Sun*, *Zoetrope: All-Story*, and *One Story*. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and one of his stories was selected for the *Best Small Fictions* anthology. A longtime believer that short fiction is the best training ground a writer can find, he has spent fifteen years helping emerging authors move from promising drafts to published pages.
Johnathan holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program, and he has taught workshops at literary conferences including the Midwest Writers Workshop and the San Miguel de Allende Writers' Conference. He spent six years as a fiction editor at a national literary journal, where he read more than ten thousand submissions — an experience that taught him precisely why editors reject, what they're hoping to find, and how the submission game really works from the other side of the desk.
His own path to publication was a slow grind of drafts, critique groups, and more than two hundred rejections before his first acceptance, and he writes about the craft and business of short fiction with that experience firmly in mind. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two very opinionated cats, and he is currently at work on a collection of linked stories set along the Michigan shoreline. You can find his essays on writing, alongside submission resources and news from his teaching calendar, at his website, johnathanscott sutherland dot com. He reads every letter from readers — especially the ones from writers who just sent their first story out the door.
