All posts tagged: Mindy Misener

Podcast: Mindy Misener on Good Guys

Podcast: Mindy Misener on Good Guys

November 13, 2026 , ,

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Transcript: Mindy Misener

 
Mindy Misener and Issue 32

Mindy Misener speaks to Emily Everett about the excerpt of her debut novel Good Guys, which appears in The Common’s brand-new fall issue. The book follows a pair of sisters in New England in 2008, breaking open the secrets of small towns and complicated families in a time of growing patriotism, masculinity, and religious fervor. Mindy discusses the many years she spent drafting and revising the book, and how the excerpted section opens up questions the book then explores. Also discussed is Mindy’s debut short story “Baby Is Not Fine,” which was first published in The Common in 2018.

Podcast: Mindy Misener on Good Guys
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Review: Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Review: Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

March 10, 2020

Book by MARCELO HERNANDEZ CASTILLO

Review by MINDY MISENER

cover

“There were moments when I didn’t need to tell my body how to move,” poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo writes in the opening passage of his memoir, Children of the Land. He’s introducing a scene in which armed ICE agents arrive at his house. He’s a senior in high school. The agents are looking for his father, who isn’t there. They leave. Yet their presence, a longstanding threat finally realized, creates a shift. Hernandez Castillo can no longer act without thinking. He explains, “Even laughter required some kind of effort. I had to remind myself: this is funny, this is how you laugh—laugh now, laugh hard, spit out your food.”

Review: Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
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Baby Was Not Fine

Baby Was Not Fine

October 29, 2018 , , ,

By MINDY MISENER

Right before Baby finished ninth grade, Jerry (Baby’s dad) announced that Baby and Carla (Baby’s older sister) would work for him that summer. Baby thought it was a great idea. She would much rather landscape for Jerry than work at one of the three pizza/sub joints in town, or at a basketball camp for kids, which was most of what of her teammates were doing.

Jerry was six-three (two inches taller than Baby) and had a thick mustache and a laugh that rattled fine china. He’d built the house they lived in. In church he sang the loudest and the most out of tune. Six nights a week he did a hundred push-ups. He never took a sick day. It was true what everyone said, that Jerry was the most hardworking, honest man in Waldo County, Maine. The other thing people said was he didn’t suffer fools, but Baby was not one hundred percent sure what this meant, so she couldn’t say if she agreed.

Baby Was Not Fine
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