Q: If you could have a fantasy pet, what would you have and why?
A: An octopus. With its nine brains and decentralized nervous system and enigmatic intelligence they’re like what we imagine extraterrestrials to be but right there in earth. If not that, then a raven. Boring, but they’re smart and loyal and for sure will run this place once we’re done with it.
Q: What type of music best describes your writing style?
A: Punk. The songs, like my stories, are short, erratic, and bite weirdly and in bursts.
Q: Tell us about your writing office/space and why it’s special to you.
A: I don’t have one, really. Lately, I’ve been writing on my couch with my feet up on a pillow on a coffee table. But I write everywhere. Including on my phone inside my car. One story, “Then It Would Be Raining,” was written nearly entirely—about 95%—on my phone. The medium actually had an impact on the structure of the narrative, which fit well with the fragmented perception of the reality related by my POV character.
Q: What is the most challenging part of writing for you?
A: The business of writing. It’s exhausting.
Q: If you didn’t write full-time what would your day job be?
A: I don’t write full time, but I have all kinds of day jobs I’d love to have, ranging from Art Historian to Physicist to brewmaster to chef to endocrinologist to architect to linguist. I’m pretty sure I’d have thirty or forty full-blown careers if I could live to be a thousand. And writing would play a critical part of being good at all thirty or forty of them.
Q: What is your writing schedule and how many projects do you juggle at once?
A: Schedule is an arbitrary and vague term, but the brunt of my writing takes place before seven o’clock in the morning and after eleven o’clock at night. Sometimes the late hours become early ones. Generally, I have six to nine short stories in the works.
Q: How do you balance your outside life with your writing life?
A: Writing takes a back seat to being a husband, parent, and day-job worker. Writing happens along and within the margins of my life.
Q: Write your eulogy in three sentences.
A: Husband and father. Resurrected from dissociative fugue. Master of the seven-minute nap.
Q: What project are you most proud of right now?
A: I am very proud of my short story collections, Sometimes Creek and These Are My People, but I think right now I may be most proud of the novel I have in the works. It’s forcing me to develop a new writing skill. I’m allowing myself plenty of time to complete it. So, I’m proud of not rushing it, I guess.
Q: Do you have any new projects you would like to tell your fans about?
A: The novel I just mentioned in the previous question. I don’t have a solid timeline yet, but I’m aiming to complete a first draft in the next twelve months. (Is that ‘rushing it?’)
Q: Where can people find you on social media?
A: stevefoxwrites.com works for both the web and Bluesky. @stevefoxwrites on Instagram, @steve.fox@writing.exchange on Mastodon, and facebook.com/stevefoxwrites.
Bio: Steve Fox is the winner of the Rick Bass Montana Prize for Fiction, the Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction, The Great Midwest Writing Contest, the Jade Ring Award, the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Fiction Contest, and the Midwestern Gothic Summer Flash Contest. His fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, MQR, Whitefish Review, and others. His short-story collection, Sometimes Creek, was published by Cornerstone Press in January 2023 and received the 2023 American Book Fest Best Book Award, was a finalist for the Chicago Writers Association 2023 Book of the Year Award, and long-listed for the Edna Ferber Award. His next story collection, These Are My People (Cornerstone Press), publishes December 2025. Steve lives in Wisconsin with his wife, three boys, and one dog. Find him at stevefoxwrites.com.
