23 A Creative Force

Welcome back to The Spark as you know it, featuring a reading recommendation, updates on my moseying, and an author interview.

📚 Recommendation for ravenous readers

Fallout by Eleanor Anstruther (Empress Editions, 2026)

Bridget is fifteen and already tired of being told how the world works. Her father is building a fallout shelter in the garden. Her mother is holding the family together with routines and silence. And at school, no one is saying anything that feels true. So when Bridget hears about the women camped outside a military base at Greenham Common—protesting nuclear missiles, refusing to leave, she goes. At first, it’s just curiosity.

Then it’s something else.

Because Greenham isn’t what she expected. It’s chaotic, alive, and full of women who don’t ask permission. They argue, organise, clash, and care for each other in ways Bridget has never seen before. Here, the rules feel different. Looser. Sharper.

And the longer she stays, the harder it is to imagine going home.

But nothing at Greenham is simple. Beneath the solidarity, tensions simmer. Voices collide. Loyalties shift. And as Bridget is pulled deeper into this volatile, exhilarating world, she begins to see cracks—not just in the movement, but in everything she thought she understood about family, power, and herself.

👣 My moseying

The pace of life feels very different on the other side of my Staring into the Sun US and UK book tour. I have more creative headspace and am looking forward to getting back to my work in progress, a novel. I’ve already written about a quarter of it (20,000 words) but haven’t worked on it since the end of last year. So I sent it to my Kindle and re-read what I’d written, straight through, no edits or notes. The next step is getting back to the actual writing!

🎙️ Interview with M. Leona Godin

Leona with her portrait by Roy Nachum. Photo by Alabaster Rhumb.

Leona is a classmate of mine from grade school in San Francisco. We recently reconnected through group emails ahead of our 40th (!) reunion, which neither of us was able to attend. But we did meet up in New York at the Museum of Chinese in America, where I had a book event on June 3.

M. Leona Godin is the 2025-26 Jean Strouse Fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. Her writing on art, technology, and disability culture has appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, ARTnews, Literary Hub, O Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the New York Public Library’s Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship. She is the founding editor of Aromatica Poetica, an arts and culture laboratory for the advancement of smell and taste. Godin lectures widely on multisensory culture and access, and her experimental performances use scent and touch to explore sensory translation and blindness as a creative force.

Please listen to the audio for the full interview.

Books mentioned:

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. Riis

The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow

Crip Authority: Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Renaissance by Elizabeth Bearden

Riverwork by Lisa Robertson

You can find Leona at drmlgodin.com and on Instagram at @drmlgodin. Aromatica Poetica is currently open for submissions.

Share The Spark

📙 Where to find my writing

Staring into the Sun

🇺🇸 US Buy paperback | ebook (published by Ten16 Press)

🇬🇧 UK Buy paperback | ebook (published by Ten16 Press)

🎧 Audiobook on all platforms (produced by Mercury Calling)

“Things My Dad Told Me” in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, The Hope Prize anthology published by Simon & Schuster Australia.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“Gold Mountain Diggers” in Issue 10 of Livina Press.Buy in US | Buy in UK

“His Bones” in Transformations, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize anthology.Buy in US | Buy in UK

Find out more about me and my writing, including press coverage, on my website: madelynpostman.com.

Most book links go to my Bookshop.org page, where sales are win-win-win, benefiting the authors, local bookstores, and my own writing—unlike using A-you-know-who.

You can listen to The Spark on your favorite podcast platform. On Substack, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter. Please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it would mean the world to me. And please share it with your reading and writing friends!

Music and mixing by Mercury Calling.