April Wilder, Ph.D.

Works in Progress

novel in late developmental mode

The Bowling Green Massacre

Upon not entering the West Side of the building, the shooters first would’ve encountered Willow Perkins at the hostess stand and if a massacre is what they were after there would’ve been no reason not to start with her. With Willow (not) down, Shooter One would’ve logically pivoted right to the bar area, where surveillance video did show, seated alone maybe ten feet from the foyer/greeting area, Hans Beverage, PhD, a rhetoric professor at Western Kentucky University, enjoying a glass of chianti, a “famous” house salad (290 calories), and grading a one-page reading response that he didn’t even have to grade but was because this semester he was going to get on top of things, yes, fuck yes...

I Think About You All The Time, Starting Tomorrow

novel in late editorial mode

      “How do you know it’s not cotton. I mean if it’s inside your head, this ‘fog’, and so lacking material properties—?”

     “No, that’s true," she said, "It could be cotton.” 

     “A lot of things could be cotton if you think about it."

     “My therapist called it a foreshortened sense of the future.”

     He raised an eyebrow above his good eye. Both of his eyes worked fine, it was that one had goodness in it, one was the eye of a good man, a helper, a doer. The other, with both the slant of the socket and the eye within the socket, belied cynicism and uninvolvement in the general struggle. That was the more attractive eye, of course.

The Return of Lefty

graphic fiction in development

I sit in the office of a hand surgeon. She puts a copy of my X ray on the counter and says there is a certain amount of forgiveness you can expect, but that too much was needed here. She shows me with a protractor, fanning and setting it on the picture of my wrist. We look. We observe the beyond-forgivenessness of the fracture...

This Is Not An Accident

book

short stories and a novella

(viking/penguin, 2014)

STORIES

The Butcher Shop

McSweeney's

Issue 23

Me Me Me

The Sun Magazine

Issue 383

We Were Champions

Zoetrope All-Story

Vol. 12 No. 4

nonfiction

O, the Oprah Magazine

Strings Attached

     I currently teach creative writing in the MFA program at San Diego State University.

      I have an obsession with developing support structures for novelists,  figuring out how (if!) one can, I can, really help someone attempting something that difficult, solitary, elusive. 

       June 1st I will be launching  NovelRocket, a developmental engine designed to provide writers the practical, moral, and structural support needed to get a novel off the ground. 

      I also work with a few writers at a time one-on-one doing developmental editing. Click here to learn more: