by Writing Workshops Staff
3 hours ago
There's a sentence near the top of Meg Pokrass's Perseverance Interviews that we can't stop thinking about. After fifty rejections of a story she believed in — five years of tinkering, doubting, revising, sending it out again — Erin MacNair distills the whole hard-won lesson into a single line: "Now that I've had many, many rejections, I know that sometimes a piece just needs the right reader."
The right reader, in this case, turned out to be Joyce Carol Oates.
Erin's ghost story "It Is Certain" appears in Conjunctions:83 / Revenants, The Ghost Issue, co-edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow. Open the table of contents and you'll find Erin's name alongside Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, Paul Tremblay, Peter Straub, Ben Okri, and Oates herself — about as charged a lineup as contemporary literary horror can muster. For a piece that started its life as the kind of story magazines kept calling "close, but not this time," that's no small thing. That's a vindication.
Erin MacNair is a Wisconsinite who has made her home in North Vancouver, BC, where she serves as Writer in Residence for the North Vancouver Recreation and Culture Commission — running write-ins, hosting flash fiction workshops, and emceeing the city's first Story Slams. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in The Baffler, The Walrus, subTerrain, and Cosmic Horror Monthly, and her debut speculative fiction collection, The Museum of Admirable Suffering, is forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions in 2028 with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her story "Sand Penis" is being included in Best Canadian Stories 2026. She is, in short, having a moment — and it is well-earned.
"It Is Certain" is, by Erin's own description, a 4,000-word ghost story about a spirit trapped in a hospital, looking for her long-dead son and slowly learning the rules of the in-between. Three POV shifts. Many drafts. Literary in form, with horror elements and dark humor stitched through. As Erin tells Meg, "It was literary, so didn't fit the horror genre, yet it had horror elements as well as dark humor. The story straddled a few worlds, like the ghost in it!" That straddling — the very thing that made it itself — was also what made it tricky to place. It needed an editor whose imagination had room for all of it at once.
Erin has been generous in pointing to the broad ecosystem of teachers, residencies, and reading hours that shaped her practice over the years. We're honored that WritingWorkshops.com has been a small stop along that road, going back to The Big Texas Read with Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth McCracken in 2022.
Since then, she's joined us for Amber Sparks's Editing Short Fiction and Essays Through Play and Games, Kyle Minor's Twelve Structure Ideas for Your Story, Essay, Memoir, or Novel, Kritika Pandey's Writing the Dark, the Funny, and the Darkly Funny short story intensive — a class whose very title could be a thumbnail of "It Is Certain" — and most recently The Road to Getting Published: From Rejection to Read with Jenna, a seminar with Ethan Joella whose own arc from 100+ rejections to Scribner-published novelist mirrors the kind of patience Erin has lived. Given how perfectly her ghost story sits inside the modern gothic tradition, Amber Sparks's The Modern Gothic: Making Haunted Fictions for the 21st Century feels like a natural next stop for any writer drawn to Erin's territory.
What we love most about Erin's interview with Meg is how unsentimental she is about the work of getting better. She kept tinkering with the story even on the final pass, taking Bradford Morrow's note that she was opening too many sentences with "she" — "So simple, yet it made such a difference." She is unromantic about rejection, too: some of those early submissions, she admits, went out before the story was ready. She had to learn the difference between a draft she believed in and a draft that had truly arrived. Her advice to writers trying to tell the difference is the kind of thing you want to print out and tape above your desk: "If you believe in the story, if you know there's something there worth sharing––don't give up. And aim high! You never know!"
When the email finally came from Bradford Morrow, Erin says she set a personal record for how many times one human being can say omigod in an empty room. We love that detail. It's the sound of a writer who has done the unglamorous work for years and is allowing herself, for one stunned afternoon, to feel the size of it.
What's next? A speculative fiction novel. With aliens. And retro cars. And, per Erin, churros. "You know, the basics!" We can't wait.
Ready to write the story only your right reader is waiting for? WritingWorkshops.com brings together working authors, agents, and editors inside an online creative writing community built for writers in it for the long haul. Whether you're shaping your first short story or sending out submission number forty-nine, our seminars, intensives, and master classes offer expert instruction, a generous cohort of fellow writers, and a track record of alumni finding their way into print. Your right reader is out there. We'd love to be one stop along your road.
