I so wish I had a better answer for this, but here goes: the line “The letter arrived on my eighteenth birthday” kind of popped into my head one day, and that doesn’t usually happen to me, so I tried to figure out what it meant. Tell me a little about where the idea for QUESTIONS I WANT TO ASK YOU came from. She is the director of the MA in Writing and Publishing program at DePaul University in Chicago. Her second novel, The Countess, was a Target Discovery pick and published in ten languages. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, Mississippi Review, Harvard Review, Printer’s Row Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mademoiselle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Self, and Seventeen. Later, she left the magazine business to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she wrote her first novel, Icebergs, a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award. She’s the author of Questions I Want to Ask You (2018), Pushing Perfect (2016), and Playlist for the Dead (2015).Ĭhicago-area native Rebecca Johns first intended to be a journalist because she thought that would allow her to support her fiction-writing habit. She currently serves as Director of the Communication and Legal Reasoning program at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law and teaches fiction on the side at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. She quit practicing law to study fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and ever since, she’s been teaching legal writing and fiction writing and writing novels. After that, she attended Columbia Law School in New York and went on to be an intellectual property litigator in Silicon Valley. She pretty much spent her whole childhood reading and then went off to study literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Michelle Falkoff was born and raised outside of Boston.

The countess by rebecca johns