An Interview with Megan Milks, 2026 Judge of the Waasnode Fiction Prize
Megan Milks (they/them) is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, Slug and Other Stories, and Mega Milk: Essays, all published by Feminist Press. Their personal history of early online music fandom, Tori Amos Bootleg Webring, was published as part of Instar Press's Remember the Internet series. They are also the co-editor, with Marisa Crawford, of We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers.
Fiction team lead Frankie Spring interviews Megan Milk for Passages North.
Frankie Spring: What makes a piece of fiction memorable for you?
Megan Milks: I love a work of fiction that combines some level of craft experimentation or structural adventurousness with feeling. Especially when reading short fiction, I love to see a writer showing me something new about what we can do in and through narrative. But more than that, I want to experience some level of intimacy with the writer and/or their characters. I want to see a writer working through something and inviting me into that process.
Frankie Spring: Name a short story or collection that you read at the right time in your life. Why did it speak to you in that particular moment?
Megan Milks: In 2014, I came upon Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing in Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium in Vancouver, Canada, when I was in town for a conference. I was drawn in by the cover—Tom’s magnificent pompadour against day-glow green, the hot pink “blood” dripping from an obviously fake scar on his cheek. When I read the back copy, I was sold. Like the best moments in Kathy Acker’s work, Tom’s stories exhilarated me. They were unlike any stories I had read: they followed their own logics, they were gonzo and maximalist and unpredictable and hilarious. But at the core, there was heart. At the time, I had been feeling disconnected from my writing practice, like I had forgotten how to write stories because I’d lost sight of the kinds of stories I wanted to write. Look Who’s Morphing zapped me back to life.
Frankie Spring: In fiction, you’ve played with different fictional genres and their constraints; your brand-new book, Mega Milk, is an essay collection. How do these genres respond similarly to your writerly attention? How do they respond differently?
Megan Milks: I think of fiction as a possibility machine. It gives me opportunities to put ideas and characters into action and see what they do; it gives me space to revise my life. In fiction, I am often engaged in a practice of rewriting the self via new embodiments and new generic frames. I use the personal to bend genre in unexpected ways, while also inviting genre to bend and remake the self.
In personal nonfiction, I am writing the self more straightforwardly, though I’m also trying to keep the self, and the essay as a form, open to possibility. I’m bending and remaking the self by giving myself new experiences and new knowledge (via experiential and other research; and also just being open to life—and to fantasy) and charting those shifts in writing. When I turned to the essay as genre, I initially felt stymied by the supposition that I would now be stuck with my regular old everyday self—ugh. But then I realized that this everyday self is still shaped by fantasy… and when I allowed fantasy to leak in, that’s when the writing started to flow.
Find Megan Milks on Instagram at @sklimnagem and submit to Passages North’s Waasnode Fiction Prize on Submittable.
