The University of Cincinnati’s Robert and Adele Schiff Fiction Festival returns to the Elliston Poetry Room April 2 and 3. Director of Creative Writing Chris Bachelder says the fest gives their community of students and the greater literary scene a chance to see writers at varying points in their careers.
“This time we have two writers with one book and two writers for three books,” Bachelder says. “They’ve taken different paths; that’s the kind of diversity we’re looking for. We’re also looking for writers doing different things on the page with different influences, inspirations and models.”
Speaking on the selection process, he notes that they began with a big list before whittling it down to four: Lydi Conklin, Ananda Lima, Maurice Carlos Ruffin and Adam Ehrlich Sachs. CityBeat caught up with Lima ahead of the festival to discuss her work, process, love of Gremlins 2 and more.
Published in 2024, Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil features interconnected stories in which a writer sleeps with the devil and sees him throughout her life. Craft is surreal, meta and layered with pop culture references to horror icons.
“I love reading about other writers and I love when they put themselves –– either themselves or a writer, an avatar –– [in a story],” Lima says. “One of the things I love is acknowledging how the story is constructed.”
Craft takes readers through writing workshops and the very creation of the story within the story. Lima’s meta approach might make you question what’s real and what isn’t (or if she is actually the writer depicted).
“When I started writing this book ages ago to the end, I felt like I understood myself as a writer much more than before I began,” Lima says. “That was fun. Earlier on, I was a good student, so I was always like: ‘I must do this. I must do that.’ Toward the end, I was like: ‘No, I don’t have to do these things.’”
Lima finds inspiration in ‘80s and ‘90s horror in the way they often blend scary and funny moments together. This mixture of two feelings from opposite poles creates an unsettled feeling Lima loves. Readers will see this play out in “Tropicália,” which opens with a quote from Brain Gremlin. In the same story, the character carries around a Gizmo keychain.
“There are so many layers in Gremlins 2 that work with [Craft],” Lima says. “First, the meta aspect of it. And also, the fact that in Gremlins 2, it feels like they did whatever they wanted to do. You feel great joy in the writing and people having a lot of fun. Even though my book has so much darkness in it, I felt that, ‘Yes, I am doing whatever I want here.’”
Another layer that makes Gremlins 2 work with Craft is its play on invasion fears, which Lima ties to current immigration anxieties and prejudices. Now splitting her time between Chicago and New York, Lima grew up with the movie in Brazil, making it feel like a part of her personal lore. While you’re likely to find humor in Craft, it also touches on heavy, pressing themes.
“I need the joy of language and all the fun literary stuff I’m doing –– the meta, the references –– all these things that make me happy have to be there together with the things that make me extremely sad for me to get through it,” Lima says. “That is something very important for us living through this now. You have to not forget and pretend that terrible things exist.
“You have to have that very present in your mind. But you cannot forget the things that make you want to get through it. In this book, that happened very organically just from living it.”
Lima didn’t necessarily set out intending to write about immigration or other political issues. Instead, she sat down to write things that interested her from an artistic perspective; those themes just happened to come out in her writing.
When it came to evoking the devil, Lima says it started with the idea of writing a story about a devil that was a bit of a bro. But it also came from being exposed to a host of devils. In Brazil, she says there is folk literature featuring the devil where people often trick him instead of the other way around. Later on, she researched takes on the devil from varying political theologists, literature and more.
“I could not put any of that research in the book,” Lima says. “Other people told the history and did that work very well. And the writing would just be bad if I tried to be faithful to the theory out there and to the fact. I decided I would take all that inspiration and let my devil be whatever he wanted to be.”
Circling back to the festival, Lima echoes Bachelder’s sentiment, saying that her, Conklin, Ruffin and Sachs make for a great variety of writers. When asked what advice she would give aspiring writers, Lima says that it has always been hard to know the future, but now even more so.
“Separate in your mind career, prizes and publication –– all this external world stuff –– from your writing and your art. They do go together and live together, but make them independent in your mind. Just because you’re not getting published, it doesn’t mean that your work is bad,” Lima says. “Having done that separation, really learn how to get your joy and find the good stuff in your work and enjoy the process of making the work just for the making.”
Festivalgoers can hear a fiction reading from Conklin and Ruffin at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 2. On April 3 at 11 a.m., the festival will host a panel discussion about the “various forces that have helped to generate and shape their work.” Lima and Sachs will close out this year’s fest with a fiction reading at 5:30 p.m. on April 3. While the writers are different in style, Bachelder says they’re all “energetic on the page.”
That sentiment is reflected in UC’s creative writing department. Bachelder says that, unlike some grad programs, they’re not looking for an in-house style or specific kind of writer.
“That extends to the visiting writers that we bring into this fiction festival,” Bachelder says. “Our undergraduates and graduates are doing all kinds of different work and hopefully they find something in one of these writers that they respond to.”
The University of Cincinnati’s Robert and Adele Schiff Fiction Festival returns to the Elliston Poetry Room April 2 and 3. More info: artsci.uc.edu.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s March 19 print edition.
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This article appears in Mar 19 – Apr 2, 2025.