Natalie Sierra
Natalie Sierra is the author of Medusa, a collection of poetry reworking the myth for modern times. Her work has been featured in the Westwind: A Journal for the Arts from UCLA, the Los Angeles Times, and more.
Natalie is also the editor-in-chief for Disquiet Arts, an alternative lit/gothic art literary magazine.
Natalie lives in Pomona, CA with her husband, three daughters, four dogs, and their latest addition, a kitty named Angel.
Fiction
A Cry in the Night
written by Natalie Sierra
In Hollywood in 1929, a young actress working as a telephone switchboard operator receives a terrifying call — a woman screaming for help, silenced by a sudden gunshot. When the police investigation leads nowhere, she jumps into action to try to learn the identity and the fate of the mysterious screaming woman.
© 2020 Natalie Sierra | Recording © 2020 Rivercliff Books & Media. All rights reserved.
Read by Taylor Coan
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Stitcher | Email
Q&A with Natalie
Tell us about your story...
A Cry in the Night is the story of one woman’s search for a killer, set in 1920’s Los Angeles.
What was the inspiration for this story?
I’m obsessed with old Hollywood and vintage items, but most especially old photos. I received a packet of one woman’s headshots, including a few personal photos, as a gift. Well, being the curious-to-a-fault person that I am, I set out on a quest to learn as much as I could about the woman. Her name was Mary Elizabeth Stewart.
I ended up visiting some of the places in L.A. where she had been. From that, I wondered how she might haven gotten by when she wasn’t working in the studio, what kind of things she did in her free time, what she might have seen… that’s how the ghost of the story began to form.
What have you recently read that you loved?
Weather by Jenny Offill. Poetic, quietly beautiful. Atmospheric and moving.
Someday I want to...
Live by the beach in Northern California and write, undisturbed.
What do you like to do when you're not writing?
Watch movies, read poetry and horror stories. Listen to the same song over and over again until I don’t notice when it ends or where it began.
Do you have any hidden talents?
My cooking skills * chef’s kiss…
On the weekends I like to...
If I’m not working, I’m hanging out with my husband and kids, most likely watching their playful antics and falling asleep in the armchair with a book in hand.
Tomorrow I absolutely refuse to...
Wash a single goddamn dish.
Anything else you'd like to share?
Believe women.
If You Enjoyed This Episode…
give these a listen!
Finding the Lost River
Michael Fallonis a Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the English Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he taught a huge variety of writing courses, Creative Writing, and Literature for thirty-five years. His poems have appeared recently in Northeast Narrative, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Connecticut River Review, The Loch Raven Review, Illuminations, Southword, and other...
Driving the Section Line
Sarah K. LenzSarah K. Lenz’s nonfiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, The Fourth River, Entropy, South Dakota Review, Crab Orchard Review, Front Porch, and elsewhere. Three of her essays have been named Notable in Best American Essays, and she received the New Letters Readers’ award in nonfiction. Sarah holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Georgia College in Milledgeville,...
Trash Can Blues
Jerry Visspent the earliest years of his life in Paterson, New Jersey, where he was born in 1939 into a blue-collar family struggling to overcome the lingering effects of the Great Depression. He has an M.F.A. in fine art and taught for many years in public school and college. He is the author of Paterson Boy: My Family and Other Strangers: A Memoir in Twenty-Eight Stories and is presently...