The Science of Longing

What would make you believe the impossible? What happens when the desire to know becomes inseparable from the desire for something to be true? We like to imagine reason as solid ground, but grief, love, memory, and loss can make the boundaries between evidence, belief, obsession, and hope much harder to see. In their debut novels, Scott Lambridis and Yance Wyatt explore characters confronting realities that strain the explanations available to them. Their conversation will move between psychology, science, faith, mythology, and the impossible to ask what makes a belief reasonable, where skepticism becomes its own kind of certainty, and whether emotion distorts inquiry or gives it urgency. At stake is a deeply human question: when ordinary explanations fail us, what are we willing to believe in order to keep making sense of the world? Scott Lambridis writes literary speculative fiction about the stories people rely on to make sense of the world. He studied neurobiology before earning an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. His fiction explores belief, consciousness, trauma, and the strange places where psychology, folklore, and love begin to overlap. Before publishing his debut novel, St. Ulphia’s Dead, Scott toured with a progressive rock band, founded an independent press and literary performance series, tended a forty-acre olive farm, and read a book from every country in the world. He lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his family. More at scottlambridis.com. Yance Wyatt was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. He studied fiction at the University of Cambridge and the University of Southern California, where he has gone on to serve as professor of writing and director of the Writing Center. As fiction editor with The Blue Mountain Review, he seeks to acquire the best new stories from the South. His own stories have appeared in dozens of nationally circulated literary journals and received several Pushcart Prize nominations. The Watersmith is his first novel. Visit him @yancewyatt or www.yancewyatt.com.