Introducing Contributing Editor of Fiction Max Delsohn

Welcome, Max! We’re excited to have you as the Contributing Editor of Fiction for Vol. 29 of Water~ Stone Review. Your debut collection of short stories, Crawl was published by Graywolf Press in October of last year. Since then it’s received a lot of praise and appeared on several “Best Books” lists. Congratulations! 

Thank you so much. I can’t believe it’s almost been a year already–It’s all still very surreal!

What are the themes and topics you find yourself returning to in your writing? What are your obsessions?

I write about trans men near-exclusively. I’m interested in the unique relationship a given trans man has to the world around him. Transitioning thrusts you into a very different kind of life than cis people. When I transitioned, I didn’t know how to think about it. It’s hard to think about transness because trans thought, speech, art, etc is so aggressively suppressed. When I first came out as trans it was very difficult for me to find rigorous, nuanced writing about the experiences I was having. Relatedly, I have always been obsessed with the concept of desire. I love trying to find language that maps desire.

I noted on your website that you’ve worked as a stand-up comedian. How does your comedy influence your writing? Your writing influence your comedy? 

I no longer work as a stand-up, but I do draw from it sometimes in my fiction. There’s a character in Crawl that is just starting out as a comic. I quit stand-up because I realized I only wanted to write jokes, I didn’t really want to perform them onstage or have to organically engage with the crowd. I think doing stand-up taught me, above all, not to waste a second when you have your audience’s attention. In stand-up, this can be as small as how you hold your hands on stage, or when you take a breath, which syllables of which words you emphasize, etc. Short stories benefit from this degree of scrutiny–every sentence, word, and sound should land somewhere between very good and perfect. It should be doing something–maybe it’s only a tonal flourish, maybe it’s information that complexifies a character, whatever, but it should strike the reader as useful or pleasurable or interesting or valuable in some way.

As an editor, what draws you to a piece of writing? Is there a particular lens you read through? What makes a piece stand out?

Boldness. I like when writing really shocks me–with its originality or strangeness, its edginess, its beauty, its vulnerability. So much in this life is boring and the same. I would like to see some really weird, personal shit.

What will you be looking for in the fiction submitted to Volume 29 of Water~Stone Review?

I am looking for stories that use language in surprising, intentional ways that serve the greater ideas the writer is pursuing–My favorite stories have real stakes, stakes for the writer that I, as the reader, can feel. Like, why did you write this? What’s the burning question at the heart of this story, where’s the desperate grasping for insight? 

What writing project are you currently working on?

I am working on a novel about a trans man who goes to an orgy in New York.

Current favorite writers, fiction and otherwise?

This is an absurdly difficult question! I just finished reading Harron Walker’s new novel, Veronica Place, and I loved it so much that I can’t even speak about it. I have been recommending it to people but it’s mainly been me telling them the title of the book then looking into their eyes meaningfully? I don’t know, I haven’t found the words to express how much I love this book yet. Some other books I read recently and loved: Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell, The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink, and Early Work by Andrew Martin come to mind.

Max Delsohn is the author of Crawl (Graywolf Press, 2025), a short story collection about trans men living in 2010s Seattle. Crawl was named a best book of the year by Vulture, Them, Electric Literature, Debutiful, and Chicago Review of Books, as well as a November Indie Next List pick. His short fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, VICE, Joyland, The Rumpus, Triangle House, Lit Hub, and Nat. Brut, among other places. He received his MFA degree from Syracuse University and now lives in Los Angeles.