HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the November meeting of its Wilde Reading Series, proudly continuing its ongoing eleventh season of highlighting local authors in Howard County. This month’s reading features Linda Kay Klein and Will Cole, hosted by Ricky Jones and Laura Shovan. Please join us at independent bookstore Queen Takes Book on Tuesday, November 10th at 7 p.m., at 6955 Oakland Mills Rd, Suite E, Columbia MD, 21045.
Our warm and welcoming open mic follows the featured authors and we hope you will let us hear from your stories, poems, or other piece. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time (about two poems) and sign up when you arrive. Books by the featured authors will be available for purchase.
Below, get to know Linda and Will!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Linda: My mom finds her way into most things I write. Every time I feel like I’ve finally got my own shape, she stretches herself out in my skin, parts of her protruding from me uncomfortably … and comfortingly … because it’s nice to know she’s still there … before I go back to therapy.
Will: Well, I write memoir, so I suppose it’s me. Beyond that, perhaps my ex-husband (past) and my best husband (present).
Where is your favorite place to write?
Linda: It has felt nearly impossible to find the space and time to write since the birth of my 6-year-old daughter. A few weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, worrying over when and where I would ever write again, when a wild idea flashed: “What if …” I thought, “… I were to ask my friend Brian if I could use his massage studio, which is just a few blocks from my daughter’s school, to write for an hour or two after drop-off the days he doesn’t see clients until late?”
Then, the following morning, I did something really outrageous: I asked him.
And this man—just an absolute spark of light, who, as it turns out, grew up in the small Wisconsin town next to mine, though we didn’t actually meet until I approached him at the end of a yoga class in Baltimore decades later and said, “Aren’t you in my choir? Want to grab a cup of coffee?”—anyway, this lovely, auspiciously-placed man unhesitatingly answered my audacious question “yes.”
So.
I am writing this blog post using a massage table as a desk.
And although it is my first time writing here in Brian’s calm, quiet studio, it is already feeling pretty “favorite.”
Will: If favorite means “where I write most,” then it’s at my desk in my home office, with my big monitors. Preferably with my cat on my lap. But I bet if I got a paid residency somewhere with a great view and excellent coffee and croissants within walking distance, that’d become my favorite.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Linda: Consistent? No. But I do have rituals. If I don’t take the time to move my body and clear my head before getting into things, eventually I burn out. When I have the time for it, I like to start my writing day with 30-minutes of 5 Rhythms dancing, followed by three pages of “morning pages,” as Julia Cameron would call them. Then I like to make myself a hot drink. Because how does anyone begin writing without a hot drink in hand? Oh! There you go. That—the hot drink—that’s about as consistent as it gets for me.
Will: Consistent? Rituals? Inconceivable! I have ADHD. When the lightning strikes, I write. If I need to write but can’t, I used to criticize myself and try to push through. Now, I try to switch to movement, arts or crafts, meditation, or eating, depending on what my body tells me I need.
Who always gets a first read?
Linda: I wish I had an answer to that question. In my experience, writing is lonely work.
Will: My husband, Josh. If my son is in the story more than incidentally, I always let him read it and request changes. He’s never asked for changes.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Linda: Letters to a Young Poet by [Rainer Maria] Rilke.
Will: Honestly, I have far too many books in my TBR pile to read things a third time, let alone more, unless I’m editing. In my younger years, though, I read the Chronicles of Narnia series four or five times, and still have my original, non-chronological boxed set. The Hobbit. H@rry P0tter series (though I now despise the author for her transphobic vitriol). And I doubt I’ll read it again unless it’s for research for my memoir, but I read the Book of Mormon 15 times from ages 11 to 24.
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Linda: My professor at Sarah Lawrence College, poet Victoria Redel, invited a group of us to attend a reading she was giving with a few other poets at The Red Room above the KGB Bar in New York City’s East Village.
I mean, you can hear how cool that was just from the facts, right?
Soviet-themed bar. East Village. New York City. POETS. I don’t even need to tell you that Victoria arrived wearing her signature leather coat.
My friends and I crammed into a corner, sharing chairs and drinking the coolest drinks we could think to order out of plastic cups so thin you had to hold them lightly or they’d cave in.
Life, it felt, was just beginning …
Will: The one that keeps popping into my head is also an author I don’t read anymore, given his homophobic public statements and book themes. He was a favorite of mine as a teenager, though, as a well-known and successful Mormon sci-fi/fantasy author (long before Stephenie Meyer and Brandon Sanderson). He was friends with a man in the neighborhood, and one Sunday evening when I was 13, my dad and I joined him in the friend’s living room with a handful of others. I was too starstruck to speak, but he signed the family copy of Speaker for the Dead.
• Linda Kay Klein is the author of the award-winning book, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free. Her writing and other work have been featured by NBC, CBS, The New York Times, and 150 other media outlets, including an hour-long interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, which was one of the 10 most listened to episodes of the year. Linda is an inspiring speaker and has given two TEDx Talks. Glennon Doyle calls her work “a fresh breath of freedom” and Gloria Steinem praises Linda for exposing a form of religious trauma that “must be understood by us all.” Linda also teaches creative writing and provides one-on-one coaching for individuals raised in purity culture.
LindaKayKlein.com should be back up and running soon— first as a temporary landing page from which you can find her book, most recent TEDx Talk, the video that The New York Times created about her work, and a few other things— and then in its new, reborn state.
• Will Cole is a queer, transgender writer, scientist, educator, and “seahorse dad.” In 2026, he completed an MA in Writing Nonfiction from JHU and the Yale Writers’ Workshop. He received the David Everett Award for Outstanding Thesis and his essay in Open Secrets was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2025). His work has also appeared in The Portland Review, Welter, Jarnal, The Science Writer, Baltimore Fishbowl, and Another Jane Pratt Thing.
You can find Will online at willcolewrites.com; Substack as @transcousin; and on Instagram and Bluesky as @yourtranscousin.
