We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Courtney Hunter-Stangler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Courtney, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I don’t consider myself a writer by trade, or at least, I didn’t always. I was a dancer for the majority of my young life, studied Fashion Merchandising in undergrad, and worked as a retail buyer for almost five years before I decided to try writing. And I learned to write by doing it.

In 2017, I produced a contemporary dance performance for Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival, and when the performance was finished, I felt there was still more to the story that I told on stage. I decided I wanted to turn the concept for the piece into a book. So, I did. First lesson in craft: try new things! You’ll be shocked at what carries over from one discipline to the next.

In 2020, I self-published my debut novel, Sentience, a science fiction exploration of the ethics of artificial intelligence. Think Westworld meets The Hunger Games. Self-publishing can sometimes be seen as a double-edged sword, but having that experience as my angle into writing was invaluable because I was entirely in control. I also didn’t have any voices in my head to make me doubt myself. The book sold 4,500 copies and had strong reviews on Amazon. I think I had some natural talent, a great work ethic, and a little bit of beginner’s luck.

Next is where the craft really comes in. I used my novel as a writing sample to get into an MFA program to hone my craft, and in 2021, I was accepted into UC Riverside’s Low Residency MFA Program. I learned a TON about writing as well as the publishing industry, which is something that made my program unique. Ultimately, everything I learned in grad school came down to reading, both reading published books and reading my classmates’ work in workshops. While I absolutely loved my experience at UCR, I don’t think an MFA is the only way to hone your craft because reading is something that can be done independently.

What I will say UCR gave me that I wish I had known sooner is the concept of reading for my writing rather than just reading for enjoyment. If you’re writing a first-person present novel, read first-person present novels. If you’re writing a third-person multi-POV novel, read third-person multi-POV novels. Pay attention to the plot points, and make sure you’re hitting the same emotional beats in your own work. There is a fantastic piece written by Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek, describing how she used Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River to help her write her book. (https://www.vulture.com/article/angie-kim-mystic-river-miracle-creek.html). It’s such a simple concept to use successful books as frameworks for your own, especially at the beginning of your career, but sometimes we get so caught up in the desperate need to reinvent the wheel that we overlook the core concepts of narrative that speak to everyone at a human level.

This is sort of a full-circle thing, too. When I was a retail buyer, we were constantly visiting the stores of our competitors doing something called “comparative shopping.” Checking out the merchandise assortments of both my direct and aspirational competitors helped me identify blind spots and figure out what I needed to do to make my assortment better.

TLDR: Look to the greats, and just do it!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Courtney Hunter-Stangler, and at my core, I’m a storyteller. Now, I tell stories in the most literal sense, as a novelist and writer, but it wasn’t always that way.

My introduction to the arts was dance. I started at two years old, but dance as storytelling didn’t take shape in my life until I was quite a bit older. Once I joined my childhood studio’s senior dance company, I began to participate in contemporary dance pieces that told stories. I learned about composition, structure, themes, and even character. I learned how stories play on feeling.

So, once I graduated high school and moved on to college, after spending some time dancing in a Philadelphia-based company called The Blind Faith Project, I started my own company called Stolen Fire Collective. SFC is now mostly defunct as I focus on writing, but with this company, I produced a contemporary dance show for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2017 that went on to be the source material for my first novel, Sentience.

Sentience got me into grad school, and now, I’m working on my sophomore novel, a literary crime novel set in the neighborhood in Philadelphia where I grew up. When I’m not working on writing my novel, I also write about Film, Television, and Books for Dread Central, The Lineup, and Murder & Mayhem.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

If you want to talk about resilience, look no further than a novelist. There is nothing that demands resilience more than the process of revising. Writing can be deeply personal, and it requires so much to open your work up to criticism.

One story that particularly highlights my resilience is that even though I am in the process of editing what (I think) will be my second published novel, it’s technically my third book. While I was in graduate school, I was working on a different project entirely, and I had to walk away from it.

When I arrived at my graduate school residency orientation, I heard stories about people having to change the voice and tense of their novels, and this terrified me. (It is so much work). I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t let this be me, that from day one I would write my new novel exactly as it needed to be told. What a stupid promise to make.

A year into my program, I needed to change the tense and the voice. And a year after that, when I met with my graduation advisor, we decided that the project needed to be shelved. It simply was not working.

That’s what happens in writing sometimes. Maybe I’ll go back to that project one day, maybe I won’t. But what I do know is that I was writing about a personal subject matter that made it hard for me to abandon my experiences in service of a stronger plot.

It took resilience to admit I was getting stuck in a trap that I created, and it took resilience to start again. I’m working with a prospective agent on my current novel, and when they called me with a list of revision requests, guess what they asked for? A tense change! Fortunately, this time around, the task doesn’t feel quite as daunting.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I have taught creative writing to kids and adults, and I love teaching. I want to teach more. For so long, I held myself back from teaching because I thought I didn’t know enough to do it, but I do. (Teaching actually teaches you in the process).

I love nothing more than when someone sits down with me in a workshop. tells me they can’t write (and they genuinely believe that), and then they whip out a gorgeous, breathtaking sentence that hits like a goddamn truck. It astounds me how much people have inside them waiting for the right person to help them get it out.

It is always a joy to be that person.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://courtneyhunterstangler.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/courtneyhunterstangler

Image Credits

All images are mine except for the image of me bowing at the end of my dance performance against the purple background. Credit for that image belongs to Brian Mengini.