Author Q&A with Patrick Strickland

Patrick Strickland is an award-winning journalist and author from Texas who has reported from some fifteen countries across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, covering immigration, the rise of the far right, humanitarian catastrophes, armed conflict, and more. Based in Athens, Greece, he is the managing editor of Inkstick Media. His books are Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle, The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, and You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece, and most recently, the story collection A History of Heartache (Melville House, 2026). He was a 2024 de Groot Foundation Writer of Note.

His short fiction, Day Drinking, appears in Issue #25 ~ Autumn 2026.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’ve been living abroad for most of my adult life. After my undergraduate, I moved to the Middle East and started working as a journalist. I lived in Palestine, Lebanon, Qatar, and now Greece, with a couple stints back in Texas in between. Around fifteen years and some change, all told.

What was the inspiration behind Day Drinking?

I go on pretty long walks every morning, oftentimes for a couple hours, and one day last summer, I passed a bar near where I live. There were a few old guys sitting around in there, each staring into their drinks. It wasn’t much of a scene. Truth be told, I’d probably seen that image a hundred times. I’d probably lived it a few times myself. But I just had the realization I’d never written a bar story. Bars pop up in a lot of my stories, to be sure, but not simply putting a guy in a stool and putting him through the wringer. For me, every story starts with a voice. “Day Drinking” began with this line in my head about white lies. I don’t recall the exact words from that time, but it eventually became, “Truth was, why Mack sent me packing wasn’t much of a story. I’d stretched the truth a little. Harmless stuff. White lies. But he lost his shit on me, clawed my face bloody.”

From there the story came together fairly quickly. I wrote a sketch of the story that day and sat on it a couple weeks, then started revising and filling in details.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it?

This is rare for me, but the story didn’t involve nearly as much revision as it usually takes me to feel good. I’ve had stories that got rejected more than a hundred times and went through several dozen revisions over the course of years. This one was a small blessing. I tweaked it now and then and got some very trusted feedback, but the only thing that took some work was settling on an ending. The original ending was in the same spirit as this one, but I initially clipped it and kept rewriting it. I tried something a little more overtly hopeful. That didn’t work. Finally, one of those morning walks led to me thinking about hope, and from there, the last paragraph came together neatly.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

That hope is a small, precious thing in my mind. Everyone searches for it in stories. I certainly do. It’s why many of us read. But anytime I sit down to write, it starts to veer toward a darker, more bruised and mangled hope. I don’t expect everybody to see it there, but to my read, this story’s got something that resembles hope if you squint just right.

What do you hope readers take from it?

That’s for the readers to say. All I know is when the narrator spoke, I was drawn to the guy.

With a background as a journalist and much success with nonfiction work, we’re curious when you began writing and working on fiction.

When I was doing my undergraduate in Texas, I started writing fiction before I ever really considered journalism. This was maybe eighteen years ago. I had a couple of mostly forgettable stories picked up in magazines, but journalism offered something a little different. I was broke and graduated into the recession. I’d never traveled or seen anything of the world, and fiction didn’t strike me as something that could pay bills or put food in my stomach. I focused on journalism for several years while living abroad, but the notion of writing fiction still nagged me. It was all I really read, and it seemed inevitable that I’d give it a shot again.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?

I never felt there was much choice involved in it. Whether it was nonfiction or fiction, I always wrote every day. A large part of it is the crushing anxiety that comes with going out each day and being alive in the world. Another part is I just enjoy it—picking up on a voice and really tapping into it is puts you in someone else’s head for a moment. It’s about empathy. The journalism and nonfiction are too, but fiction really forces you to ask how you’d react if you were saddled with another person’s circumstances.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

The answer to that question changes every day. I didn’t read a ton growing up. The first book I ever read on my own was Albert Camus’s The Stranger. I was already at university, and it rattled me in this unique and entirely new way. More recently, I’ve been reading a lot of old pulp noir paperbacks, as well as several novels by a fantastic writer called Megan Abbott. There are others. I dig a lot of gritty, rural writers. I also watch a lot of movies and listen to old radio theater programs. All of it influences the way I think about stories. Also, my writing and reading friends, the people who talk about books they love with me or give me feedback.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

I write before work and after work. I think about writing when I go on walks. It’s kind of baked into every free moment I get in a day. I make myself write a minimum of a few paragraphs a day, or at least revise a little bit.

Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote?

The books I’ve recently read that cut me hardest were Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman and Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel. If you like fast, dark, and very literary books with a crime bent, they’re about as killer as you could hope for. Another book I like to hype is Mark Richard’s The Ice at the Bottom of the World. It has some seriously interesting sentences. And to be a little shameless, my first fiction book came out in April. It’s called A History of Heartache.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

I won’t deny its existence, but pull out a map and show me where, exactly.

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Thank you, Patrick, for sharing your work with us and for being a part of our growing community. We appreciate the time you spent on this Q&A and wish you success with the new book and all your writing endeavors.