Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore takes long and meandering walks through Capitol Hill most days. From the height of summer to the depths of winter, if the sun is out, she’s soaking in it. On these walks during the pandemic lockdown, Terry Dactyl came to her. She couldn’t write it immediately because she was working on her memoir, Touching the Art, which came out in 2023. Before that, there was The Freezer Door, Sketchtasy, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, among other novels and memoirs, plus six anthologies and another currently in the works. She’s a prolific queen because writing is survival, she says.

“Writing is my process of staying alive,” Sycamore says. “It is embedded in how I live. Specifically, writing everything that I dream of, and everything that fails me, all of the emotional reality.

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