There's something quietly full-circle about this episode. Kelly Esparza — editor in chief of FLARE Literary Magazine, freelance editor, and writer living with lupus — was a stranger to Morgan until Kelly accepted her very first piece of published writing into FLARE. That single acceptance set something in motion. And now they're here, talking for the first time face to face (virtually), about what it means to build something out of a gap you noticed, to lead with honesty and generosity, and to keep writing through the challenges of chronic illness.
Kelly didn't start FLARE because she had it all figured out. She started it because she went looking for stories about chronic illness and came up mostly empty. Newly diagnosed with lupus, freshly graduated into a pandemic job market, she decided to make the thing she wished existed. She expected maybe a handful of submissions. What she got instead was a community.
This episode moves through a lot of territory — lupus and what it actually looks and feels like from the inside, the strange exhaustion of being a young person with an old person's joints, the grief that comes with measuring your energy in spoons, and the peculiar sweetness of finding people who just get it without you having to explain. They also talk about what it costs to create something — a literary magazine, a novel, a chapbook of grief poems about your own body — when your body is the thing you're writing about and the thing that keeps getting in the way.
Kelly shares her path to editing through internships and volunteer work with publications like Sonora Review at the University of Arizona and Free State Review, and how that experience shaped everything about how she runs FLARE — including her commitment to responding to submissions within 24 hours, keeping access free, and sending rejections that feel like they were written by someone who actually read your work, because they were. There are also exciting updates on Kelly's fiction life: she recently signed with a new literary agent she met in person at a book festival, and is working toward going on submission to publishers in the fall with her adult speculative mystery. Plus: her chapbook A Spoonie's Guide to Self-Acceptance, a small collection of lupus poems published by Bottle Cap Press — which Kelly explains with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you want to immediately go find a copy.
By the time they get to the closing questions — the ones that are, as Morgan admits, not exactly fun but absolutely worth asking — this conversation has become something warmer and stranger and more honest than either of them probably planned. The kind of conversation two chronically ill writers with a lot to say tend to have when they finally get to connect.
Timestamps
[0:00] Introductions, Kelly's background in writing and editing, and the origin story of Flare Literary Magazine
[17:00] What lupus actually is, Kelly's long road to diagnosis, and life after — symptoms and treatments
[40:00] The emotional weight of chronic illness, how FLARE actually works, and the editor's perspective on community, rejection, and what it means to believe in someone's work
[1:18:00] Kelly's fiction journey, A Spoonie's Guide to Self-Acceptance, dreams for FLARE's future, and the closing questions
","author_name":"Morgan Barrett"}