Shelby Hinte: On the Power of a Country Song, Revision as Self-Reclamation, Making the Past Alive, and Her Debut Novel ‘Howling Women’

While Shelby and I were making plans to run the Write or Die magazine table at AWP this past March, I had what I thought would be a brilliant idea—to do this interview in person. I pictured us in a café, me like a staff writer for Rolling Stone, describing Shelby’s oat milk latte order and the combat boots she’d be wearing, as she sat across from me—a newly published novel author in the wild. And while Shelby agreed to the idea, the time we spent together in person for the first time in our five year internet relationship flew by us in the busy rush of the three-day convention and the after hours readings. But our phone interview three weeks later was still one of the most special I’ve done. In the six years I’ve been talking to writers here at Write or Die, getting to speak with Shelby about her book, Howling Women (LEFTOVER Books, 2025), was a wonderfully layered experience. Not only did the two of us meet right here in this little corner of the internet, but Shelby was such a frequent and brilliant interviewer for the magazine that she eventually took over the whole section as the interviews editor. The two of us have talked about interviewing others for so long, that it felt sort of cyclical—or dare I say, magical—to now have the chance to interview her for the publication that brought us together, as dear writer friends. 

Howling Women is a badass of a debut, following Sabine to the deserts of New Mexico, seeking salvation from a violent past. But through a metafictional confessional, we learn what happens when this escape turns into a spiral and where a single act of violence exposes all the truths she tried to forget. Shelby’s visceral prose transports us—inviting us to breathe in the dry desert air, feel the sticky bar floors beneath our feet, and sense the ever-looming vortex in the mountains, tinged with foreboding. You can feel the passion Shelby has for her craft on each page, in the way her sentences hum with tension, tenderness, and truth. 

In our interview below, Shelby Hinte and I discuss how her novel came to life—not all at once, but in layers, through questions she couldn’t stop circling. We talk about what it means to make space for both doubt and discovery in the creative process, the power of sad country songs, and how rewriting can sometimes be an act of self-reclamation. 

Kailey Brennan DelloRusso: To kick us off, there is a quote I love that I wanted to talk about. Sabine is reflecting on why change is always put on the woman. “Why should I be the one to change, to become a better person, to try and be smarter than where I came from, when it’s the man that lives where I came from that really ought to be the one to change?” 

I bookmarked that line immediately. It feels like a central question for the novel. I’d love to hear you speak more about that. Also, I realized that while I’ve known you were working on this book for a long time, I never actually knew the genesis or what inspired you to write it. 

Shelby Hinte: I love that line too, which, by the way, didn’t come until one of the very last drafts. When I started the book, what interested me most was place. I was really curious about writing in New Mexico. The Vortex specifically came from a joke, actually. It was sort of a dark, morbid joke with everyone I grew up with, which was: the town in New Mexico that I’d grown up in, a lot of really wild things happened there that felt like the sort of things you would read in a book about a backwards town. And we all would joke that, “oh, it must be something in the mountains.”  And that joke extended after some of us left and would come back for a wedding or some kind of event. It was supposed to be just like a fun, normal weekend, and then something tragic or horrific would happen. And we’d be like, “oh yes, this is why we left.” There is something so dark about this place that we just don’t understand. I don’t know if it’s just that a lot of people feel that way about the places they come from, or if that is New Mexico-specific—but I do think New Mexico is really interesting.

Then in terms of some of the more female questions—of why this onus of change is put on the woman—I think just as a woman, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the ways in which we have to protect ourselves or change ourselves in order to make space for the bad behavior of men. I think that’s really like a backwards way to go about it. It’s an obsession of mine, and it’s something I witness over and over again. Whether in my own personal life, or witnessing trials happening very publicly in the media of women who have been assaulted. 

What I wanted to do was write a story that took place in a strange place where there was a lot of room to play around with the surreality of something that is just kind of the everyday. 

KBD: I love that—that makes a lot of sense. I think it's really interesting that that line came later, because when you read a finished book, it’s so easy to assume, like, “oh, that must have been a central question from the start.” But maybe it wasn’t obvious at first—maybe it became clearer over time, through multiple drafts. 

SH: Totally. Yeah. And I think that’s true. I feel like writing a bunch of drafts is just circling around a question—one you maybe think you have, but aren’t totally sure how to articulate yet. I think now, with other projects, that question is more central in my mind. But with this book—my first—I started it in my twenties, and honestly, it was sort of just vibes, you know? There wasn’t a full plot.

So yeah, I think you’re right. We kind of circle around the thing we’re really trying to ask until, eventually, we get to a point where we can say, “oh, that’s it. That’s what’s interesting me.”

KBD: Speaking of obsessions—I’m obsessed with your country music references, especially the Brooks & Dunn ones, and some of the older country singers.

First of all, I thought you wove them in really well. In fiction, I think there’s a balance between naming a song outright, hinting at it, or just letting it play in the background—and you struck that balance beautifully.

But I also wanted to talk about ’90s country specifically. What does it mean to you? What’s your relationship to that genre?

SH: You know, I was just making notes about an essay I want to write about country music, based on my recent road trip to Southern California. I grew up listening to it—that’s just what we had. My mom had such eclectic taste, and I think I’ve inherited that. As an adult, my taste is all over the place too. But there was always a lot of country music in our house. Whenever there was a big mood—something really depressing or something really happy—country music was playing.

Pretty early on, though—maybe by middle school, even the end of elementary school—I realized, “oh, this thing I really love is not cool.” Which was strange, because I was obsessed with Brooks & Dunn, but my first concert was KISS. That was my favorite band. Music was always an obsession, but country music specifically, I had a fraught relationship with because it became this private secret space. 

Recently, I was driving to AWP, and before that to San Diego—it was an eleven-hour drive in one day. I had made this playlist, and I don’t think there was any country music on it at first. I listened to it for maybe two or three hours, and then by the second half of the drive, all I was playing was the same country albums on repeat, as loud as possible.

There’s just something about being on a wide open road—or in a liminal space, or feeling discontent—where a country ballad just hits. You can feel it in your chest. You can cry to it.
And yeah, I think for me, it just hits differently than anything else.

KBD: I was singing Neon Moon basically every day while I was reading your book. [laughs] It’s such a catchy song. You used it as an epigraph, and so it was in my mind the whole time I was reading, which was really fun.

It was kind of similar for me growing up—my parents listened to country, and then I hit that point where I was like, “oh, this isn’t cool.” But as an adult, it’s kind of lovely to revisit it. You still get the nostalgia, but you’re also having a totally new experience with it. You’re relating to things differently, or you just feel it in a new way. There’s just something about that time...

Besides Brooks & Dunn, who are some other favorite country singers — either now or then?

SH: Definitely Lucinda Williams. Gillian Welch, too—and I guess those are more folk or Americana, but Steve Earle as well.

And, okay, I feel a little bit embarrassed about this, but one of the albums I listened to a lot on my drive to Southern California was Lainey Wilson’s Whirlwind. Every single song on that album makes me cry—which is what I was in the mood to do. [laughs] 

There’s nothing that gets me crying quicker than a really good, sad country song. That’s all you need sometimes. Those are kind of the big hitters I go back to. And of course, Dwight Yoakam—that’s a favorite.

And yeah, Brooks & Dunn is all over that. I mean, every song. But Neon Moon might be one of my favorite songs of all time. I think it’s one of the most perfect songs ever written.

KBD: Now that I’m older, my sister and I do a camping trip every summer, and our playlist on the drive to New Hampshire—and for the weekend — is all old stuff. Shania Twain, LeAnn Rimes, all the classic ’90s country. We just listen to them all again. Same thing as you—in middle school, we were like, “Country music is so stupid.” And now I’m like, give it to me. I want the country music. [laughs]

But it has to be old. I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s different now. There are still good songs, but I feel like there was this peak time where it was just all so good.

SH: I sort of agree. That’s why the Lainey Wilson thing is so weird to me—she kind of gives me that same feeling. I can’t think of any other newer country singers I really listen to. I stumbled on her music kind of by accident—I wasn’t even actively listening to country at the time. But she’s so famous now, it’s hard not to stumble on her. Still, I was surprised that I’m so into these two country albums by a newer artist. That hasn’t happened to me since elementary school.

KBD: Now that we’re talking about it, there were so many really cool women in country music. They were totally their own thing—they weren’t doing what the pop girls were doing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I love pop too—but there was just something really cool and distinct about those country women.

SH: Totally. And thinking about it—I hadn’t thought about this in relation to the book, and there aren’t really songs tied directly to this in the book—but there’s nothing more vengeful than an angry country girl ballad, you know? Like, I’m thinking—oh my God—Goodbye Earl by The Chicks?

KBD: Yes! 

SH: That’s a song about murdering an abusive boyfriend or husband. It’s the kind of thing that gets written off as Podunk or silly, but honestly—even with the big blonde hair and the rhinestones—if you actually listen to the lyrics, they’re about getting revenge. Whether it’s on men who wronged them or the society that did. In that sense, it’s really empowering.

KBD: Yeah—there are so many songs like that. Like Kerosene by Miranda Lambert?

SH: Mm-hmm.

KBD: Oh, I love it. Okay, I also love how this novel reads like a confessional. I thought that was such a cool element—and you did such a great job balancing it.  Was that always the structure of the book, or did that come later? 

SH: That came toward the end, I would say. I’d been working on the book for probably four years—and, who knows, maybe seven to ten drafts. It wasn’t really until the last year or two, when I was deep into rewrites and starting to get a little traction with agents, that it became clear something wasn’t landing. One of the things that kept coming up was pacing or momentum. People were into the plot and the voice, but a few times I heard that the flashback-to-present-action ratio just wasn’t quite working. So I sat with that for a while. I swapped the manuscript with Mila [Jaroniec], and she said that the past seemed to be as alive as the present. So I sat with those questions and feedback for a while, to try to troubleshoot, how do I make the past feel alive?

I think I’d been playing it a bit safe by sticking to a more traditional narrative—like, present action, flashback, present, flashback. And because the book had gotten a lot of traction with agents but hadn’t been picked up, I kind of got into this “fuck it” mentality.  I wanted to try something more playful, more strange. I really love books that break the fourth wall, where it feels like the story is being written in real time. So I thought maybe I could do that myself and I could play into that, because if it’s already not sitting with people, then I can just write it the way that feels the most fun to me. 

So I rewrote the entire book with that structure in mind: Sabine awaiting trial and sifting through the events that led up to her shooting a man.

KBD: Yeah, I feel like that attitude was very Sabine of you—to rewrite the book like that. [laughs] I’d love to talk about novel writing in general. You write a lot of short fiction, you write a lot of essays—now that you’ve written a novel, and you're writing another, what do you love most about that form? I don’t know how many novels you’ve written in your life, but I know you’re a novel writer. So what is it about that form that pulls you in? What makes you keep coming back to it? When you started this one, or your next one, did you just know it was going to be a novel? 

SH: I think the reason I’m drawn to the novel is actually the same reason I’m drawn to the essay—I think of both forms as questions. At least with the two novels I’ve finished—Howling Women and the one I’m working on now—I’ve always started with a question. Usually it’s an emotional or relationship-based question that I want to explore. I approach essays the same way, but I think the stakes are a little higher with essays, because it’s your own personal life—and there are so many ways to get it wrong. With a novel, what’s exciting is that there are fewer rules. You get to make things up. And that imaginative space—that ability to push past real-life boundaries—is what really interests me. 

If I have a question about why a character is the way they are, or what might happen if—the novel gives me the freedom to push them into situations that maybe feel familiar to me, but where I can make different choices, or explore different outcomes. And I really get to ask, what would happen if they took it all the way? Specifically, I think what I’m most interested in is when characters do the most extreme things. 

So I feel like what draws me most to a novel is, here’s some emotional question that I want to explore, and here are these characters that maybe are similar to me, or have feelings that I’ve felt before, or have been in situations I’ve felt before—but their response to whatever life throws at them is the most extreme. Then it’s kind of just a domino effect of like, what happens next? How do they respond next? I always want to get someone on the page as far into a problem as possible—to see how it might blow up. What might be revealed? Which is kind of scary to do in real life—if I take this thing all the way to the edge, what if I can’t come back? And maybe that’s true for a character in a book, but you can close the book at the end. So I think that is what’s most interesting to me—is that space to just play around with something that maybe feels a little bit dangerous to play around with in real life.

KBD: I love that. I totally agree. That is great writing advice for someone reading this too, because I think that is what carries you through. Like, if you get stuck, it’s like—“okay, I just need to put this character under more tension, under more stress. How far can it go?” It’s so cool as the writer to be able to do that and live vicariously through the character in that way.

What are some challenges that came up for you when writing this book? 

SH: So many challenges came up. I had written a handful of novels before this one. I don’t know, maybe three or four... and I would say, like, air quotes “wrote,” because I didn’t finish them. I made it through like a hundred pages before kind of abandoning them. So I think one of the things that was the hardest was being confronted with problems I didn’t initially have the solution to—and to keep going. Because I had never done that before in any of the other books.

So that was the biggest challenge, which I think is just persistence—showing up even when it’s hard.

And then, going back to the idea of having a question you can stay obsessed with—I think that was crucial in being able to keep going, even when I was far along in the process.

I started this book in graduate school, and I was working on it as my thesis—turning in big chunks of twenty-five or fifty pages at a time and getting feedback. That can work for some people, and maybe it worked for a while for me, because I was getting encouragement. I’m sure that was a huge part of why I brought it to the end of a first draft—having someone say, “I believe in this, keep going.” 

But I also feel like I sometimes was full of self-doubt, or didn’t always take the time I should have to really ask big questions—because I was just trying to get it finished.
The biggest lesson I learned was that now I don’t share my work with anyone until I have a complete first draft—all the way, beginning to end. Because I don’t think it’s helpful, at least for me as a writer, to hear other people’s opinions on my work until I know, really truly, what it is I’m trying to do. I think just having shown so many people pages early on—whether they were in classes or with my thesis advisor—that was actually really difficult. It sort of forced the process in a way that was probably really useful in getting me to finish the book all the way to completion… but it kind of convoluted my own thinking.

The last thing that was really tricky was figuring out what needed to be on the page and what didn’t. The book originally was twice as long as it is now. I think it’s somewhere around 70,000 words, but the original drafts were 120-something or 130-something. And I had this—probably a trauma response to grad school—this intense feeling of having a responsibility to show everything, to make sure all the stakes were clear. That really dragged the pacing down.

So trying to figure out: what’s the story I’m actually trying to tell? What doesn’t need to be on the page but could be implied through another action? Or maybe just doesn’t need to be there at all? That took me a long time to figure out—that balance.  And honestly, that’ll probably be true forever with any book.

I read an interview once—I can never remember who said it—but they said something like: writing a story is really just seeing how much you can get away with not saying and still make sense. That’s sort of always in the back of my mind now.

KBD: So I know it’s always hard to know when a book is “done”—or at least done enough to start looking for a place to publish it. What was your editorial process like in getting to that decision?

SH: For me, the metric is pretty much always: do I think I’ve taken the book as far as I can take it? And so, the first time I started taking it out, I did feel like it was as far as I could take it. But the thing is—while you’re sending work out and it’s just sitting in people’s inboxes for months, waiting to be read or responded to—hopefully, you’re still writing. I was still writing. And you’re learning new things. You’re also kind of becoming a different person. 

Honestly, I feel like I could’ve kept editing this book for the rest of my life. And now that I’m having it published, I realize,  in a lot of ways, the reason for publication is just to take a project out of your hands.

But in terms of just logistically, or on a practical level, when to send work out—I think it’s when you feel like you’ve solved all the problems of the text to the best of your ability, until you know differently. Because a book can be full of infinite iterations. If you go to any workshop and hear someone submit a piece—and I always say this to my students—we don’t give real “criticism,” we just ask questions. Because really, all we’re pointing out is something that’s unanswered to us.

In the case of character motivation, for example, there are dozens of ways to show it in any given scene. You can use flashback, you can show the experience of the body, you can get really close with psychic distance and show their interiority, you can have them do some action… and none of those are right or wrong. They’re just choices. So I feel like that’s actually the hard part of writing a book—that there’s sort of an infinite number of options. And at some point, I think it’s just deciding: this is the way I want to tell it.

KBD: In terms of your writing life right now, I know obviously there’s all the excitement and planning around your book launch, but what is your writing life or practice looking like these days?

SH: So I was in a full rewrite of another book up until about two months ago. And then I had some crazy life stuff happen, and I found that it was just hard to work on that. I had to stop the rewrite because it was too emo—like, the project felt too close to what was happening in my personal life to keep working on it. I needed a little distance. I’m moving in two weeks, and I feel like as soon as I’m moved, I’m going back to that rewrite—because I think it would be good for me to emotionally process my whole life through rewriting a novel.

But in the last two months since I stepped back from that, my writing life has felt,  oddly,  really energized. I’m a morning writer, mostly because I work. And I have a pretty rigorous journaling practice, so I journal every morning. I’ve been working on a handful of essays—maybe trying to work through some of the stuff going on in my head.

So that’s kind of where I’m at right now—I’m in the creative nonfiction world, just writing a ton in my journal.

And then, when something presents itself as more than just my babbling diary entry—when there’s maybe a bigger question emerging—I’ll take that material out and stretch it into an essay, or try to see how I can open it up beyond just my own individual self. How maybe it’s a question that’s a little bit bigger than just me.

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Shelby Hinte is a writer from Northern California. She teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco, Writers.com, and Writing Workshops. She has served as an intern and editor for various independent presses including ZYZZYVA, Split/Lip, and No Contact. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Electric Literature, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. Her first novel, HOWLING WOMEN, released in 2025.