Contributor Interview: L.B. Browne

L.B. Browne is the winner of the 2025 Broad Ripple Review Prize in Fiction. Her story, "The Dress Department" appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review

What's your favorite punctuation?

The em dash. Real thought isn’t linear and doesn’t arrive whole, and the em dash is honest enough to capture that. No other mark so boldly and elegantly barges in, interrupts language, changes direction midstream, and then steers a sentence back on track.

A literary hot take you have?

Book blurbs deserve a swift, painless death. Every one of them insists the book is “brilliant,” “devastating,” “unforgettable.” Every author is a “once-in-a-generation voice.” Prose are always “luminous.” Has anyone ever been swayed to read a book because of a blurb? The whole process is embarrassing—authors applauding each other in increasingly meaningless superlatives.

What led you to write “The Dress Department”?

I’d been reading about the theory of enclothed cognition—the theory that what we wear doesn’t just reflect who we are, but can actually shape how we think and feel. I began thinking about what that might look like in grief, when you may no longer recognize yourself or know who you are. So, the story follows a woman who keeps buying and returning dresses, trying to find one that fits not just her body, but her sense of self, the woman she wants to be. It became a way to explore how the outer self can become a rehearsal for the inner one, how transformation starts in the mirror.

What topics do you think are most notable in writing right now? 

The return of genre-blending in the past twenty years or so has been exciting. Of course, the practice is older than Shakespeare. Writers have always crossed genres to create unique narratives or stylistic experiences. But there have been times when we couldn’t really admit that. Most recently, maybe starting in the 1980s up until the early 2000s, “literary” basically meant domestic realism, and I think fiction as an artform lost a certain sense of play or mischief. But the pendulum has swung back, and now thankfully, stories that include magic and spaceships can once again be taken seriously.

I saw that you’re based in NYC! Were you born there, or did you move later in life? If so, did you feel like you had to because of New York’s dominant writing/publishing scene? If not, how would you say New York culture has influenced your writing?

I moved to NYC for undergrad and have been in and out ever since. I never felt I had to stay here to be a writer. In fact, I’ve lived and worked all over the world, and if anything, those experiences have been the greater education, continually reshaping how I see and write. But I did my MFA here in NYC, and there’s no denying that being here offers both an insider fluency in how publishing works and the opportunity to find a creative family.

I also noted that you’re a fiction editor for LIT Magazine. Is it hard being an editor as someone who also understands the grueling submission process? Do you have a preference for one side of publishing over the other?

Editing has made me more patient and humble. Reading hundreds of submissions reminds you that this is a business of opinions, that so much of publishing depends on timing and fit. It’s also made me less precious about rejection. Most pieces that don’t get accepted aren’t “bad,” they just don’t quite belong there. I love both sides for different reasons: editing lets me champion another writer’s voice; writing forces me to work on my own.

Now that “Dress Department” has wrapped up, what’s next on the writing docket?

I’m deep into a novel that blends genres! A literary mystery that’s both gothic and cerebral. It’s a project about authorship and inheritance, how knowledge becomes its own form of temptation. Whether the book will ultimately work is anyone’s guess, but I’m having a great time wrestling with the story.

Do you have any advice for upcoming writers looking to get their work published?

Write to your obsessions, not trends. Read more than you write. Read journals before you submit to them; find editors whose taste surprises you. And protect your joy: publishing is slow, subjective, and sometimes punishing, but the act of making something that didn’t exist before, of living in creation, is the real prize. It can be difficult to remember that everything else is noise.

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About the Author

L.B. Browne is a writer, editor, and physician based in New York City. Her work has been published in The Sewanee Review, LIT Magazine, ABCNews.com, and Public Seminar. She currently serves as fiction editor of LIT Magazine. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School, an MS in journalism from Columbia University, and an MD from Duke University. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and an NIH Clinical Research Training Fellowship. She recently completed her first novel.

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About the Interviewer

Ollie Sikes (they/them) is an evolving queer writer, editor, and creator based in Dallas, TX. They completed a double BA in Creative Writing and Theatre at Butler University. Besides volunteering with Broad Ripple Review, they also serve as Content Creator for the little things literary magazine. Their poetry has been published with Synchronized Chaos. You can follow them on Instagram @ollie.sikes.