“Compulsively readable.”
—Vagabond City Lit

Elle Nash is the author of the novels Gag Reflex (Clash Books, 2022) and Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in the 2018 June Reading Room of O - The Oprah Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a ‘complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.’

Nudes (SF/LD Books and 404 Ink), her debut short story collection, is out now.

Her work appears in Guernica, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, The Fanzine, Volume 1 Brooklyn, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and has edited fiction at both Hobart Pulp and Expat Literary Journal.

Her writing and teaching experience is a culmination of learning under Tom Spanbauer, the creator of the Dangerous Writing workshop in Portland, Oregon, the same writing workshop Chuck Palahniuk attended in the 90s which he championed in his 2020 craft book, Consider This. You can read Elle’s interview with Chuck Palahniuk at Hazlitt. Tom developed Dangerous Writing with writer Peter Christopher before branching off on his own, after they both had studied under Gordon Lish at Columbia with the likes of Amy Hempel. (Read Elle’s interview with Gordon Lish on how to maintain your focus, as well as her interview with his son, Atticus, on the joy and pain of editing, at The Creative Independent).

Elle studied with Tom Spanbauer for two years as she completed her first novel, Animals Eat Each Other, and she follows along in this teaching philosophy that good writing has a feel to it and that it’s imperative to bring the reader to their knees. In 2022, she was asked to blurb the reissue of Peter Christopher’s Campfires of the Dead and The Living, which features an introduction by Palahniuk, and is forthcoming 11:11 Press this year.

Elle’s teaching and mentoring encompasses both traditional explanations of various writing ‘rules,’ the rational behind them, deconstructing them, discussing points where they might not work (such as in changing atmosphere and tone), as well as encouraging and discussing how to develop the positive self-talk needed to complete short or long range projects.