Sandy Ebner lives and writes in Northern California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, the HerStories/ My Other Ex anthology, and other publications. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from California State University, and is an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She previously served as the creative nonfiction editor at MadHat Lit and MadHat Annual (Mad Hatter’s Review), and is working on her first novel.

I’ve spent most of my adult life after hours. Not just in smoke-filled bars and restaurants where, as a bartender, I saw the pain, humor, goodness, cruelty, and dysfunction of the human condition. But also afterwards, in the after hours, where the mind often goes to strange places: the minutiae of life—love, hate, food, drink, places I’ve been, people I’ve known—but also the arcane and the obtuse, a miscellany of odd, unrelated things that make me curious. Often I think about books and writing, and writers, both famous and infamous, or basically unknown, like me. I think about our differences and similarities, how we somehow manage to navigate the strange mix of terror and optimism that is the writing life. I think about anything and everything, after hours.
READ ALL COLUMNS BY SANDY EBNER:
- Why Food Writing Matters: A Profile of John Thorne
- Twice Loved
- Hatred Learned
- A Conversation with Frances Dinkelspiel
- Some Thoughts on AWP
- Distracted by Life
- Brown Bottle by Sheldon Lee Compton
- Gracious Little Bastard: The Story of a Chef
- A Conversation with Meg Tuite
- An Alleyway in Paris