Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 301 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Chandler Clang Smith.

She's a graduate of Bennington College and the Creative Writing MFA program at Columbia University

and she's worked in book publishing as a ghost writer and

for the KGB Bar literary venue. She served twice as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards,

and she teaches and tutors in New York City. And we'll be speaking with her today

about her new novel The Sky Is Yours, about a surreal science fiction city that for decades has been

under attack by dragons. And now here's our interview with Chandler Klang Smith.

All right, so we're here with Chandler Klang Smith.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so it says in your bio that you went to Bennington College and it seems like a lot of writers go there.

So I was just curious what it was like going to Bennington as an aspiring writer.

Yeah, I had a really great experience there.

You know, it is, as you know, like a small liberal arts college in Vermont and one of the things that really appealed to me about it is that you get to design your own education.

So I was really able to follow my own imagination and

inspiration with the stuff I studied. I studied literature and philosophy and yeah and I

got to work independently from pretty much the beginning on a lot of creative projects, which I think

empowered me to feel like I could go on and write books in the future.

Now, I mean, the two writers that I know who came out of Bennington just off the top of my head are Brett Easton Ellis and Jonathan Letham. Were you sort of aware that they had gone there? Is that something people still talk about?

Yeah, definitely. Jonathan Letham actually ended up being our commencement speaker when I graduated.

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