Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”

Apple Podcasts logo

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Spotify Logo Green

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Lucas Schaefer Podcast.

LUCAS SCHAEFER speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about his story “Tuesday,” which appears in The Common’s brand new spring issue. “Tuesday” is an excerpt from his novel The Slip, out June 3 from Simon & Schuster; both center on a motley cast of characters at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Lucas talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the novel as a whole, which started over a decade ago as a series of linked short stories. Lucas also discusses how the novel’s central mystery came together, what it was like writing with humor and in so many voices, and how his own experience at an Austin boxing gym inspired the story and its characters.

lucas schaefer next to the common's issue 29 cover


 

Lucas Schaefer lives with his family in Austin. The Slip is his debut novel. His work has appeared in One Story, The Baffler, Slate and other publications. He holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at UT-Austin.

­­Read Lucas’s story “Tuesday” in The Common at thecommononline.org/Tuesday.

Order The Slip in all formats via Simon & Schuster at simonandschuster.com/books/The-Slip/Lucas-Schaefer/9781668030707.

Learn more about Lucas at www.lucasschaefer.com and follow him on Instagram at @lucaseschaefer.

cover of the slip

 

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Affordis the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”

Related Posts

whale sculpture on white background

September 2025 Poetry Feature: Earth Water Fire Poems, a Conversation

LISA ASAGI
"We and the whales, / and everyone else, / sleep and wake in bodies / that have a bit of everything / that has ever lived. Forests, oceans, / horse shoe crabs, horses, / orange trees in countless of glasses of juice, / lichen that once grew / on the cliffsides of our ancestors, / deepseated rhizomes, and stars. // Even stars are made

Two children kneel on a large rock surface, large grey boulders and a forest of trees visible in the distance.

The Garden of the Gods

ELI RODRIGUEZ FIELDER
The gods must have been giant children squeezing drip sandcastles from their palms, back when this land was at the edge of a sea. This used to be a mouth, I say. It feels impossible that this peculiar landscape should suddenly emerge among farms and Dairy Queens.

Book cover of Orbital by Samantha Harvey

What We’re Reading: September 2025

MONIKA CASSEL
The speaker’s father, deployed to Vietnam in 1970 (the year of the dog in the lunar calendar) becomes a central figure between these grieving, unsilenceable women, but he is reticent, seen most vividly when the speaker, a child, watches as he sleeps to make sure he doesn’t choke on his tongue from seizures resulting from his service.