Founding Editor

Dan White is a current Ph.D. Candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. A graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles, he was a Fellow at Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program for the 2020-2021 year. He teaches fiction workshop and introductory writing courses at UIC, as well as a graduate course on narrative theory and the work of Rachel Cusk in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University. His project at both graduate school and his fellowship was The Seachamber, a literary work exploring a young woman’s consciousness as her inner ambition collides with the constraints of family at the wedding of her younger sister in 1994 Santa Monica. The Seachamber was longlisted for the Electric Book Award from Alternating Current Press. His second novel project, The Winemakers, asks questions about the price of memory and the possibilities of art across a single night in contemporary Los Angeles.

His PhD work centers around a single protagonist, Emily, within a reimagined Hamlet. The first project in the progression, The Nunnery, is set in contemporary Chicago and California and charged by a search for the depths to which narrational movement can verisimilarly render lived inner experience. That manuscript is on submission. In the meantime, he is at work on a new manuscript, a campus novel following that same character, Emily, a bit earlier in life, when things weren’t quite so complex. In the critical realm he is working on a scholarly manuscript studying the use of narration in Rachel Cusk’s books, centered on narrative theory, Wittgenstein, and feminism.

In addition to founding and editing L’Esprit, he has served as the Prose Editor for West Trade Review literary journal since 2020. In 2024 he and Jessica Denzer launched Indirect Books, a new independent publisher. He also, serves as the Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions, which he helped launch in 2023. Outside of the novel form, he writes short fiction, book reviews, and critical essays. His work has appeared in Florida Review, 3:AM, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several other publications.

His literary tastes gravitate towards fearless, verisimilar, consciousness-forward writing in the High Modernist tradition. While reading, he tends to keep the opening sentence of Mrs. Dalloway close at hand, as it is tattooed on his arm. He especially enjoys innovative, intelligent third-person fiction and is wary of first-person present tense. Literature that entangles philosophy, especially that of language and experience, often resonates. He is further drawn to unorthodox and sophisticated uses of free-indirect style and other techniques for rendering inner life; work that takes risks, that displays understanding of theory, and that plays with time, memory, and freely-associative thought; quotidian realities of life; and anything in the wonderfully chaotic stream-of-consciousness quartier.

Alongside Mrs. Dalloway, some of his favorite books as representative titles include Pride and Prejudice, The Sound and The Fury, Speedboat, Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, The Last Supper, and Parade, Annie Ernaux’s Passion Simple, Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, Lucy Ives’ Life is Everywhere, Marguerite Duras’ Emily L., Anna Burns’ Milkman, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, George Gissing’s New Grub Street, Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, Aysegül Savaş’ White on White, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds and, bien sûr, Ulysses.

A Chicago ex-pat, he lived in Long Beach, California for nine years, where he taught writing at Otis College and frequented the beach to hide from writer’s block. In an earlier life he earned his J.D. from Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. In an even earlier one he earned a B.A. in European History from Roosevelt University in Chicago, in the same building where Margaret Anderson founded The Little Review. He has returned to Chicago to pursue his Ph.D., proving that time is an illusory construct. His personal site is here and he can be found on Instagram and Bluesky @dwhitethewriter.

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