I’ve recorded a brief excerpt from the opening to my novel Dirty and uploaded it to SoundCloud. You can listen to it right here:
In case you missed it, an essay I wrote about my novel was featured in Airplane Reading.
Upcoming Events
4 JunThis Sunday at 2 pm, I’m reading at the kick-off event for the South Sound Writers’ Reading Series in Des Moines, WA with five very talented women that I met through ArtistTrust: Lynn Knight, Kristen Millares Young, Patty Kinney, Claire Thornburgh, and Judith Gille. The series is organized by another very talented woman, Jannát Bey, and will take place at the Des Moines Library: 21620 11th Ave S, Des Moines, Washington 98198. I’m looking forward to the field trip out of Seattle.
Then on Monday is the launch party for issue #2 of Pacifica! The theme, Sea Change, has brought some gorgeous art and writing our way. Join us at the Pine Box at 8:30. Fun!
Bradford Loomis lullaby inspired by “More Like Home Than Home”
27 MayFor the APRIL festival, The Furnace teamed up with the Bushwick Book Club Seattle, asking three musicians to create original music inspired by the three pieces presented by the series so far. Bradford Loomis wrote “Come Dance With Me,” an enchanting lullaby inspired by my story “More Like Home Than Home” and full of so much tender longing and hope.
From "Fetch" by Kathlene Postma
9 May
Here's a tiny taste of Kathlene's gorgeous story "Fetch," which she'll read at Hollow Earth Radio in just one week!
It seemed as if she had been the one to die, so light she felt, so porous and open to the snowy sky. When the surgeon explained she was fortunate to still have her leg, she fixated on a hawk that hung every day over a nearby cornfield.
Kathlene Postma's reading is next week, and I'm so looking forward to it. An excerpt from her story "Fetch" is up on The Furnace blog to give you a taste.
Spinning Yarns at Photo Center NW
6 MayThere’s a real dreamy exhibit on at Photo Center NW until May 28. I’m especially fond of Erin V. Sotak’s “SUGAR and Spice,” which depicts a bride in a blue-papered drawing room about to eat a cube of sugar that is surely poisoned, and Christine Shank’s “You Promised to Listen,” an ethereal room filled with light and dust motes and a thick carpet of fuscia, white, and green flower buds, all suggesting an altercation gone seriously, and beautifully, wrong.
Not at Photo Center NW, but my photo of a favorite spot in Seattle that keeps changing and is full of whimsical objects, and seems to be an ever-evolving story. I don’t think this particular arrangement is there anymore.
If you’re in Seattle, and in need of an art fix, do check it out! And if you’re not, 26 of the pictures are available online.
Gushing About Hedgebrook Like There’s No Tomorrow
2 MayOn Saturday, I had the good fortune of attending the Spring Salon at Hedgebrook, on Whidbey Island. I loved it so much I wrote a piece about it for their blog. Here’s how it begins:
Upon turning in to Hedgebrook, we (a poet, a playwright, and a fiction writer carpooling from Seattle) crowed at its green loveliness. A scent of wood smoke wafted out of the longhouse. And, inside, an abundance of welcome, and bagels so good I almost cried. Outside, I met with my first workshop, “The Funny Bone is an Erogenous Zone,” with Jennifer D. Munro. On the walk to the cottage, Jennifer pointed out a bench with a view of Mt. Rainier, and my poet-car-sharer Elissa pointed out a heap of lavender in a rusting wheel barrow. It was almost too perfect.
Check out VORTEX,their next weekend event, May 31-June 2. Special thanks to Brian McGuigan and the Made at Hugo House program for connecting me to this special place.
Background Reading for a Novel-in-Progess
18 AprI’ve been feeling anxious about the many things I’m juggling at the moment, so I just did a “brain-dump,” hashing out my immediate deadlines and less imminent ones, projects where I owe work to others and projects where I owe work to myself, and when in the coming months I will be able to do that. This is something I do from time to time, but having just finished auditing the ArtistTrust EDGE program, I have a few more tips and resources under my belt, with healthy reminders about making time for the writing and valuing that work. I feel a lot better. Of my own projects, there are a handful of short stories that I want to develop further, a handful to submit (or continue submitting), and a general plan to arrange the collection (in hard copy, not in my mind, which I’ve pretty much done) in September.
Anxiety-reduction aside, the brain dump also got me excited about looking ahead to my second novel. I wrote a quick, rough sketch of about 115 pages last April and put it aside to simmer. I took a number of inspiring and invigorating classes at Hugo House in March, including Chris Abani‘s class on voice and Sam Lipsyte‘s class on keeping a story going. Now, I’m taking Peter Mountford‘s excellent class on narrative structure, and had a really productive workshop of my synopsis and first chapter. I’m looking forward to digging deeper into the main conflict of the story before I set out to rewrite with more intention. And I’m excited to keep reading novels that I think will feed this book. For my first novel, I read countless books. I wish I had kept a more careful list all in one place, but my notes are scattered over many notebooks, and it would take me some time to sift through the pages to put it all together. I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on that was from or about Argentina and seemed remotely related, as well as a number of books that used magic realism in some way similar to how I tend to write it. I’m trying to be more organized about my second novel.
So far, here are some of the works feeding into Novel # 2. If you have any recommendations that fit into the nodes developing here, feel free to leave a comment!
Pictured left to right: A Convergence of Birds, An Almost Perfect Moment, The Brooklyn Follies, The Map and the Territory, Bleak House, Billy Budd and Other Stories, Just Kids, The Emperor’s Children, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, The Big Short, Lives of the Artists. Not pictured: some legal fiction by Grisham, some spy fiction by Le Carre.
Related posts:
Video
Made at Hugo House Reading – The Zoo
2 Apr
In February, the Made at Hugo House fellows read from our works-in-progress. I read “The Zoo,” which I had written in October while nervously waiting to hear whether I’d gotten into the program, and which was published in Washington City Paper’s D.C.-themed fiction issue in January. It was a lovely evening!
Marbles by Ellen Forney
8 MarMy review of Ellen Forney‘s fantastic graphic memoir Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me is up on the Ploughshares blog. The first time I read the book I was drying off in a Scottish pub in Victoria after a three mile walk in the rain; I read it again in Seattle with coffee and my critic’s goggles on. Loved it through both reads. Here’s how the review begins:
Genre: Graphic Memoir
Concerning: Cartoonist Ellen Forney’s confrontation with her bipolar disorder diagnosis
And: what it means for her identity as an artist
And: what it means for her creativity and her livelihood
Parking Signs to Power Lines
6 MarLast month, I took an afternoon class at Richard Hugo House with Shin Yu Pai called “Maps for a Narrative Atlas” to, as it were, tickle my psychogeographic fancy. After some discussion of Denis Wood’s Everything Sings and Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City, Shin sent us out into Capitol Hill to map some specific, observable aspect of the neighborhood and then try to transcribe what we found into text. I decided to focus on everything visible between parking signs and power lines, plus any sounds. I ended up with a catalogue of mostly tags and graffiti animals, an “urban bestiary” as one of the workshop participants noted (incidentally, this is a topic for another post I’ve been meaning to write as well as the title of a fascinating forthcoming book).
Here’s that catalogue.
E. Olive Street, from 11th Avenue to 12th Avenue
shoes
crows
propeller affixed to pole, swaying
crows
parking sign: Hellawasted, Action for Animals, sad ghost
bright yellow bits of a torn flier
crows
fuzzy green tree buds
Z overlaying U
Nasty Nate Comfy
faded blue outline of a skeleton
Lost Cat: Adult Male Mostly Black with a White Belly. Will Give Generous Reward if Found and Returned to Owner. Contact Arlene.
bright yellow flier, intact: Our Neighborhoods Under Attack! scary black towers descending upon single family homes with crash-pow comic book bursts
Notice of Public Meeting
fuzzy green tree buds
police car siren
12th Avenue
shoes
crows
guttural other-bird song; rattle and click
11th Avenue from Howell Street to E Olive
crows
parking sign: Hello My Name Is Nick Nack Records
4 hour parking sing: No Big Deal, smiling prehistoric fish with wings, Nasty Nate Comfy, Blink
children squealing
stick man with a briefcase and devil horns apparently going to hell
4 hour parking Valid Here: love birds
night owl with steaming cup of something
shoes
Goodreads
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