The Unicorn Purifies Water (from the Unicorn Tapestries), 1495–1505, Met Cloisters

I'm happy to have new fiction in The Capra Review, and I love the art selected for the piece, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, which is tangentially part of the story. (Just for fun, I chose a different unicorn piece for this blog post.) Other art mentioned in the story include Greco-Roman sculpture, Piet Mondrian's abstractions, and Martha Graham's choreography.

In a way, "The Samoyed" is a companion piece to my story "Old Boyfriends," which appeared in Propeller Magazine in December 2013. Both stories started out as structural "imitations" of Chekhov stories, "Old Boyfriends" using "Gusev" as a starting point and "The Samoyed" using "The Lady with the Dog," though I use the term imitation loosely. I wrote about that exercise here on my blog as well as for Ploughshares here. Anyway, here's how "The Samoyed" begins:

“Modern art is fine for decor,” he said, popping a vodka-soaked olive into his mouth. “But I don’t find it meaningful.” His lips were full, his eyes a gelid blue, his jaw-line well-defined with a stubble that seemed to Jane too calculated.

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In my last post I promised blood. Well, I'll just say I slid my boot off Friday night and it was like I was one of Cinderella's stepsisters. I'm still limping. On to day 3!What is a better breakfast than a leftover Cuban sandwich? Leftover fried oysters. Just kidding! The Cuban sandwich was much better. Day 3 was the best because Michael got a one-day pass and we got to roam the book fair together."The Worst Writing Advice I Ever Got" is an irresistible title, so of course we wrenched ourselves away from the book fair for it. Here, without narrative, a fun grab-bag of quotes:

• "Creative writing aphorisms are as useful as Dr. Phil." -Chris Abani
• "Your book won't save you. It's just something you're going to do because you're nuts." -Min Jin Lee
• "How do I handle writer's block? I don't write." -Ada Limón

I appreciated Limón's story of navigating two groups of people: those who roll their eyes at "abuelita poems" and those who say, "where's your abuelita poem?" And Melissa Stein's remark that dread may be a sign that advice you've been given may not be for you, anxiety might mean it's worth exploring the challenge, and excitement is obviously a good sign. Abani noted that "Craft advice is only important if you're asking questions. What are you trying to do?"We stuck around for a reading and conversation between Min Jin Lee and Sigrid Nunez. Nunez on writing about sex: "The vocabulary is not there. It's either coy, clinical, or filthy, none of which do justice to human sexuality." At the book signing, Lee called Michael and me adorable. So that happened.My attention span went out the door by mid-afternoon, so it was off to the hotel bar for wine and fried calamari! Naturally, someone in panda suit wandered in. Next year in Portland! Maybe Seattleites can get some party buses organized...

The Friday of AWP is always the best day. The nervous energy of Thursday has dissipated, and the inevitable Saturday flu epidemic has not yet emerged. I woke early to respond to student stories and breakfasted on a leftover Cuban sandwich, wondering if it would make me barf later. Reader, it did not! A fortifying start.Alan Sincic, the fantastic Orlando-based writer who was The Furnace's Writer-in-Residence, was on a 9 am panel on the lyric sentence. I'm a fan of Sincic's prose *and* mad presentation skills, so the early start was well worth it. The moderator, Pearl Abraham, kicked off the discussion with this advice: "If the voice doesn't work, write better sentences." Then Sincic woke up the crowd with a call-and-response activity, that gradually built up to us chanting together: "I am an individual and will not surrender my voice to the crowd." He said, "A sentence is less like the beam of a house and more like the branch of a tree," that a sentence has ghost limbs lost in the editing process. He proceeded to take apart this Mark Twain sentence, examining each word choice and its placement as a way of generating suspense and delight: "Is a tail absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog?"Baylea Jones analyzed a sentence from Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, graphing sounds and letters, including patterns of consonant use, and internal rhymes: "Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Wow! I had fun retyping that.I ducked out early to get to my book signing at the Lanternfish Press table, where I got to hang out with my editor Christine Neulieb and publisher Amanda Thomas,  and connect with new readers and old friends, including Julia Mascoli, who was in my Tin House workshop in 2013 and who is Deputy Director of Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop doing great work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in Washington, D.C. (Seattle-area folks, you can donate books to prisons and other under-served communities via Seattle7Writers Pocket Libraries program.)Later, I chilled at the Cambridge Writer's Workshop table, celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, which includes my "Summer-Inspired Writing Prompts." Co-editor Rita Banerjee was there with her mythic poetry collection Echo in Four Beats, as was Maya Sonenberg, whose new chapbook After the Death of Shostakovich Père is out from PANK Books.That night, the celebration continued at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, a beautiful old mansion a mile away from the convention center. There were many, many readings. One was from Women in the Literary Landscape; crowds whooped in appreciation for Anne Bradstreet, Virginia Kirkus, and the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. (I am a rube for not remember which biographer was mentioned, so here are five of them!)  Nell Painter, author of A History of White People, read from her forthcoming memoir Old in Art School, Diana Norma Szokolayi read her poem "Sarajevo," Sonenberg read an anti-plot manifesto, and I read an excerpt from Daughters of the Air in which Pluta has committed arson in Brooklyn and found refuge in an abandoned Times Square theater. Fun! There is so much more to write...! I'll wrap things up in one more post. Sneak preview: there will be blood.

It's my birthday, and I'm home in Brooklyn. Today is full of treats. Mimosas and chocolate croissants with my family (and bagels, but I've been gorging on bagels since Saturday and have nearly reached my bagel limit), a stroll by Prospect Park, and a reading from Daughters of the Air at WORD Brooklyn at 7 pm. If you're in town and free, I hope you'll come! There will be wine and treats.Over on the Submittable blog, I have a craft essay on poetry's effect on my prose. Here's how it begins:

Poems are tuning forks. When I am lost in the darkness of a novel-in-progress, fumbling through and then and then and then, they key me back into the precise and intimate. They pull me closer to the unknowable.  continue reading

After tonight I have two more stops on my east-of-the-Mississippi tour, in Chicago on Saturday, March 3 at The Book Cellar, with Gint Aras, and then three events at AWP in Tampa: Strange Theater: A Menagerie of Fabulists (Thursday, 3/8, 7 pm); a book signing at Lanternfish Press's table at the book fair Friday (3/9) from 10-11:30 am; and Spontaneous Reading Party by C & R Press Friday (3/9, 7 pm), celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos & Source Book For Creative Writing. Then I'm back on the West Coast for the next little while, with a full docket of events you can see here. Huzzah!

Paintings helped me grope through the dark of my first draft of Daughters of the Air. I wrote a guest blog post about that process on Lisa Romeo's blog. Here's how the piece begins:

When I was just starting to write seriously, I fetishized notebooks—and, like an eight-year-old—stickers.  I preferred black, hard-backed notebooks with graph paper that forced my writing into small, neat boxes.  My favorite treat was popping into a stationary store in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, to buy a cheap book of Dover Art Stickers depicting famous paintings by Michelangelo, Kahlo, Goya, and the like. I was trying to write the first draft of my first novel, Daughters of the Air, using Hemingway’s supposed model of 300 words a day, no more, no less, stopping mid-sentence and all that jazz.continue reading

Years later, still enraptured with the process, I ended up teaching several classes on writing from art for Hugo House at the Henry Art Gallery (you can see my students' work alongside the art that inspired them in these e-booklets the Henry made here and here) as well as several blog posts for Ploughshares, including this one on writing from abstract art. And, my next novel features an artist. And, many of my essays engage with art in one way or another, like this one on Goya, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. All this writing about writing—it's time for me to get back to a gallery and refill the well!

Over the summer, while immersing myself in Jess Walter's fiction in preparation for interviewing him in December (you can now watch his Word Works talk on time, and the Q & A,  here on YouTube), I reread his story "Don't Eat Cat" and felt compelled to write my own zombie story. And, because it's me, it's a bit a fairy tale-ish. "Scrolling Through the Feed" went online this morning in Cascadia Magazine, a new publication focusing on the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia to Oregon. I'm happy there's a new venue gathering long-form journalism, fiction, and poetry from the region, and one that that thinks beyond our borders.It feels somehow appropriate for the story to go up on the same day of the State of the Union, which I will not watch. Thankfully, I'm reading tonight at the Literary Happy Hour at Capitol Cider, alongside Bill Carty, Jarret Middleton, and Jekeva Philips, hosted by Josh Potter. It runs from 5-7 pm. In line with their "drafts and drafts" theme, I'll give a micro-craft talk on one of the earliest inspirations for Daughters of the Air.  Speaking of which, this is your last chance (ever?) to enter to win a free copy of the novel on Goodreads.  Go get it!

Well, gosh, November snuck up on me! I try not to let a whole month go by without popping in over here, so here's what's been cooking.  Daughters of the Air will be out in 18 days (you might add it to your Goodreads list to be notified of giveaways); the last several weeks featured early mornings hunched over my laptop pitching book critics and events to bookstores and a handful of book clubs. Anxiety-fueled self-googling is at peak levels, which, yes, I know I should not be doing. But every now and again someone says something lovely about the book, which, as I've said on Instagram, has me rolling around like a happy puppy. (Also: I am increasingly on Instagram, where I overuse creepy filters, such in the photo above.)I just finished teaching for the first time a fiction thesis writing class in the online MA program I work for. It's an interesting class that coaches students through the first 30-50 pages of a novel or story collection, and I am embarking upon it once again very soon, just as my own novel will be hitting shelves. Our final week's discussion on paths to publication (traditional vs. hybrid vs. self-publishing) will be rather timely.  In related news, as I head out on book tour next year, I'll be teaching online for Hugo House as well: an eight-week intermediate fiction class touching on point of view, dialogue, and scene construction. Watch for one-day classes at Chicago's StoryStudio and Port Townsend's Writers' Workshoppe! Amidst all this activity, I'm looking forward to some holiday downtime, if that is even possible. Lately I've been starting my day with Anne Carson's Plainwater and ending it with Mavis Gallant's A Fairly Good Time: a superb literary sandwich. Before the year is over, I hope to get to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gothic novel The House of the Seven Gables. I picked it up from a used bookstore in Montreal, The Word, just before graduating from college...in 2004. Yes, I guess it's about time I get to that one.Stay tuned for stories forthcoming from Lilith Magazine, the New Zealand-based Geometry, and the new Pacific Northwest-based Cascadia Magazine. If you'd like monthly news in your in-box, which will include information for upcoming events across the country, you can sign up here. Until launch day!

Sharpen your pencils: I'm teaching two classes at Hugo House this fall. Member registration opens today and general registration opens August 22. Scholarships are available: apply here by August 25!

• Wall-to-Wall Writing Prompts will be a fun-for-everyone one-day writing bonanza. I'm bringing in all my favorite prompts. If you're eager to kick start some new writing, this one's for you. Come with some overheard lines of dialogue and leave with six story openings and a plan to finish at least one. Meets Saturday, September 30, 1-4 pm. Sliding scale pricing available for this class. Please call Hugo House at (206) 322-7030.
• Fiction I  is a six-week intro to fiction, with a special focus on character, plot, and landscape. We'll read short stories from James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Flannery O'Connor, Sherman Alexie, and Louise Erdrich, among others. Writing prompts in and out of class will be geared toward writing a short story, though of course all the skills covered are applicable to novels. We'll also learn the basics of the workshop model. Meets Saturdays from October 14 to November 18, 1-3 pm.

Hope to see you then!

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Hunters in the Snow (Winter) - 1565

This winter, I'm teaching Writing About Place at Hugo House. In this six-week class, we'll read stories by Flannery O'Connor, Louise Erdrich, and Ursula LeGuin, among other illustrious authors. We'll write about places we know, places we don't know, and places that exist only in our imaginations. And, we'll talk about memory, research, and world building. Class meets Wednesdays 5-7 pm from 2/22-3/29. Hugo House is located in First Hill, an easy-peasy trip from downtown and right next to the always-free Frye Art Museum. Speaking of place, if you've not been to the Hugo House's temporary home, you're in for treat, with a light-filled atrium and mysterious winding hallways.  Registration is now open. The scholarship deadline is 12/16 and there's an early bird discount until 12/19! Hope to see you there.

I'm really looking forward to teaching a new short story class at Hugo House about Anton Chekhov and his influence on modern short story writing. So many craft techniques in wide use today originated from Chekhov, and I learned a lot deeply engaging with his stories. In fact, my story "Old Boyfriends" started out as an imitation of the structure and themes in "Gusev". In addition to reading iconic stories from Chekhov, we'll read Mavis Gallant and Jhumpa Lahiri and Ehud Havazelet, and try our hands at a range of techniques. Here's a micro-lesson preview of the class. I hope to see there, Mondays 7-9 pm, starting April 27!

Over on the Hugo House blog, I've got a mini-lesson previewing my upcoming one-day class at the Henry Art Gallery. The excerpt of class reading I chose comes from the opening of Mercè Rodoreda's novel Death in Spring, which is the new book integrated into Ann Hamilton: the common S E N S E. (The first book was J.A. Baker's The Peregrine.)Death in Spring is a stunning novel, for its poetic language, lush imagery, and its tackling cruelty among humans as well as violence in nature. Rodoreda was a Catalan writer living during Franco's dictatorship, and the novel can be read as a metaphor for that regime or for any oppressed society.The violence is also of mythological proportions, and the beauty of the language helps make reading it bearable. This technique was something that was made explicit for me by Rikki Ducornet speaking at an AWP panel on "Magic and Intellect": "For a difficult book to be readable, find a language that levitates somehow, that is scintillating."The class will go beyond this topic, delving into the many layers of Ann Hamilton's monumental show, on our relationship to animals, the sense of touch, and being touched--emotionally and intellectually--through the private act of reading. Death in Spring will definitely bring home this last idea of being touched--being moved in profound ways by another's experience and creation.

Over on the Hugo House blog, my Classy Talk interview sheds a bit more light on my upcoming  fiction workshop. Take a look, sign up, and help me spread the word about it! Class meets Wednesday nights, 7-9 pm, starting October 29. I'm already excited about the story we'll read on the first day,  a short-short by Angela Carter, which will be atmospheric and  fairy tale-ish and spooky.

My student Jenelle Birnbaum's lovely story "The Bodhisattva of the Sea," inspired by Katinka Bock's abstract sculptures, is up on the Henry Art Gallery's blog. The exhibit runs until May 4, and I think I need to squeeze in another visit before then, as there was a "Profane Fireplace" that surely had a fairy tale in it.

My fourth set of writing prompts for the Ploughshares blog takes inspiration from objects, with wisdom from Italo Calvino, Elizabeth Kostova, Cynthia Ozick, Charles Baxter, Kate Bernheimer, RT Smith, and more.In other news, an excerpt from my student Amber Murray's intriguing essay "Thoughts on Abstract Thought and the Practice of Moving Things Around Until They Sit Just Right," from this winter's Visual Inspiration class, is up on the Henry Art Gallery's blog! Exciting!

In the spring, I'm teaching a new class at Richard Hugo House, Intro to the Fiction Workshop. Exciting! This 10-week class will lay out a solid foundation for students interested in workshopping their stories but who have never taken a workshop or who want to brush up on giving constructive criticism. Workshops can be intimidating at any level; this one will be both welcoming and rigorous.  And fun! The class runs Thursday nights, 7:10-9:10 from 3/20-5-22. Registration opens 2/11 for Hugo House Members, and 2/18 for the general public. Scholarship applications are due 2/18.

I'm pleased to offer a third iteration of my writing with visual art class for Richard Hugo House at the Henry Art Gallery, now snappily-titled Visual Inspiration. Here's the course description:

This class, which meets at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, will use visual art as a springboard for diving into prose writing. We’ll mine the inspiration of images to unearth new prose or add unexpected meaning and direction to works in progress. Students can search the Henry’s digital archive and request works from the permanent collection not currently on view. For even more creative percolation, we’ll read published works inspired by visual art. Exercises, readings, and discussions will cover the writing process, character, story, landscape (internal and external), and style. Students will have the option to workshop one short-short story or essay. Co-Presented with the Henry Art Gallery.

Class meets Thursday evenings 6-8 pm, January 30-March 13 (with no class on February 27 due to the AWP conference). General registration begins December 10, and the scholarship deadline is December 24. I'm excited to see what students do with "Sanctum," the interactive installation now outside the Henry that draws on social media and surveillance technology, and I'm curious as always to see what gets pulled from the permanent collection and what new creative works spiral out from that.

I'm excited to be teaching a class on fairy tales at Corinne Manning's Living Room Workshops. Mid-December is wonderful time for contemplating magic, especially fairy tale magic. Here's the course description, with nitty gritty info below:Explore magical realism and fairy tales with 3 teachers over the course of one weekend in this moveable feast of a writing workshop. Participants will move from house to house gaining craft skills, knowledge, and writing some “marvelous” fiction and exploring the memoir as fairy tale. Readings will include Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, and Alyssa Nutting.Each class will last 1.5 hours and will take place in Capitol Hill and the Central District on Saturday, ending in Greenwood on Sunday. Carpooling is encouraged. Course must be taken as a whole. No single class drop ins. To enroll please email corinne.manning@gmail.com.Tale: A Two-day Moveable (Writing) Feast

December 14- 15, Saturday and Sunday

Instructors: Corinne Manning, Anca Szilagyi, Anne Bean

Saturday: 1-2:30, 3-4:30 (Capitol Hill, Central District)

Sunday: 1-2:30 (Greenwood)

Cost: $100

I'm retraining myself to write novels. My first novel is floating in the ether, I wrote a quick, rough draft of my second novel some time ago, I focused on finishing my short story collection, and now, with the leaves falling off the trees outside, I'm in my dark office x-raying that second novel to get at an outline.  I already had a couple outlines in hesitant pencil, one very bare bones, one a bit more detailed. But I'm hesitant to launch into a rewrite yet as I seem to still be in a fallow period. I'd have loved to take a suitcase full of books into the woods and just read for 10 days. Alas.  A decent second option was to bolt to Vancouver with M. for the weekend, where two writer friends were visiting from New York. We gorged ourselves on dim sum, wandered around Coal Harbor and the West End, had cocktails at Cloud 9, a bar that rotates on top of the Empire Landmark hotel and that has some very 1995 cocktails (we stuck to a gin martini and an old-fashioned), and went on a short, mild hike where we spotted purple and orange mushrooms and black slugs and a seal. We waved at the seal, and the seal seemed to give us a little nod before disappearing in the water, probably grumbling that we took his lunch spot, Cod Rock. All this to say, there are different ways to refill the well. Reading and travel (and with travel, eating) are some of my favorite ways. So is looking at art.I feel a little out of shape, novel-writing-wise, because I'm at the difficult step where I've decided to rewrite entirely. The first draft was quick fun, throwing details on the page and seeing what sticks.  I want to be a lot more strategic about the second draft.  I decided to try using novel writing software, to help me feel less scattered, and a few friends recommended Scrivener. This morning I finally started to get the hang of it, and now I have a more detailed outline with fancy arrows and nesting files and everything. Soon (hopefully!) I can go deeper into the writing cave to write those scenes.Outlining at this point feels helpful, but sometimes I outline when I'm stuck in writing because I don't know what else to do. I might already have the outline in my head. I might have gone over that outline obsessively already. But I still write it down, maybe more than once, as if I'm in a holding pattern, and then it just feels like treading water.  In a way, it is like a writing exercise I used to do, coming up with arbitrary lists of specific things. But it is also very different from those lists. Rather than racing from plot point to plot point., those lists try to get me to think about very specific details or to think about words I don't often use. Red things; things that start with the letter V. More particularly (while still being quite broad), Ray Bradbury recommended making lists of nouns as a way to jog creativity. He wrote, "Make  a list of 10 things you hate and tear them down in a short story. Make a list of 10 things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are." Such sound advice, for not only finding ways into writing, but writing with passion.Back in September, as Rosh Hoshanah approached and I thought about all the oncoming holidays (hello, Thanksgiving-Hanukkah merger), I thought it would be fun to just write a list of all the dishes my grandparents, great aunts, etc. were known for. I invited M. to add to that list.  This got me thinking about how many stories might be in each these specific dishes as well, and how revisiting memories is another way to refill the well.Here's that dish list:Bubby's mandelbrotGrandma's chopped liverAunt Shirley's jello moldsAunt Ellen's meatballs in a sweet tomato sauceAunt Myra's chicken schnitzelGrandpa's sarmale (large and loose and juicy)Eva's matzo balls (dense as bricks)Aunt Shirley's brisketMom's meatloafGrandpa's meat piesBubby's Swedish meatballsGrandpa's cheese piesBubby's matzo balls (large and fluffy)Aunt Myra's walnut cakeMami's salade de boefGrandma's apples and riceGrandma's salade de boefEva's fish soupEva's salade de boefAunt Myra's trifleEva's sarmale (small and tight and smoky)Grandpa's fried kippers and onionsGrandma's upside down cakes  (fruity and light)Eva's plum dumplingsGrandma's plum dumplingsMr. C's plum dumplingsEverybody's plum dumplingsWhat do you do in your fallow periods? How do you get yourself ready for big creative projects?Related posts:1. Background Reading for a Novel-in-Progress2. Parking Signs to Power Lines3. Writing from Art

I'm looking forward to teaching Found Stories, a one-day class at Hugo House this October 27 aimed at generating new fiction using found objects. There will be some very essential and very fun pre-class homework: I'm asking students to bring in objects that they find - post-it notes, mittens, music boxes - anything that will be helpful in generating stories, which, really, could be anything. I'll be bringing in a few of my own artifacts, and until class, I'm also keeping an eye out for goodies left on sidewalks, yard sales, and the like. But I'm really curious about what else people will bring. What stories catch your eye when you see something left behind - discarded or forgotten?In the meantime, here's a great story Andrei Codrescu told on NPR today about two items he found while moving: a box of chocolates wrapped in miniature covers of one of his poetry books and a bag of petrified pretzels. And here's a bit about Joseph Cornell, an artist I've been slowly reading up on who used found objects in his dreamy work .

I used to strong-arm my undergraduate students into thinking more about titles - not because I'm one for strong-arming, but because sometimes titles are a last minute concern, whereas I believe they're essential to the writing process. It was important for expository writing students to focus their essays through thinking of apt titles, and it was important for fiction students to think about how a title can add sharpness and/or layers of meaning to a story. Donald Murray, a big teaching-of-writing guy, used to generate about 150 titles per piece. He allowed himself to be clumsy and awkward in order to find what was precise and just right. Whenever I told my students this, they would grip their notebooks in apprehension until I'd say, "we're not going to generate 150 titles today, but we are going to generate 20." They'd sigh with relief, then get antsy by the tenth prompt. Some were eager to share new titles at the end and others said, with arms crossed over their chests or with a twinkle in their eye, "My original title is still better." In any case, keeping a list of titles to potentially write to, even if I never write the piece, is something I enjoy doing and find quite useful. That said, lately I've been collecting imaginary titles for novels that, in all likelihood, I won't write. (I'm keeping titles of actual works-in-progress close to my chest for now.) Here are the imaginary titles:

The Sex Lives of Traffic Engineers

Young Jewish Men Arguing in Diners

The Sweat Pickle

The Fishmonger's Uncle's Tax Accountant

Hard Drinking Elsewhere

The Ghost of Obligation

The Ineffectual Perfectionist

People Alone in Cars Reading E-mail

Now you try!