For my second Women in Translation Month post of 2022, I’d like to tell you about Winter in Sochko (Open Letter Books, 2021), which I devoured in May on the flight home for my grandmother’s funeral and back, the first novel I have been able to devour since becoming a parent in January 2021. Its spareness, and its tense family relationships in relation to food, reminds me of another favorite work in translation, Lise Tremblay’s Mile End (trans. Gail Scott, Talon Books, 2002), though here the anger is more subdued and there’s no psychosis. The comparison to Marguerite Duras on the cover also feels apt. The writing is quite fluid and poetic. In fact, perhaps because of its fluidity, I read it too fast to truly appreciate the lyricism.

Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited.

Here is a characterization of Sokcho, the resort town on the border of South and North Korea. The protagonist is a young French-Korean woman working in a hotel, relieved to not be living with her mother anymore, who stuffs her with food and comments on her appearance and suffocates her each weekend visit. It’s the off-season, windy and raw; few guests are in the shabby hotel: a woman recovering from plastic surgery and, just arrived, a French graphic novelist who asks the narrator to show her around town. She has a boyfriend, an aspiring model, but surprise-surprise, it’s an unsatisfying relationship and the graphic novelist, an older man, holds a certain amount of intrigue. While she cooks for him she thinks:

Beef and raw fish smells were wafting together, heavy and pungent. I pictured Kerrand at his desk. Lips pursed, hand drifting through the air before landing at exactly the right spot on the paper. I always had the finished dish in mind when I cooked. Appearance, taste, nutritional balance. When he drew, he gave the impression of thinking only of the movements he made with his wrist and hand, that was how the image seemed to take life, with no prior conception.

An image taking to life with no prior conception: this seems to bring together for me the themes of identity in this book, of how to forge one’s identity through creative acts and how to try to live comfortably within one’s own skin. The many accolades this book has received comes as no surprise!

I'm honored to have my short story, "Street of the Deported," included in Lilith Magazine's forthcoming anthology, Frankly Feminist (Brandeis University Press, November 2022), collecting 45 years of Jewish feminist fiction published in the magazine. My story won first prize in their 2017 contest and is included in the anthology's section on war. The collection is edited by Susan Weidman Schneider and Yona Zeldis McDonough and includes a forward by Anita Diamant. You can pre-order the book now. You can also add it your Goodreads. I am so looking forward to reading all of the other stories in the anthology!

I am delighted to have a pair of short fairy tales in Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, out now from Scablands Books! This beautiful foil-stamped anthology, edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller, features an incredible roster of Pacific Northwest authors, such as Gary Copeland Lilley, Rick Barot, Shawn Vestal, Tess Gallagher, Ruth Joffre, Nicola Griffith, Kate Lebo, Elissa Washuta, and Lucia Perillo, to name just a handful, and has some wonderful illustrations as well—you can preview a couple of them, including one from my story "Moss Child," here. You can pick up a copy directly from Scablands Books, or at Atticus, Auntie's, From Here, and Wishing Tree Books in Spokane. If you're based in the Pacific Northwest, your local library might like to know about it! Here is the "Suggest a Title" form for Seattle Public Library; many library systems have similar forms.

I'm excited to have two fairy tales in Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, a Scablands Books anthology edited by Spokane-based superheroes Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller. The (foil-stamped!) book releases November 2 (perfect season to cozy up with a book while it's drippy outside!), but discounted pre-orders are now available. Sharma shared a snippet of one of my tales on Twitter here. It's an honor to be in the same book with Elissa Washuta, Ruth Joffre, and so many other talented writers.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

I'm so glad I finally read Magda Szabó's The Door (trans. Len Rix), which Michael has been urging me to read for years. Set in Hungary after World War II, The Door is a rich exploration of the complicated friendship between Magda, a writer, and her formidable housekeeper Emerence. The mysteries that surround Emerence and her past give her a witchy quality. She almost never allows anyone inside her home where there are nine cats and, Magda guesses at one point, furniture and china looted from a Jewish family during the war. Here is Emerence bottling cherries for winter as she and Magda discuss the recent suicide of Emerence's friend Polett:

The stream of cherries tumbled into the cauldron. By now, we were in the world of myth—the pitted cherries separating out, the juice beginning to flow like blood from a wound, and Emerence, calmness personified, standing over the cauldron in her black apron, her eyes in the shadow under the hooded headscarf.

The slow revelation of Emerence's life before and during the war is balanced with a clash of personalities as Emerence foists her ways upon Magda's life, such as throwing a bit of hot mulled wine at Magda to get her to drink it when she is distraught over her husband's surgery. She is an infuriating, fascinating character, one of the most complex I've encountered in recent memory.

There is something about Emerence's strong personality and guarded history that reminds me of my great-grandmother from Budapest, who I didn't know very well and who I wrote about in my piece "Threads of Memory" in Jewish in Seattle. There is something about the metaphor of the door that has me scrabbling at it, anxious to understand so much that I never will. It's the sort of anxiety that fills novels; one day when it is safe to travel to Budapest I will do so, if only to be physically in that city, to be closer to that which I can never fully understand.

Self-Portrait inside of "My soul and I love you" by Belkis Ayón

So, my first Chicago-based publication is about life here as an immunocompromised person during the COVID-19 pandemic...I wrote the piece a month ago, and it's a snapshot of my last day in the "normal" time of moving freely about the city, taking public transit, going to a medical appointment, going to a museum. A silver lining is I get to mention the work of Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón, which I encountered at the Chicago Cultural Center. You can explore more of Ayón's work here.

Here's how my piece in Another Chicago Magazine begins:

I was sitting inside an airtight booth with my nose clipped shut, inhaling and exhaling into a tube with all my might.

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Neither of these are the physical book fair, but they are *both* at the #AWPVirtualbookfair!

Last year around this time, Michael and I traipsed about Portland for AWP, skirting the conference itself, simply enjoying off-site readings and the book fair on Saturday. It was a lovely way to round out our time in the Pacific Northwest.

This year, because of our move, I never had any intentions of going to the conference in San Antonio, but because of the coronavirus, lots of folks, including my publisher Lanternfish Press have cancelled their trips. Because small presses depend on AWP each year for sales, a virtual book fair has been set up as a Google Doc by Trevor Ketner, publisher of Skull + Wind Press, inspired by poets G. Calvocoressi, Dana Levin, and Greg Pardlo. Now folks can browse from afar, and check out the many beautiful books and journals on sale here at #AWPVirtualBookfair. In random scrolling through the virtual book fair, I came across this intriguing book of poetry, Goodbye Wolf, by Nik De Dominic. Most discount codes are good through Sunday. Lanternfish Press is offering 30% off all of their books (including Daughters of the Air); use the code AWP2020.

Another press I love that has cancelled its trip to San Antonio is Fairy Tale Review. Their newest issue, back issues, subscriptions, and the complete set of issues are 20% off. Use code AWP20. The title story of my in-progress story collection, "More Like Home Than Home," is in their Wizard of Oz-themed Emerald Issue. It's set in Brooklyn in the 1980s and is a potpourri of the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Twelve Dancing Princesses.

But what is a book fair without getting to pick up a book and open it at random? Below is random page from Daughters of the Air (you can read the opening over at Tin House). Beneath that, a taste of what all is in FTR's Emerald Issue.

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Stay healthy out there! Enjoy yer book browsing & book reading!

In the Badlands in 2009

In 2009, Michael and I drove west from Brooklyn to start a new life in Seattle. I was beginning the MFA program at the University of Washington, and we were ready for a new adventure in a region neither of us ever thought we'd live in. I documented that first cross-country drive in a list of lists here.

Nearly ten years later, we felt the pull to come back east; in April, we packed up our things and now we're in Chicago, starting the next chapter of our lives. But of course! We had to take another cross-country drive, partly retracing our steps but also seeing lots of new things. And herein is a list of lists for our second crossing:

• Mileage: Approximately 2400
• Days: 9
• Start point: Seattle
• End point: Chicago

Parting image of the Pacific Northwest: Wet roads, sopping dark evergreens.

Cities stopped in to eat and/or sleep: Ellensburg, WA; Spokane, WA; Missoula, MT; Bozeman, MT; West Yellowstone, MT; Jackson Hole, WY; Rock Springs, WY; Laramie, WY; Cheyenne, WY; North Platte, NE; Lincoln, NE; Omaha, NE; Des Moines, IA; Iowa City, IA.

Detour: Petrified Ginko National Forest

Notable Spokane radio: Developing a trauma-informed perspective, on Native America Calling

Rivers crossed: Cle Elum, Columbia, Coer D'Alene, Clark Fork, Boulder, Jefferson, Missouri Headwaters, Madison, Gallatin, Snake, Buffalo, Hoback, Little Sandy, North Platte, Medicine Bow, Laramie, South Platte, Platte, Blue, Missouri, West Nishnabotna, East Nishnabotna, South Raccoon, North Raccoon, South Skunk, North Skunk, Guernsay, Iowa, Cedar, Mississippi, Fox.

Fauna spotted: bald eagles, hawks, bison, elk, alpaca, orioles, cardinals, starlings, geese, hundreds of horses, thousands of cows.

Best smelling city: Still Bozeman, ten years later. This time, instead of pine trees, it smelled of apple and smoked pork.

Most public service announcements about meth: Still Montana, ten years later. "Ask Me How My Gun Went Off."

Most fun billboard: "Rock Creek Testicle Festival," also in Montana.

Most awe: Western Wyoming.

Aw!

Best business name: Pickle's Discount Mattress in Rock Springs, WY.

Promising overheard dialogue in Rock Springs: "I used to listen to Morning Joe, but I can't anymore. I just wanna know what's going on. Don't rant at me!" This jived with our similar feeling of watching Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC for half a minute. Maybe we can turn it all off? Then again...

Notable Nebraska radio: Christian homeschool radio on social media and the "Pakistinian-Israelite Conflict"

Scariest downtown on a Sunday: North Platte, NE, mostly boarded up and closed, save for Hometown Cash Advance, Cash n' Go, and a dollar store.

Scariest Victorian home to visit at dusk when no one's around and the horses across the street are all staring at you: Buffalo Bill's home, also in North Platte.

Notable Iowa radio: Agritalk. Regarding leaving the TPP: "Was the juice worth the squeeze?"

Happiest lunch spot: cheeky Gazali's in Des Moines, IA, where we ate garlicky chicken shawarma after several days of burgers burgers burgers.

Unicorn in our Iowa City hotel room, with an excerpt from The Glass Menagerie

Best town name: What Cheer, IA.

Most adorable stop: Iowa City.

Most roadkill: Illinois :( Intestines coiled in the street like giant fusilli. My next novel will be a horror novel.

Notable Chicago radio that filled me with glee: Cardi B. on Polish-American Radio. Brr!

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

On WA-20 west toward the Anacortes Ferry Terminal, Michael and I found a Spanish radio broadcast with news relayed at a curiously slow pace, so that even we, with our limited Spanish, could understand. It was a multicultural station based in Vancouver. We got news of sex trafficking in Buenos Aires, corruption in Brazil, and an interview about traditional foods in a certain town in Mexico whose name eluded me: horchata tamarindo, pavo, taquitos fritos, plus socializing at church. There was mariachi music, then a pan flute.

In the next hour, the language switched to something I couldn't recognize. Something Scandinavian? South Asian? I had no clue. But then bhangra music came on, so maybe it was Punjabi?

At the ferry checkpoint (we were on our way to Victoria, British Columbia), I lowered the radio, as if customs would find foreign sounds questionable. Once we were on the boat, I switched my phone to airplane mode and concentrated on Mirielle Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (trans. Ros Schwartz), which Michael found at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco, when I was there on book tour in April.

It seemed appropriate to read a memoir and philosophical treatise on the act of translation while crossing into Canadian waters. Gansel's family survived the Holocaust; she grew up in France and remembers the special occasions when a letter would arrive from Budapest and her father would solemnly translate it aloud. Some of her memories remind me of visiting Freiburg, Germany with my grandmother, who spoke a mishmash of Romanian and Hungarian with her cousin and uncle (they saved Hungarian for dirty jokes), and where the cousin's husband spoke German and their children spoke English to me. Here is the lovely excerpt which prompted my reverie:

In the 1960s and '70s, Gansel went on to translate poets from East Berlin and Vietnam. Something she touches upon which I would like to research further is the "de-Nazification" of German and the attempt to translate Vietnamese poetry without exoticization. She mentions Bertolt Brecht de-Nazified Hölderlin's translation of Antigone without comparing examples. But she does offer this translation of poet To Huu (translated into English, in turn, by Ros Schwartz--oh, the layers!):

Casuarina forests,

Groves of green coconuts,

The shimmering of the white dunes

where the sun trembles,

garden of watermelons with red honey!

Gansel quotes Nguyen Khac Vien, who invited her work to on an anthology of Vietnamese poetry in translation: "Exoticism arouses simply a sense of foreignness, without being able to communicate the emotions, the deeper feelings that inspire a work."

On that notion of digging for deeper feelings, Gansel shares her approach to translating the entire oevre of Nelly Sachs, a Jewish German-language poet who lived in exile in Sweden. She ended up rewriting the work four times, using the Bible's four levels of meaning, according to the Jewish tradition of exegesis: Peshat (literal meaning), Remez (allusive meaning), Drush (deeper meaning), and Sod (secret, esoteric meaning).

I could go on and on and on about how much I love this slender volume about exile and empathy.  This book has opened so many doors for me.

I'm excited to have a new short story, "Sneaking Into Dr. Zhivago," in the spring issue of Confrontation. It's an honor to be in a journal that's published the likes of Cynthia Ozick and Joseph Brodsky! Here's how the story begins:

If not Paris, Vienna. That's where I should have landed. My father sent my brother to medical school in Vienna, and I, I was being groomed for the Sorbonne. I would have studied history. And literature. Between the wars, many of my cousins moved to Vienna, London, New York. Children of my seven uncles.

Below you'll find a photo of the first page of the story so you can get more a taste of it. If you're intrigued, you can order a copy for just $12!

I'm back home after a whirlwind book tour that ended with AWP in Tampa. Michael and I drove up from Delray Beach through the Everglades, hoping to spot alligators, and though there were none, pelicans abounded.We arrived in time for me to catch one panel Thursday afternoon, "Difficult History: Jewish Fiction in the Alt-Right World," which began with brief readings from each panelist. Emily Barton read from The Book of Esther, an alternate history in which a Turkic Jewish warrior state that disappeared in the Middle Ages existed into August 1942. Simone Zelitch read from her novel Judenstaat, another alternate history, this one set in 1980 in the Jewish sovereign state established in the province of Saxony in 1948. Amy Brill read from Hotel Havana, about Jewish refugees in Havana in the 1930s and '40s, highlighting the fresh pain German Jews felt compared to Polish Jews, since Polish Jews had always been considered Jewish rather than Polish, whereas German Jews had thought of themselves as German. And Irina Reyn read from a work-in-progress ending on this note: "A Russian woman doesn't wait. A Russian woman acts."On the question of what is Jewish fiction, Zelitch quoted a character of hers: "We don't bow down. We cross borders. We remember." Reyn recalled her unhappy Jewish day school experience as a Russian immigrant who never felt she belonged (I totally related to this, being neither a "real" American or Israeli at my elementary school); she said, "Jewish fiction is constant negotiation: where do you belong?" Brill remarked that as a reform Jew who went to Sunday school and never really understood her bat mitzvah asked: how do you handle writing a character that is either less than or more than your own religiosity? Barton said that for The Book of Esther she generated 90 questions and found a rabbi willing to discuss them all with her; then she showed the finished manuscript to another rabbi. She said that after revision and publication she still got things weirdly wrong. Oy! On the question of how much to explicate for the reader, Barton said she wants Christian Americans to know what's like to be a religious minority: "I looked up pentecost; you can look up havdallah."Barton also made a point I feel strongly about (and have written about in Salon and Jewish in Seattle): it is important to revisit history and re-enliven it. Alternate history, she suggested, is one way to get around Holocaust fatigue. Zelitch added, "Judaism has to be more than the Holocaust and Israel," that we should look to the international Jewish experience and the refugee crisis. Reyn then touched on "diasporic anxiety," the need to be more Jewish than you really are in order to connect with Jews in a new place (again, something I totally relate to since moving to Seattle from New York, and touched on in an essay for The Rumpus). Zelitch added that today dystopian fiction seems like a cop out and the challenge is to write engaging utopian fiction, that we need to see powerless people taking power and people need to lose themselves in this kind of story. Before opening up the discussion to audience questions, Brill said: "The arc of justice is not necessarily moving on its own. We need to push it."It was certainly an invigorating panel! One or two more posts to come...

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!

I'm excited to share that my story "Street of the Deported," part of my in-progress story collection More Like Home Than Home, won first place in Lilith Magazine's fiction contest. You can read the story right here, or pick up a copy from your local newsstand. Over on their blog, I spoke with fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about the story, Daughters of the Air, fairy tales, and food. You can read that Q & A here. Hooray!

I've written an If My Book column for Monkeybicycle, wherein I compare Daughters of the Air to weird things. Here's how it begins:

If Daughters of the Air were fruit it would be blood orange and pupunha.If Daughters of the Air were cheese it would be Roquefort. Also: Kraft saved from a dumpster.

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Today is the big day! Daughters of the Air is out in the world. I'm excited that after so many years this is really, really real. Really. It is out of my hands and readers are reading. Whoa. I am especially excited to share that Tin House has published an excerpt on their blog today, which you can read right here.If you'd like to help me get the word out, there are a few things you can do:Join me at the launch party tonight at 7:30 pm at the Hotel Sorrento. Elliott Bay Book Company will be selling books there. Or join me at one of my upcoming events around the country. Bring friends! Buying the book at bookstores show booksellers there's enthusiasm for it. And it supports all the good work booksellers do. And, um, in general buying the book helps me pay the bills and write my next book.Review the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, Powell's, your personal blog...Let people know your thoughts.Let your friends know if you think they might like a novel that is dark, fabulist, lyrical, political. Or if they're into cities like New York, Buenos Aires, Manaus, or Rome. Or if they're into myth and fairy tale. Or if you really like my sentences and think they'd really like my sentences too!Request your local library carry it. Have I told you lately how much I love libraries? Here is a very old blog post about one of my favorite toys.If you're part of a book club, suggest it to the group. I'm happy to meet with groups in person in the Seattle area, or while on book tour, or by Skype.Let me know if you'd like me to read at your reading series or come talk to your students or would like to adopt the book for a course. I love to give readings and talks. Daughters of the Air will be taught in a human rights class in the fall and would be a great fit with other classes too, such as contemporary fairy tales, Jewish studies, Latin American studies, and small press publishing.Send me photos of you with the book and I will post it on Instagram! Or tag me, and I will happily repost.Of course, these are all good things to do for any and all books out in the world that you wish to support. Thank you so much for championing literature!

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Last week I went home for the Brooklyn Book Festival and it was so lovely! Tuesday night, my parents took Michael and me to Malachy McCourt's event at Greenwood Cemetery for his new humorous book

Death Need Not Be Fatal. 

I love that the cemetery is also a literary venue with a club called the

Death Café

; the coordinator promises "the history of cremation has a few laughs." Perhaps my favorite (non-funny) thing McCourt said is this, regarding his atheism:  the conception of hell is "ecclesiastical terror. I don't want to hang out with the people who invented that."We also went to the Whitney Museum to see

Alexander Calder

's refurbished, motor-driven mobiles and "

An Incomplete History of Protest,

" an inspiring exhibit tackling art as protest from the 1940s to the present. The views from the Whitney are fantastic. It's hard not to fall in love with New York over and over again.

Stay tuned for more book news next week! And if you'd like to get that news right in your in-box, I've got a short and sweet monthly newsletter you can sign up for here.

I'm delighted to have my prose poem "Green Tea in a Pink Room" published in The Sunlight Press today! This is my second poem to be published, after last year's "How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth" in Pacifica Literary Review. Maybe if I publish an average of one poem a year I'll have enough for a collection by my 100th birthday? It's good to have goals.

[gallery ids="3481,3482,3483,3484" type="square" orderby="rand"]I am beyond thrilled to announce that Lanternfish Press is publishing my debut novel, Dirty, in late 2017 or early 2018. Dirty is a magical realist work about a teenage runaway whose father is disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War.The seedlings of this book emerged long, long ago, in 2001. And I worked on the first draft in fits and starts for years until I decided an MFA at the University of Washington would help me get it done. Then, mid-way through the program in 2010, Michael and I managed to travel to Argentina. (There was a pitfall to super cheap plane tickets; I wrote about it for Airplane Reading.) At graduation, my thesis advisor David Bosworth compared the process of finishing a novel to the gestation of a whale. Fast forward to 2017. Not sure which beasts gestate for 15 years. But this labor of love will see the light of day!Lanternfish is based in Philadelphia and makes gorgeous, genre-blurring books like Vikram Paralkar's The Afflictions and Christopher Smith's Salamanders of The Silk Road. The moment I read Lanternfish's cred0, I knew it would be a good fit:

READ. READ VORACIOUSLY. READ WRITERS WHO DON’T LOOK LIKE YOU. READ FOREIGN WRITERS. READ DEAD WRITERS!Writing is a conversation. It can offer people who lead wildly different lives a window on each other’s worlds. It can bridge gaps between cultures and gulfs in time, overcoming unbearable solitudes. We tend to click with writers who’ve grappled with many stories and whose work is informed by that broader perspective.

I am so delighted they agreed.

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 Please join me at the Central Library for Elissa Washuta's reading "Seattle's Fremont and the Centerless Universe" on Saturday, February 18 at 2 pm. Elissa spent the summer researching and writing in the Northwest tower of the Fremont Bridge. She'll read an excerpt of the work spun out of that residency, exploring Seattle's waterways, bridges, and spirits. And the neon Rapunzel! It's an honor to discuss this project with Elissa, a dear friend, fellow UW MFA alum, and ridiculously talented author.Apropos of landscape, there are still spots available in my Hugo House class Writing About Place. Class meets Wednesdays 2/22-3/29, 5-7 pm. Want to dream up a utopia? Destroy a dystopia? Burrow into memories of home or explore a foreign city?  We'll write lots, read great stories, and maybe share some snacks from George's, my favorite Polish deli, around the corner from Hugo House.Looking ahead to spring, I'm teaching an online webinar on Contemporary Fairy Tales via Inked Voices on Saturday, April 29, 9 am-10:15 am PST (12 pm-1:15 pm EST). You can also opt in for a critique of a four-page fairy tale here.

There are just six copies left of my chapbook "I Loved You in New York" (alice blue books, 2015). Since alice blue shut its doors in 2016, I've been selling them at readings and on Etsy. (UPDATE: Only one left! Snatch it up!) An excerpt:

On Valentine's Day, she's feeling a little sick, so they stay in and watch part of Cronenberg's Crash and eat Stouffer's chocolates while on the screen a bloodied couple screws each other in a car wreck.

Get it in time for Valentine's Day!Did you already read and enjoy? Please leave a review on Goodreads. My ego thanks you.