As with past AWPs, I found yesterday that I could really only digest two panels per day. I attended three, but the third panel was somewhat lost on me, unfortunately. This morning, I took in another informative session, however!

Behind the Curtain: An Insider's Look at Four Top Literary Journals

Panelists: Carolyn Kuebler, Oscar Villalon, Patrick Ryan, Julia Brown; Moderator: Matthew Landsburgh

I've been interested in the ins-and-outs of literary magazines (mostly as a writer and reader but occasionally as an editor) for a long time now, so I could not resist this panel.

Landsburgh asked each panelist to provide an overview of their journal, speak to the kinds of work they publish in print and online, speak to their process of selecting work, and also what is an easy rejection versus what catches their attention for potential publication.

Brown, a fiction editor at AGNI, based at Boston University, said that next year will be 50th anniversary of the journal. They publish 250 pages of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art twice a year, and AGNI 94 includes a Future of Translation portfolio representing 21 languages. They publish a similar variety of things on their blog but also do Q & As, more reviews, and graphic novel excerpts. They receive an astounding 21,000 submissions a year across genres, around 8,000 of which are for fiction, so are constantly reading and passing around submissions that are whittled down to 6-8 stories per issue. Brown likes to read one third of a piece; within the first few pages, she says, "you can tell if it is something you want to pass on to others or not." But also: “sometimes there’s a story like a thorn that isn’t to your taste but there’s something about it that makes you want to pass it on." Brown loves when she is being led through a story and the sentences are like bread crumbs--it feels exciting and dangerous. When there’s a honed sensibility in the language, “it’s evident from sentence one”

Villalon is the managing editor at ZZYZYVA, a San Francisco-based journal with no institutional affiliation, publishing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and art three times per year. In addition to online classes, they do 27 events per year, which include festivals, conferences, and interviews at bookstores with contributors who have a new book, which sounds like a really nice way to build community. Villalon also noted that online publication is paid the same as print. They do not take online submissions, however, and they do not use readers— interns log submissions and do a first read mostly for their own benefit, making a maybe/maybe not pile but it’s for them to learn about common mistakes and what works well in a submission. Editors look at everything. Submissions with cliches and clunky sentences are a quick rejection. They are looking for a believable voice, conviction, something that sounds true, that it’s not a writing exercise or thought experiment but something meaningful.

Ryan, the editor in chief of One Story, also a magazine with no affiliation, said that next year is their 20th anniversary. They publish one short story per month in chapbook format have published 284 different writers so far, half of which it is their first publication. They receive 10-12,000 submissions per year, close 2 months a year to catch up. A volunteer team of 12-15 vetted, trained readers commit to reading 15 complete submissions per week and they must submit a “best” submission of the week (I love this requirement); an assistant editor reads the best ofs, then sends them to Ryan, who starts all of them and they work together to winnow down what to read next. Red flags include confusion and obscurity, a mistake made by a lot of emerging writers; no sense of urgency by page two, no sense that the story is going anywhere. But if a colleague says to read it, he reads the whole submission.

Kuebler, the editor of New England Review, which is based at Middlebury College, noted that they publish short short fiction to novellas, poetry, essays (critical, personal, lyric, travel), dramatic writing, and translations in all genres, but they do not publish reviews or art. Occasionally they do an emerging writers issue (e.g. writers who have not yet published a book). They have a podcast in which theater students at Middlebury perform published work which sounds lovely! A volunteer team of 20 readers (some recent grads, some retirees) read 10,000 submissions a year. The editors get to know the readers well before the readers can be quite brief in their comments on Submittable, where much of the conversation takes place. The editors will read the readers' comments and the submissions and then decide whether to advance story to Kuebler who “is the keeper of the big picture” in terms of what’s been published recently and what will be in future issues. She loves to get a submission where she wonders “how’s this going to work?” yet the piece feels authoritative.

The panel ended with the all-too-important urging of writers to subscribe to one or two journals. If every writer did this, it would create significant support for the literary ecosystem. So please do so if you don't! Happy subscribing, reading, and submitting!

January is almost over. Is it too late for a blog post on setting intentions? I would venture not! The pandemic and being a new parent (do I still get to say "new" now that my child is one?) is a constant reminder to be gentle with myself and find the right level of ambitious that I find fulfilling without giving myself a migraine.

What soldiering through a migraine feels like?

So what are my writing and publishing goals for this year? With my second novel releasing from Lanternfish Press in late September, I have to be mindful of the marketing and publicity work just around the corner. I learned with my first novel, Daughters of the Air, that marketing and publicity can be ::e n d l e s s:: I do like it! But I also need to keep space for work-work, creative writing, and life.

I started writing my second novel two days after I began submitting my first novel—with a haiku workshop as a palate cleanser in between. I started writing my third novel, my current work-in-progress, just a year after starting my second novel. It's a long story as to why that I won't get into here, but I was heartened to learn that Jess Walter juggles multiple book projects simultaneously, and I'm sure many other writers do as well. Welp! The big hope for this year is I "finish" that third novel. (NB: Here's my silly essay "How to Finish a Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years"; I love that this essay landed in The Nervous Breakdown.)

My other writing goal is write two more essays for the collection that I began the same year as Novel #3. I'm taking an essay writing class through Atlas Obscura, where I've been having a great time teaching fairy tale writing. It'll be my first time as a student since taking a wonderful Hugo House class in 2016 with Alexander Chee on making fictional characters of historic figures, and I'm really looking forward to it. My plan is to write one piece arising from the class and one essay after finishing reading A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, which I have ordered from one of my favorite Chicago bookstores, Exile in Bookville, which is located in one of my favorite buildings in the city.

That's it for my writing. I think those are plenty of goals for the year, given what I've got on my plate. I stopped aiming for 100 rejections per year a few years ago, though I do think it's a good goal to have if you're starting the submissions process and need to develop a callous against rejection. By my calculations, I had a 17% acceptance rate in 2021 so I do need to aim a little higher as my general goal, per advice from Creative Capital, is 10%. But I'm not going to tear my hair out over this one. As I say to my son, "Gentle! Gentle!"

My last goal is to continue to help emerging writers stretch their craft and hone their approach to getting their work out in the world. If you have short stories or a novel you're working on and if you'd like to work one-on-one with me, you can check out my coaching and consulting page at Hugo House here.

What are your goals for 2022? Any special plans for writing, reading, publishing? Or maybe you want to learn to cook something special this year? My cooking is toddler-centric now, but I've been dipping in and out of Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I love her opinions: "Powdered rosemary must be shunned." Onward & upward & twirling, twirling, twirling!

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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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.

 The Seattle Review of Books invited me to participate in their fun & breezy column, "Whatcha Reading?" I touched on dark psychological fiction, heartbreaking poetry, an essay on the cleverness of crows, and more. Something for everyone! Plus: a preview of some Women in Translation Month picks.Over on the Magic Realism blog, Zoe Brooks had this to say about Daughters of the Air: "In every way this is a mature intelligent book which may not suit all readers, but it is an example of how magic realism is so suited to ambiguity and  to difficult subjects." You can read the whole review here. Also, I wrote a very personal essay about life choices here on Healthline.Finally, this Monday at 6:30 pm at the Phinney Neighborhood Association, I will be participating in a panel discussion on the author-editor relationship at the Northwest Independent Editors' Guild. The panel will include Dave Boling, author of The Lost History of Stars and Jamie Swenson of the University of Washington marketing and communications department. Matthew Bennett of the guild will moderate. Not in town but curious about the topic? You can tune in live on YouTube.

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.

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!

I am pleased with how fitting it is to have an essay called "How to Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years" in The Nervous Breakdown today. Here's how it begins:

1.  Choose a horrific moment in history you know little about, in a country, Argentina, you know little about, but which seems to have troubling similarities to the here and now. Research for years. Images from the Dirty War sear into your mind.continue reading

In other news, I made a handy-dandy card with all of my upcoming out-of-Seattle readings (as always everything is on my appearances page).Huzzah!

The term "dumpster fire" has been used in reference to 2017 at least several million times. At one point in October, I considered taking some classes on how to cope with anxiety and insomnia that were organized specifically in response to our collective ongoing sense of doom. I didn't though—because I was overwhelmed! Ha.Despite everything, I need to celebrate 2017 on a personal level. Daughters of the Air, which I'd toiled over for years, finally came out, and people are reading it and telling me they are enjoying it! Michael and I celebrated the holiday season with candles and latkes and lights and dim sum and snow (!) and The Shape of Water (a beautiful love story!) and chocolate peanut butter pie and New Year's Eve back at the Hotel Sorrento's Fireside Lounge for reading (me, Teffi's Subtly Worded, him Hanna Krall's Chasing the King of Hearts, which I'm happily adding to my Women in Translation Month queue), writing, live jazz, people watching, and bubbles. What more could I ask for?The day after Shelf Awareness called Daughters "a striking debut from a writer to watch," The Seattle Review of Books included it among five Seattle novels that made Paul Constant's year:

Anca Szilágyi’s Daughters of the Air is a fantastic debut — a magical realist fairy tale set in gritty New York City. It’s the kind of book that leaves you utterly confounded at the end, as you try to remember all the twists and turns that you took along the way. It feels like an impossible book, somehow — a product of alchemy, a creation of unearthly talents.

Wow! The book hasn't been panned yet, but when it does, I'll hang on to these two reviews for dear life. I was also super happy to see Tara Atkinson's novella Boyfriends included in the end-of-year list; I gobbled it one sitting and highly recommend it.Yesterday afternoon, I was thrilled to see The Seattle Times reviewed Daughters too—my first review in a major American newspaper!

Anca L. Szilágyi’s intense debut novel, "Daughters of the Air," locates a deeply personal story against the surreal backdrop of [Argentina's Dirty War].

  [gallery ids="4953,4952" type="rectangular"]I'll be moseying up to a newsstand later today so I can rustle up the paper and feel the newsprint on my fingers.In other news...

• Every year, I strive to collect 100 rejections. (Why? See this wonderful Lit Hub article by Kim Liao.) In 2016, I made it to 106, plus eight acceptances. In 2017, I garnered 93 rejections and 16 acceptances. This is actually bad in terms of my other annual goal, which is to be rejected 90% of the time. I need to aim higher.
• There are just four spots left in my online Fiction II class at Hugo House, which begins on January 14. You can sign up here.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this longer-than-usual blog post! As a gift, here is a Goodreads giveaway for you. Already read Daughters? Leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Powell's would help spread the word! You can do this regardless of how you obtained the book (other bookstores, my publisher, the library, and all that fun stuff).Onward!

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!

I had a lovely time discussing the craft of writing with Thea Prieto of Propeller Magazine last week! We touched on research, breaking workshop "rules," and a handful of the books that enriched the "broth" that was the manuscript of Daughters of the Air.  You can read the interview right here.

Fun news: Lanternfish Press is running a giveaway for Daughters of the Air on Goodreads. You can enter here. If you've already pre-ordered the book, perhaps you might add it to your to-read list and recommend the giveaway to a friend or two?

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!

I'm happy to have a piece in the July/August issue of Women's Review of Books, discussing Jade Sharma's Problems (Coffee House Press), Julia Franks' Over the Plain Houses (Hub City Press), and Angela Woodward's Natural Wonders (FC2). You can purchase a digital copy here.In other news, last week I had a lovely time chatting with fellow LaSalle Storyteller Award winner Peter Mountford and Scott James of Solipsis Publishing about the writing life and the impact the award has had on our work. You can watch the video here. The deadline for the 2017 award is August 28. If you're a Washington State fiction writer, you should apply! 

 Over on The Woodsy, I chatted about inspiration, long-term motivation, and whether one ever feels "done" when writing a novel. I was joined by Bonnie Rochman, author of The Gene Machine, and Candace Dempsey, author of Murder in Italy. Thanks for the fun opportunity, Dena Ogden!

Dang it. Despite world affairs being horrendous, I'm going to relish some good things that happened in 2016. First, I achieved my goal of obtaining 100 rejections (106!). If you're not getting rejecting 90% of the time, you're not aiming high enough--so goes the wisdom from Creative Capital. The fruits of this labor paid off with eight publications. Here they are, plus other goodness. (Find the zoetrope!) 

• Artist Trust and Gar LaSalle threw a party to celebrate my winning the inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. With delicious homemade pizza! Pictures here. Thank you, forever, Gar and Artist Trust. The door this award opened is tremendous. And congrats to the 2016 winner, Peter Mountford! I can't wait to read his next novel, In The Rush of Everything.
• Jewish in Seattle published my personal essay "Threads of Memory" and my first feature article "Art After Auschwitz."
• Steve Barker interviewed me for his podcast Ordinary Madness. Check out his debut essay collection Now For The Disappointing Part.
• Pacifica Literary Review published "How Do I Fit This Ghost In My Mouth," my first poem.
• The Rumpus published my personal essay "Used To Be Schwartz," featuring a very sad ham sandwich.
• M & I traveled to the Netherlands so I could research Novel #3.
• The anthology Airplane Reading included my essay "Mapping Imagination," about travelling to Argentina to research Novel #1, Dirty.
• The Jack Straw Cultural Center released a podcast  from my 2015 fellowship, in which I discussed with Kevin Craft Novel #2, Paralegal, and read an excerpt. It's got cabbage and spite in it.
• The Los Angeles Review of Books published my essay "Dark Fruit: A Cultural and Personal History of the Plum." Hooray for plums! This essay was a loooooong time in the making.
• Syntax & Salt published two micro-fairy tales.
• For their 30th Anniversary celebration, Artist Trust included my story "Cauliflower Tells You" in the window of V2, a temporary collaborative arts space that used to be a Value Village. The party was super fun; I especially enjoyed Cathy McClure's installation in the elevator, "Such a Nasty Woman." It's similar to her piece "Carnival of Life" except with female figurines.
• Moss published my story "Don't Worry," inspired by something disturbing I overheard at Anne Frank Huis.
• Though I am sad Corinne and I brought The Furnace to a close, our farewell evening was just beautiful. Lisa Nicholas-Ritscher closed out the night by leading a sing along to "Dance Me To The End of Love" with the help of the klezmer group The Schtick Figures. Ah, Leonard Cohen! RIP.

My plans for the holidays including gorging myself on kreplach, cholent, pizza, and rainbow cookies and devouring Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Paula Fox's Desperate Characters. Happy winter solstice!

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.