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.

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...

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!