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! 

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!

 My story "Don't Worry" is out in Moss, Issue 6.  Here's how it begins:

Johnny’s teaching math in the fall and we’re on our honeymoon. Venice, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam. A whole month. Sexy sexy cities for sexy sexy times. I planned most of it. He got Amsterdam.continue reading

I wrote the story on the way home from my trip to the Netherlands this May, after overhearing a tourist at Anne Frank House say of the diary, "it's just paper." It's (unfortunately) been feeling pretty timely this past week. The trip was made possible by the Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, which brought me there to research my third novel. I'm forever grateful for that opportunity.The story will be available in print later this year in Volume 2. If you'd like to hold the story in your hands and support a great journal, you can subscribe here!

Fun news: We just installed my short story "Cauliflower Tells You" in the storefront window of V2, a temporary collaborative art space in Capitol Hill's old Value Village. If you're in Seattle, stop by anytime! This is part of Artist Trust's 30th birthday celebration, which will culminate in a party on October 22. The party will feature art, music, film, readings, and performances from:Humaira Abid / Iole Alessandrini / Juventino Aranda / Hami Bahadori / Jana Brevick / Zachary Burns / Romson Bustillo / Blake Chamberlain / Michelle de la Vega / Ryan Feddersen / Dakota Gearhart / Leah Gerrard / Ari Glass / Lori Goldston / Dayna Hanson / Vic Haven / Gary Hill / Andrew Hoeppner / Jessica Hoffman /  Jan Hopkins / Jenny Hyde / Mari Ichimasu / Todd Jannausch / Britta Johnson / Christopher Paul Jordan / Lisa Kinoshita / Robert Lashley / Cheryll Leo-Gwin / Stacey Levine / Holly Ballard Martz / Cathy McClure / Fiona McGuigan / Marilyn Montufar /  Tyna Ontko / Clyde Petersen / Kristen Ramirez / George Rodriguez / Paul Rucker /  Austin Stiegemeier / Anca Szilagyi / Barbara Earl Thomas / Elissa Washuta / Ellen Ziegler / More TBA!Prior to the party on the 22nd, you can drop in during Capitol Hill Art Walk on October 13, 5-8 pm. Hope to see you on the 13th or 22nd!

I'm back from a family trip to Orcas Island. Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, we spotted skittering kingfishers and a great blue heron in flight--its path strangely loping. Then, in Orcas, there were the requisite cows, sheep, and horses; a buck crunching on dead leaves; and sweet doe eating dandelions. We went to the old strawberry barreling plant in the hamlet of Olga, where there are no longer any strawberry fields. And M & I baked our bones in a sauna that may have been close to 200° F. How refreshing!Now I'm in back-to-school mode. A few tidbits of note:

• On Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a free one-day class on contemporary fairy tales at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library.
• On Saturday, October 22, I will be one of 40+ featured artists at Artist Trust's 30th Birthday Party. Tickets are $25 and proceeds support this amazing organization and all the hard work it does in Washington State. I have felt their impact profoundly as a recipient of their inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. But they have been a helpful resource for me long before that; I attended a number of their grant writing workshops and compiled some of my notes in a post here.
• Finally, I'm pleased to be offering one-on-one writing coaching via Hugo House's new manuscript consultation program. You can learn all about here.

In other news, I have a few pieces forthcoming--a collage essay about a fruit (in the meantime here's a post I wrote about nectarines), a short story inspired by my recent trip to the Netherlands, and two short-short fairy tales. I'll be sure to post links to these pieces as they become available.

Thanks to the tremendous generosity of the Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, I spent the earlier part of this month in the Netherlands, researching my third novel. M came as my trusty research assistant, furnishing highlighters, snacks, and sweaters with alacrity. There's a lot of information crammed in my skull right now, which I am organizing as best I can, hoping it seeps into the crevices of my subconscious fruitfully.What struck me on our trip: the birds! (I know, I know, put a bird on it.) Egrets, loons, swans, geese, ducks, grouse, crows; white-breasted, brilliant blue, long-tailed, plump and shimmery; raucous, trilling, warbling, chortling. Fact: the first painting acquired by the Rijksmuseum features a bold, angry swan.In the moat by the citadel in 'S-Hertogenbosch, an egret bullied ducks until a trio of geese chased the egret to the boardwalk where it loomed. This continued on a loop for a while. A seagull swooped down to chase the egret further and when the egret returned, the geese trailed it, sinister and slow. Sinister, at least, until we realized there were goslings near.In a canal in Rotterdam, three loons had a lovers' spat. Slapped wings, held heads beneath the water--murderous! Not far from there, we strolled past the "swan bridge," soaring and modern.On our last night in Amsterdam, we stayed at a fanciful b&b on the Western Canal Belt. Our hostess could not greet us when we arrived. She hid our keys in a flowerpot. Up two steep, narrow flights of stairs, we flung open the door. The lights were on, the doors and windows open, a gust of wind coming from the terrace, which led to another room with another open door, and the flutter and chirp of green and yellow parakeets, in a big cage looking down upon the Keizersgracht canal. Old books stacked everywhere, art on the walls and leaning upon the books, a laptop left on a long wooden table, half open, as if our hostess had left in a hurry. It had the feel of that computer game Myst, where mysterious rooms, empty of people, always suggest a presence, a place quickly abandoned. We did meet her late that night and in the morning at breakfast the birds flew freely about the room and she would call to them and air kiss them and talked to us about Argentina and Barcelona and photography and her love of Amy (Winehouse).Apropos of birds, on the flight back, I finished Noy Holland's debut novel Bird, a raw gorgeous thing. Here, I leave you with an excerpt:

She was hungry again and gorged herself on chicken fried steak and skittles, on vermilion faces of canyons, cliffs you could dig with a spoon.

Behold, Seattle's gloriously long spring, stretching from February to late June. In my youth, the colors of my birthday month featured gray slush and the unnatural blue icing on Carvel ice cream cakes. Now, there is a profusion of pink in all the azaleas, rhododendrons, early cherry blossoms, meaty camellias.Speaking of meat, I'm reading at a"Moveable Feast" themed reading on Saturday, March 5 at 7 pm, alongside my fellow Jack Straw'ster Bernard Grant and Emily Holt. They're promising a themed cocktail and open mic to follow, so come have a drink and bring food-themed work to share. This will be at a private home in Madrona on 34th and Columbia, as a part of the roving Makeshift Reading Series. Incidentally, this is also the second time I'm reading at a private home, which is just a lovely experience. A few weeks ago, I read at a party Artist Trust threw for me (!), hosted by Gar LaSalle. It was surreal and delightful and an honor. Pictures here!Then on Wednesday, April 6 at 7 pm, I'm reading at the third anniversary edition of Lit Fix at Chop Suey, alongside Anastacia Tolbert, Michelle Peñaloza, Sean Beaudoin, Gint Aras, and acoustic solo project The Wild. I'll be reading nonfiction, a genre I've been diving deeper into in the last year or so, and which I've never performed before.Lastly, on Wednesday, April 13, I'm returning to Castalia, the University of Washington MFA program's monthly series at Hugo House. Details on the line up to come!I'll have copies of my chapbook I Loved You in New York on hand at each of these readings, for $5. You can also get them from alice blue books at the APRIL book expo on March 20, at AWP in Los Angeles March 31-April 2, or via Etsy.

Some people have been asking what I submitted for the Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storytelling Award. They were three short stories:

1. "The Zoo," published in Washington City Paper
2. "Old Boyfriends," published in Propeller Magazine
3. "Sugar," published in Gastronomica

I didn't submit a novel excerpt, following the general grant-writing advice to use a work sample that has a beginning, middle, and end. I also strived to show a range in styles and put the sample together in the order above to modulate tone, starting with the sad/happy, getting quite dark, and then ending on a lighter note. Just putting my process out there in case it's helpful! NB: Artist Trust gathers an amazing list of funding resources here. And here's a post on writing artist statements.

In news that has made my year, I have been awarded the very first Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award! I am honored and overjoyed. This recognition means--so--much.My deepest gratitude to physician, sculptor, filmmaker and author Gar LaSalle for generously donating the award and for selecting me from among the finalists. Many thanks to panelists Aaron Counts, Angela Fountas, and Samuel Ligon for moving my work forward. And many thanks to Artist Trust, for the all the amazing hard work they do on behalf of artists in Washington State.Update: Many thanks to Seattle Review of Books and Paul Constant for this lovely write up!