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!
This Sunday at 2 pm, I'm reading at the kick-off event for the South Sound Writers' Reading Series in Des Moines, WA with five very talented women that I met through ArtistTrust: Lynn Knight, Kristen Millares Young, Patty Kinney, Claire Thornburgh, and Judith Gille. The series is organized by another very talented woman, Jannát Bey, and will take place at the Des Moines Library: 21620 11th Ave S, Des Moines, Washington 98198. I'm looking forward to the field trip out of Seattle.Then on Monday is the launch party for issue #2 of Pacifica! The theme, Sea Change, has brought some gorgeous art and writing our way. Join us at the Pine Box at 8:30. Fun!
I've been feeling anxious about the many things I'm juggling at the moment, so I just did a "brain-dump," hashing out my immediate deadlines and less imminent ones, projects where I owe work to others and projects where I owe work to myself, and when in the coming months I will be able to do that. This is something I do from time to time, but having just finished auditing the ArtistTrust EDGE program, I have a few more tips and resources under my belt, with healthy reminders about making time for the writing and valuing that work. I feel a lot better. Of my own projects, there are a handful of short stories that I want to develop further, a handful to submit (or continue submitting), and a general plan to arrange the collection (in hard copy, not in my mind, which I've pretty much done) in September.Anxiety-reduction aside, the brain dump also got me excited about looking ahead to my second novel. I wrote a quick, rough sketch of about 115 pages last April and put it aside to simmer. I took a number of inspiring and invigorating classes at Hugo House in March, including Chris Abani's class on voice and Sam Lipsyte's class on keeping a story going. Now, I'm taking Peter Mountford's excellent class on narrative structure, and had a really productive workshop of my synopsis and first chapter. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into the main conflict of the story before I set out to rewrite with more intention. And I'm excited to keep reading novels that I think will feed this book. For my first novel, I read countless books. I wish I had kept a more careful list all in one place, but my notes are scattered over many notebooks, and it would take me some time to sift through the pages to put it all together. I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on that was from or about Argentina and seemed remotely related, as well as a number of books that used magic realism in some way similar to how I tend to write it. I'm trying to be more organized about my second novel.So far, here are some of the works feeding into Novel # 2. If you have any recommendations that fit into the nodes developing here, feel free to leave a comment!
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