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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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.

I'm really looking forward to teaching a new short story class at Hugo House about Anton Chekhov and his influence on modern short story writing. So many craft techniques in wide use today originated from Chekhov, and I learned a lot deeply engaging with his stories. In fact, my story "Old Boyfriends" started out as an imitation of the structure and themes in "Gusev". In addition to reading iconic stories from Chekhov, we'll read Mavis Gallant and Jhumpa Lahiri and Ehud Havazelet, and try our hands at a range of techniques. Here's a micro-lesson preview of the class. I hope to see there, Mondays 7-9 pm, starting April 27!

My short story "Old Boyfriends" is in Propeller Magazine this week. Here's how it starts:

It’s four p.m.: the sun is gone.Sandra, a graduate student in archaeology, lurches forward with the bus along Avenue du Parc.“This roof’s all bone,” Sandra says, rapping her knuckles to her skull.continue reading

Back in my MFA program at the University of Washington, I took two "creative writer as critical reader" classes (my favorite classes from the program) one after the other, in poetry with Heather McHugh and then prose with David Bosworth, my adviser. Heather brought in a translation of Anton Chekhov's story "Gusev" that she'd been working on with Nikolai Popov, a prose-bone to throw at the small contingent of prosers in her class. At first, I bristled against the story, feeling disoriented in its dark, suffocating setting. But the ending was wonderful and the more I read it, the more I loved the whole thing. I loved seeing how the story opened up with Gusev sinking in the ocean among the sharks and the pilot fish and how the light in the sky shifted to green, to violet, to gold, to rose. In David's class, we were invited to choose a short story that we wanted to study deeply and either imitate or take its structure and themes and write a story we'd already been wanting to write within that structure or launching off of it somehow. I chose the latter, among other things making Gusev's ship into Sandra's city bus and kind of letting the story take over from there. Dan DeWeese, the editor of Propeller, had a couple wonderful suggestions that ultimately took the story away from the exercise and made me excited about the story all over again, since writing that first draft back in 2010.