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!

Mid-February to mid-March, I'll be zipping around the country reading from and yapping about Daughters of the Air (yay!). While I'm at it, I'll be teaching a couple one-day classes on one of my favorite topics: writing contemporary fairy tales. In both classes we'll short-short stories by masters of the form, Angela Carter and Kate Bernheimer, and write our own retellings and original tales.In Portland: Sunday, February 18, 10 am-2 pm at Literary Arts. Bring lunch! Register here.(N.B.  I'll be reading at Powell's City of Books the next day, February 19 at 7:30 pm, in conversation with another fan of fairy tales, Susan DeFreitas, author of Hot Season. Here is a conversation between us on fairy tales on the Powell's blog.)In Chicago:Monday, March 5, 6:30-9 pm at StoryStudio Chicago. Register here.(And my Chicago reading will be at The Book Cellar on Saturday, March 3 at 6 pm, with Gint Aras, author of The Fugue.)

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All of my upcoming readings are here.All of my upcoming classes are here.Want short & sweet once-a-month updates on readings, classes, publications, and bits on art, writing, food, and cities? Subscribe to my newsletter here. It's like this blog but less often and right in your inbox! You can check out previous newsletters here. Past highlights include pictures of ponies, fruit pyramids, giants, and odd winged creatures.

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!