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!

The Daughters of the Air launch party Tuesday night was a dream. The Fireside Lounge at the Hotel Sorrento was all decked out for the holidays: twinkly lights, garlands, and the lounge's quintessential warm glow. I was astounded at the turn out—and relieved we splurged on 100 alfajores! The books sold out within half an hour. Then Hugo House hurried over with more books. Then those sold out. Then Michael hurried to the car to get a box of my own books. Then we hauled out the second box.Christine Neulieb, Editorial Director of Lanternfish Press, opened the night with a few words about publishing Daughters of the Air. My dear friend and Furnace co-founder Corinne Manning read a beautiful excerpt from her novel Potential Monsters. And, we talked about metamorphosis, the pungent air by the Gowanus Canal, the inverted landscape of fairy tales. You can see more photos from the party here.Saturday night, Salon published by essay "Writing a Holocaust novel without writing about the Holocaust." in which I discuss exploring the Holocaust obliquely in Daughters of the Air. Last week, I spoke about this theme in an interview with Erin Popelka over at Must Read Fiction, along with how reading poetry and teaching ESL informed my creative writing. (If you retweet the interview or like it and follow Must Read on Instagram, you'll be entered into a giveaway for a copy of my novel.)Finally, I have a new short story, "Healers," in Geometry,  a new magazine based in New Zealand. The .pdf is available for free, but you can buy a beautiful print copy for $15 and support a literary magazine that pays writers.What a week! All the excitement has given me a cold, but I love an excuse to flood myself with big bowls of noodle soup. 

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Last week I went home for the Brooklyn Book Festival and it was so lovely! Tuesday night, my parents took Michael and me to Malachy McCourt's event at Greenwood Cemetery for his new humorous book

Death Need Not Be Fatal. 

I love that the cemetery is also a literary venue with a club called the

Death Café

; the coordinator promises "the history of cremation has a few laughs." Perhaps my favorite (non-funny) thing McCourt said is this, regarding his atheism:  the conception of hell is "ecclesiastical terror. I don't want to hang out with the people who invented that."We also went to the Whitney Museum to see

Alexander Calder

's refurbished, motor-driven mobiles and "

An Incomplete History of Protest,

" an inspiring exhibit tackling art as protest from the 1940s to the present. The views from the Whitney are fantastic. It's hard not to fall in love with New York over and over again.

Stay tuned for more book news next week! And if you'd like to get that news right in your in-box, I've got a short and sweet monthly newsletter you can sign up for here.

[gallery ids="3481,3482,3483,3484" type="square" orderby="rand"]I am beyond thrilled to announce that Lanternfish Press is publishing my debut novel, Dirty, in late 2017 or early 2018. Dirty is a magical realist work about a teenage runaway whose father is disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War.The seedlings of this book emerged long, long ago, in 2001. And I worked on the first draft in fits and starts for years until I decided an MFA at the University of Washington would help me get it done. Then, mid-way through the program in 2010, Michael and I managed to travel to Argentina. (There was a pitfall to super cheap plane tickets; I wrote about it for Airplane Reading.) At graduation, my thesis advisor David Bosworth compared the process of finishing a novel to the gestation of a whale. Fast forward to 2017. Not sure which beasts gestate for 15 years. But this labor of love will see the light of day!Lanternfish is based in Philadelphia and makes gorgeous, genre-blurring books like Vikram Paralkar's The Afflictions and Christopher Smith's Salamanders of The Silk Road. The moment I read Lanternfish's cred0, I knew it would be a good fit:

READ. READ VORACIOUSLY. READ WRITERS WHO DON’T LOOK LIKE YOU. READ FOREIGN WRITERS. READ DEAD WRITERS!Writing is a conversation. It can offer people who lead wildly different lives a window on each other’s worlds. It can bridge gaps between cultures and gulfs in time, overcoming unbearable solitudes. We tend to click with writers who’ve grappled with many stories and whose work is informed by that broader perspective.

I am so delighted they agreed.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of chatting with Steve Barker for the 76th edition of Ordinary Madness, his Arts & Entertainment podcast. We talked about novel writing, rejection, The Furnace, the effects of winning awards, and a bit about my time at McGill University in Montreal. I also read two short-short stories, one of which is quite new. Fun!