The Seattle Review of Books invited me to participate in their fun & breezy column, "Whatcha Reading?" I touched on dark psychological fiction, heartbreaking poetry, an essay on the cleverness of crows, and more. Something for everyone! Plus: a preview of some Women in Translation Month picks.Over on the Magic Realism blog, Zoe Brooks had this to say about Daughters of the Air: "In every way this is a mature intelligent book which may not suit all readers, but it is an example of how magic realism is so suited to ambiguity and to difficult subjects." You can read the whole review here. Also, I wrote a very personal essay about life choices here on Healthline.Finally, this Monday at 6:30 pm at the Phinney Neighborhood Association, I will be participating in a panel discussion on the author-editor relationship at the Northwest Independent Editors' Guild. The panel will include Dave Boling, author of The Lost History of Stars and Jamie Swenson of the University of Washington marketing and communications department. Matthew Bennett of the guild will moderate. Not in town but curious about the topic? You can tune in live on YouTube.
[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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I'm excited to be teaching a class on fairy tales at Corinne Manning's Living Room Workshops. Mid-December is wonderful time for contemplating magic, especially fairy tale magic. Here's the course description, with nitty gritty info below:Explore magical realism and fairy tales with 3 teachers over the course of one weekend in this moveable feast of a writing workshop. Participants will move from house to house gaining craft skills, knowledge, and writing some “marvelous” fiction and exploring the memoir as fairy tale. Readings will include Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, and Alyssa Nutting.Each class will last 1.5 hours and will take place in Capitol Hill and the Central District on Saturday, ending in Greenwood on Sunday. Carpooling is encouraged. Course must be taken as a whole. No single class drop ins. To enroll please email corinne.manning@gmail.com.Tale: A Two-day Moveable (Writing) Feast
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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