Dang it. Despite world affairs being horrendous, I'm going to relish some good things that happened in 2016. First, I achieved my goal of obtaining 100 rejections (106!). If you're not getting rejecting 90% of the time, you're not aiming high enough--so goes the wisdom from Creative Capital. The fruits of this labor paid off with eight publications. Here they are, plus other goodness. (Find the zoetrope!) 

• Artist Trust and Gar LaSalle threw a party to celebrate my winning the inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. With delicious homemade pizza! Pictures here. Thank you, forever, Gar and Artist Trust. The door this award opened is tremendous. And congrats to the 2016 winner, Peter Mountford! I can't wait to read his next novel, In The Rush of Everything.
• Jewish in Seattle published my personal essay "Threads of Memory" and my first feature article "Art After Auschwitz."
• Steve Barker interviewed me for his podcast Ordinary Madness. Check out his debut essay collection Now For The Disappointing Part.
• Pacifica Literary Review published "How Do I Fit This Ghost In My Mouth," my first poem.
• The Rumpus published my personal essay "Used To Be Schwartz," featuring a very sad ham sandwich.
• M & I traveled to the Netherlands so I could research Novel #3.
• The anthology Airplane Reading included my essay "Mapping Imagination," about travelling to Argentina to research Novel #1, Dirty.
• The Jack Straw Cultural Center released a podcast  from my 2015 fellowship, in which I discussed with Kevin Craft Novel #2, Paralegal, and read an excerpt. It's got cabbage and spite in it.
• The Los Angeles Review of Books published my essay "Dark Fruit: A Cultural and Personal History of the Plum." Hooray for plums! This essay was a loooooong time in the making.
• Syntax & Salt published two micro-fairy tales.
• For their 30th Anniversary celebration, Artist Trust included my story "Cauliflower Tells You" in the window of V2, a temporary collaborative arts space that used to be a Value Village. The party was super fun; I especially enjoyed Cathy McClure's installation in the elevator, "Such a Nasty Woman." It's similar to her piece "Carnival of Life" except with female figurines.
• Moss published my story "Don't Worry," inspired by something disturbing I overheard at Anne Frank Huis.
• Though I am sad Corinne and I brought The Furnace to a close, our farewell evening was just beautiful. Lisa Nicholas-Ritscher closed out the night by leading a sing along to "Dance Me To The End of Love" with the help of the klezmer group The Schtick Figures. Ah, Leonard Cohen! RIP.

My plans for the holidays including gorging myself on kreplach, cholent, pizza, and rainbow cookies and devouring Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Paula Fox's Desperate Characters. Happy winter solstice!

Fun news: We just installed my short story "Cauliflower Tells You" in the storefront window of V2, a temporary collaborative art space in Capitol Hill's old Value Village. If you're in Seattle, stop by anytime! This is part of Artist Trust's 30th birthday celebration, which will culminate in a party on October 22. The party will feature art, music, film, readings, and performances from:Humaira Abid / Iole Alessandrini / Juventino Aranda / Hami Bahadori / Jana Brevick / Zachary Burns / Romson Bustillo / Blake Chamberlain / Michelle de la Vega / Ryan Feddersen / Dakota Gearhart / Leah Gerrard / Ari Glass / Lori Goldston / Dayna Hanson / Vic Haven / Gary Hill / Andrew Hoeppner / Jessica Hoffman /  Jan Hopkins / Jenny Hyde / Mari Ichimasu / Todd Jannausch / Britta Johnson / Christopher Paul Jordan / Lisa Kinoshita / Robert Lashley / Cheryll Leo-Gwin / Stacey Levine / Holly Ballard Martz / Cathy McClure / Fiona McGuigan / Marilyn Montufar /  Tyna Ontko / Clyde Petersen / Kristen Ramirez / George Rodriguez / Paul Rucker /  Austin Stiegemeier / Anca Szilagyi / Barbara Earl Thomas / Elissa Washuta / Ellen Ziegler / More TBA!Prior to the party on the 22nd, you can drop in during Capitol Hill Art Walk on October 13, 5-8 pm. Hope to see you on the 13th or 22nd!

I'm back from a family trip to Orcas Island. Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, we spotted skittering kingfishers and a great blue heron in flight--its path strangely loping. Then, in Orcas, there were the requisite cows, sheep, and horses; a buck crunching on dead leaves; and sweet doe eating dandelions. We went to the old strawberry barreling plant in the hamlet of Olga, where there are no longer any strawberry fields. And M & I baked our bones in a sauna that may have been close to 200° F. How refreshing!Now I'm in back-to-school mode. A few tidbits of note:

• On Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a free one-day class on contemporary fairy tales at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library.
• On Saturday, October 22, I will be one of 40+ featured artists at Artist Trust's 30th Birthday Party. Tickets are $25 and proceeds support this amazing organization and all the hard work it does in Washington State. I have felt their impact profoundly as a recipient of their inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. But they have been a helpful resource for me long before that; I attended a number of their grant writing workshops and compiled some of my notes in a post here.
• Finally, I'm pleased to be offering one-on-one writing coaching via Hugo House's new manuscript consultation program. You can learn all about here.

In other news, I have a few pieces forthcoming--a collage essay about a fruit (in the meantime here's a post I wrote about nectarines), a short story inspired by my recent trip to the Netherlands, and two short-short fairy tales. I'll be sure to post links to these pieces as they become available.

Thanks to the tremendous generosity of the Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, I spent the earlier part of this month in the Netherlands, researching my third novel. M came as my trusty research assistant, furnishing highlighters, snacks, and sweaters with alacrity. There's a lot of information crammed in my skull right now, which I am organizing as best I can, hoping it seeps into the crevices of my subconscious fruitfully.What struck me on our trip: the birds! (I know, I know, put a bird on it.) Egrets, loons, swans, geese, ducks, grouse, crows; white-breasted, brilliant blue, long-tailed, plump and shimmery; raucous, trilling, warbling, chortling. Fact: the first painting acquired by the Rijksmuseum features a bold, angry swan.In the moat by the citadel in 'S-Hertogenbosch, an egret bullied ducks until a trio of geese chased the egret to the boardwalk where it loomed. This continued on a loop for a while. A seagull swooped down to chase the egret further and when the egret returned, the geese trailed it, sinister and slow. Sinister, at least, until we realized there were goslings near.In a canal in Rotterdam, three loons had a lovers' spat. Slapped wings, held heads beneath the water--murderous! Not far from there, we strolled past the "swan bridge," soaring and modern.On our last night in Amsterdam, we stayed at a fanciful b&b on the Western Canal Belt. Our hostess could not greet us when we arrived. She hid our keys in a flowerpot. Up two steep, narrow flights of stairs, we flung open the door. The lights were on, the doors and windows open, a gust of wind coming from the terrace, which led to another room with another open door, and the flutter and chirp of green and yellow parakeets, in a big cage looking down upon the Keizersgracht canal. Old books stacked everywhere, art on the walls and leaning upon the books, a laptop left on a long wooden table, half open, as if our hostess had left in a hurry. It had the feel of that computer game Myst, where mysterious rooms, empty of people, always suggest a presence, a place quickly abandoned. We did meet her late that night and in the morning at breakfast the birds flew freely about the room and she would call to them and air kiss them and talked to us about Argentina and Barcelona and photography and her love of Amy (Winehouse).Apropos of birds, on the flight back, I finished Noy Holland's debut novel Bird, a raw gorgeous thing. Here, I leave you with an excerpt:

She was hungry again and gorged herself on chicken fried steak and skittles, on vermilion faces of canyons, cliffs you could dig with a spoon.

"I wish people would just stop writing about the Holocaust," a woman said to me at a national writing conference. Thus begins "Art After Auschwitz," my feature article for Jewish in Seattle's history issue.It's such a big topic. I'd love to explore it further. I learned about so many artists, such as Israeli Maya Zack, who's working on a film about Paul Celan, and Seattleite Leah Warshawski, whose documentary Big Sonia follows a larger-than-life survivor running a tailor shop in a dying mall outside Kansas City. I came across Ann Lipscombe, a young artist whose surreal drawing "What We Talk About When We Talk About My Jewish Nose," stopped me in my tracks at the Jewish Art Salon's "The Jew as Other" show in New York last December, and miniaturist Tine Kindermann, whose "Hummel Midrash" project explores the danger of kitsch and who curated "The Jew as Other" with Yona Verwer.

I'm very happy to report that "How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth," my first published poem, is up on Pacifica Literary Review's website. The piece was inspired by Geoffrey Farmer's exhibit of the same name at the Vancouver Art Gallery back in September. Many thanks to editor Matt Muth!

This spring, I'm teaching a six-week class on contemporary fairy tales at Hugo House. We'll read Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and Alissa Nutting, among other fantastic writers. We'll talk about some of my favorite techniques, like everyday magic and intuitive magic. And we'll try our hands at writing our own fairy tales. Class meets Wednesday nights 7-9 pm from May 25-June 29. Registration is currently open for Hugo House members; general registration opens March 22. Scholarships are available and applications are due on March 25.I'm also teaching a 75-minute webinar on Saturday, April 16 called Powerful Objects via Inked Voices. We'll talk about one of my favorite topics: how objects create a special kind of magic in fiction and how useful they are in developing character, plot, and emotional resonance. It's a lecture-based class that will include writing prompts and a Q&A. The class will meet at 12 pm EST / 9 am PST and is just $25. We'll talk about Cynthia Ozick's story "The Shawl," so please read that in advance. You can register here.Speaking of fairy tales, right now at the Henry Art Gallery, you can see Paul McCarthy's White Snow, a wildly whimsical and subversive take on Snow White. A few years ago, I saw his gonzo installation WS at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, a similarly subversive spin on Snow White but somehow less rich than the wood sculptures on view at the Henry. White Snow seems more artful, crafted, and thoughtful, whereas WS was a big raunchy frat party. The Henry is now free on Sundays (huzzah!), so go check it out. Perhaps it will inspire you!

My essay "Bedtime Stories for Ghosts: Reading Aristotle to Coco Chanel and Other Encounters in a Massive Art Installation" is up on Electric Literature today! This piece has been in the works since the beginning of the common S E N S E, Ann Hamilton's show at the Henry Art Gallery in October 2014, evolving as the show evolved and growing stranger with each of my visits. It draws on Aristotle and J.A. Baker and Mercè Rodoreda and Rikki Ducornet and humming birds and egret capelets and more.  (Not incidentally, the Coco Chanel egret capelet makes an appearance in my story "Cauliflower Tells You," over on Monkeybicycle.) I'm excited to have my work in Electric Literature and am thankful to Kelly Luce for taking it on.

I'm grateful to have caught "How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?", Geoffrey Farmer's exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery this weekend. I had never heard of Farmer, and I was entranced. "The Last Two Million Years" is a collage sculpture that takes up an entire room, comprised of hundreds of figures meticulously cut from a found Reader's Digest encyclopedia of the same title. I was awed not just at the amount of work that went into the installation, but the impulse to pin down layers of ephemera--not only tiny details in a vast history that feels impossible to contain but also the fleetingness of the found book itself, which stands eviscerated as you exit the room."The Surgeon and the Photographer" gathers images in a similar though more surreal manner, creating Dadaist characters from used books salvaged from a closed down used bookshop as well as fabrics. The sculptures are called puppets, suggesting one might inhabit them, give them voice and stories, and they'd be rich and complex stories indeed. Somehow this piece recalled for me a bizarre puppet movie I once saw as a tiny person, sitting alone in the attic in front of our old knobbed television tuned to a UHF channel. Faceless wooden mannequins sat chained in tubs of water and turned their heads, vaguely squeaking but unable to talk. I was utterly mesmerized and alarmed and had no idea what I was looking at.The most thrilling installation for me was "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" -- an eerie room filled with moving sculptures made of old movie props (lion heads, snakes with blue light bulb teeth), a haunting soundscape (bells, chimes, wind), and lights that shift from green to red to blue so that when it finally becomes white, the colors of the objects are almost a shock. The room is programmed to last the duration of an entire day, and I was very tempted to try and experience it for that long.Alas, we did not spend the entire day there. After leaving the museum, we encountered a zombie-themed wedding and wondered if the square outside Vancouver Art Gallery has a similar function to New York's Union Square. On the beach by English Bay, at sunset, we saw someone make enormous soap bubbles that shrieking children and adults alike chased to pop. We found a wonderfully curated independent bookstore called Pulp Fiction (I picked up The Dud Avocado and M picked up Wanderlust), and we watched a man train an enormous pit bull puppy on Kitsilano Beach with the help of beautiful red husky, and we gorged ourselves on Ukrainian, Malaysian, and Italian food. We also found time to just sit still and read. And, thanks to Geoffrey Farmer and all kinds of other stimuli, I wrote a poem, possibly the first I've written that I actually kind of like. Maybe I'll even send it out. Art wins!

Over on the Hugo House blog, I've got a mini-lesson previewing my upcoming one-day class at the Henry Art Gallery. The excerpt of class reading I chose comes from the opening of Mercè Rodoreda's novel Death in Spring, which is the new book integrated into Ann Hamilton: the common S E N S E. (The first book was J.A. Baker's The Peregrine.)Death in Spring is a stunning novel, for its poetic language, lush imagery, and its tackling cruelty among humans as well as violence in nature. Rodoreda was a Catalan writer living during Franco's dictatorship, and the novel can be read as a metaphor for that regime or for any oppressed society.The violence is also of mythological proportions, and the beauty of the language helps make reading it bearable. This technique was something that was made explicit for me by Rikki Ducornet speaking at an AWP panel on "Magic and Intellect": "For a difficult book to be readable, find a language that levitates somehow, that is scintillating."The class will go beyond this topic, delving into the many layers of Ann Hamilton's monumental show, on our relationship to animals, the sense of touch, and being touched--emotionally and intellectually--through the private act of reading. Death in Spring will definitely bring home this last idea of being touched--being moved in profound ways by another's experience and creation.

My sixth set of writing prompts for the Ploughshares blog dives into the vast territory of creative writing involving music, with wisdom from E.M. Forester, Milan Kundera, and Maya Sonenberg, and a short list of reading suggestions from Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" to a forthcoming novel on the inventor of the theremin.

In my fifth set of writing prompts for the Ploughshares blog, I consider dance as a launchpad for writing. 

My student Jenelle Birnbaum's lovely story "The Bodhisattva of the Sea," inspired by Katinka Bock's abstract sculptures, is up on the Henry Art Gallery's blog. The exhibit runs until May 4, and I think I need to squeeze in another visit before then, as there was a "Profane Fireplace" that surely had a fairy tale in it.

Forgive my hyperbole, but I really enjoyed AWP this year. Maybe it was because this was the fourth I attended, so it was less overwhelming. Maybe it was because it was in Seattle, so I got to see so many friends and sleep in my own bed. Maybe it was because I had a chance to read alongside some really lovely writers. Maybe it was because I got to bring M to the book fair on Saturday and he made many tired exhibitors laugh. I *did* have violent heart palpitations the weekend before the conference as I stressed out over the three readings I had, but somehow these subsided by Tuesday, and by Thursday it was one big love fest. Here are some highlights.Notes on the PracticalOn Thursday I attended Kristen Young's panel Like Sand to a Beach: Bringing Your Book to Market. Jarrett Middleton of Dark Coast Press gave a really informative overview of the publishing process, especially when it comes to distribution. I had no idea how scary a pre-sales conference is (when a publisher pitches the merits of a title to all the big guns of a distributor and they try to poke holes in your marketing plan). I also didn't know that a book has about 90 days or one quarter in a bookstore before it gets returned to the warehouse. Karen Maeda Allman of Elliott Bay Book Company gave the bookseller's perspective. My favorite advice of hers about author events is to "invite everyone you know, encourage them to bring friends, and invite your 'Kevin Bacon' friend--the one who knows everyone." All of her presentation slides are available on this beautiful Tumblr. Author Jonathan Evison emphasized building communities and taking the time to invite friends individually to your events rather than through mass emails. He also said, "Even if only six people come to your B & N event in south Austin, take the events coordinator to the Cheesecake Factory afterwards and get her drunk. She'll keep selling your books." Finally, Rachel Fershleiser of Tumblr gave an overview her experiences as a book publicist and of what she calls the "bookternet" -- smart people being silly on the internet with sites like Last Night's Reading.A Controversial PanelFriday morning I attended the panel Magic and Intellect. It was packed to the gills; magic must be popular! Something extraordinary occurred at this panel that so far one blogger I know of has recounted and it is worthwhile to read her account. I hope more people will write on it. I haven't had the mind space to do so; I'm still processing. But I did come away from it feeling affirmed, that imaginative writing is necessary. Rikki Ducornet said, "The human mind & imagination cannot sustain itself in a constant state of emergency," and Kate Bernheimer said, "Solutions in fairy tales often require radical acts. If you're in an incestuous, abusive relationship, you might need to cut off your finger to use as a key to get out of a room." And Rikki Ducornet offered this advice: "For a difficult book to be readable, 'find a language that levitates somehow, that is scintillating'" (last quotation via Mackenzie Hulton on Twitter).One Really Cool Thing from the Book Fair: Envisioning the Future of the BookI cannot begin to describe the many, many books I acquired last week. So I will simply share one very cool thing, Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book & Paper Expanded Artists' Books. They displayed a hybrid artist book with heat-sensitive ink and an embedded iPad; if you pressed your hand on the page, different words erased and different words appeared on the iPad. What alchemy.Readings GaloreI had the pleasure of reading fairy tales with Maya Sonenberg, Rikki Ducornet, and Valerie Arvidson. I was pleasantly surprised to see a fairly large room fill with people eager to hear stories. Somehow each of us included food in our stories--I hurriedly jotted the phrase "saffron buns and candied salmon" as Valerie read--and that made me immensely happy.At Canoe Social Club, I read with Andrew Ladd, Michael Nye, and Wesley Rothman. I'd finished Andrew's book What Ends Tuesday night and it had me sobbing by the end. In addition to making me think about the issues that got me crying, it got me thinking about the books that also made me cry like that--Sophie's Choice, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn-- so maybe I'll write a separate post on that topic. I picked up Michael's story collection Strategies Against Extinction; of course I will read the story "Sparring Vladimir Putin" first because obviously. I can't wait. Wesley is working on a collection that may be called Sub-Woofer--keep your ears peeled!Chris Abani and Chang-rae Lee did a wonderful reading and conversation. I already read The Secret History of Las Vegas (it's powerful!), but hearing Chris read the opening and another section concerned with fairy tales gave me shivers.I got to read with 13 others affiliated with the Univesity of Washington MFA and  the Cambridge Writers Workshop. We filled up Victrola's back room and then most of us retired to Coastal Kitchen for drinks, snacks, and exquisite corpse. Coincidentally, I sat beside someone I'd only known through twitter and had no idea would be there. The future is now!In the lovely subterranean Alibi Room, I got to see the UNC-Wilmington alumni reading, which featured several friends and which introduced me to the wonderful work of Rochelle Hurt and Kate Sweeney. You should check out their respective books, The Rusted City and American Afterlife. Finally, read Paul Constant's take on the conference here, which includes high praise for my Furnace co-conspirator Corinne Manning and her Alice Blue chapbook "A Slow and Steady Eruption." Hooray!

My latest book-review-in-bullet-points is up on the Ploughshares blog today. Here's how it begins:

Genre: literary mysteryWith reference to: Little House on the PrairieAnd: immigrant lit & ethnic litAnd: restlessness vs. belongingAlso: Manifest Destiny & Utopia

continue readingThis will be my last book review for the next little while as I gear up for a *new* series of blog posts on writing prompts using art, architecture, and a whole slew of other sources of inspiration. The first post goes live on Sunday and posts will appear every 2 or 3 weeks. Stay tuned!

I'm pleased to offer a third iteration of my writing with visual art class for Richard Hugo House at the Henry Art Gallery, now snappily-titled Visual Inspiration. Here's the course description:

This class, which meets at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, will use visual art as a springboard for diving into prose writing. We’ll mine the inspiration of images to unearth new prose or add unexpected meaning and direction to works in progress. Students can search the Henry’s digital archive and request works from the permanent collection not currently on view. For even more creative percolation, we’ll read published works inspired by visual art. Exercises, readings, and discussions will cover the writing process, character, story, landscape (internal and external), and style. Students will have the option to workshop one short-short story or essay. Co-Presented with the Henry Art Gallery.

Class meets Thursday evenings 6-8 pm, January 30-March 13 (with no class on February 27 due to the AWP conference). General registration begins December 10, and the scholarship deadline is December 24. I'm excited to see what students do with "Sanctum," the interactive installation now outside the Henry that draws on social media and surveillance technology, and I'm curious as always to see what gets pulled from the permanent collection and what new creative works spiral out from that.

[gallery columns="4" type="circle" ids="1449,1446,1442,1450"]Yesterday and all of last night and into 9 am this morning, the Center on Contemporary Art hosted a 24-hour art-making marathon at their Ballard location, the Shilshole Bay Beach Club. One of the 21 artists participating, John Osgood, wanted to collaborate with other artists during this frenzied event, and last month, I was invited to submit some of my writing. I sent John a couple short stories, and didn't know what would happen until I arrived at the marathon yesterday (of course, pretty much simultaneously with his other collaborators Amir Farhad, Robert Hardgrave, Stephen Rock, and a last minute fifth collaborator which added to the frenzy). John told me he'd chosen to work with my story "Skitter" and would paint a parade scene from it. He proposed that I paint text on the canvas and he would layer colors on top of that. I loved the idea, though I was nervous about painting, even if it was in my realm of text. After I decided what text should go on the canvas, he showed me how to use a paint pen, and I practiced as much as I could so that it didn't look like a 3 year old or drunk person had written it, though I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing. John spray painted over my first layer of text, then wrote over the same excerpt with a red paint pen, using his infinitely cooler handwriting. Then he spray painted it again and handed me a calligraphy brush and more liquid black paint and asked me to write the text again in smaller letters, trying not to cover over the other two layers but getting between them. John is probably taking a well-deserved nap right now, seeing as he painted 5 new pieces, collaborating with 5 different people, all between 9 am yesterday and 9 am today. The works (and there was a ton of other fantastic stuff being made by 20 other artists) will be auctioned off tonight during CoCA's fun-n-fancy gala dinner, which is, I understand sold out. Of course I am eagerly awaiting the final product from John's take on "Skitter" -- above are a few photos from documenting the process. Special thanks to John Osgood and to Nichole DeMent. It was a fantastic night!***Update:Here it is, the final product, "Harush," by John Osgood & Anca Szilagyi:

After the Tin House conference, M. and I went to New York to visit family and get our fill of art and food. We structured our visit around three bizarre-sounding art exhibits: Matthew Barney's drawings at the Morgan Library, Paul McCarthy's massive installation at the Park Avenue armory, and Jane Alexander's eerie sculptures at St. John the Divine.Barney's drawings were often framed in "self-lubricating" plastic, which was fascinating in and of itself, and sometimes more  interesting than the faint, conceptual sketches contained within. Most intriguing in this exhibit were his copies of Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, heavily marked up, cut up, splashed with gold leaf. This is part of his newest project, "River of Fundament," a seven-part "opera" drawing on  Mailer's novel of Ancient Egypt and the Egyptian Book of the Dead and transposing it to 20th century American car culture."WS," McCarthy's exhibit, took up the entire armory with projections and sculptures of Snow White, the seven dwarves, and Walt Disney in an extremely debauched frat party. The set from the projected film took up the center of the armory, and you could walk around it, peeking into windows, catching sight of some very disturbing after-the-party messes. An enchanted forest lay beyond the house, and you couldn't quite walk inside of it, but just below it, which was unsettling, along with the fact that trees intentionally resembled turds. And in side galleries, a series of other films with the same characters included food porn and  a naked Snow White accosting Walt Disney's mouth with a bar of soap. It was an impressive production, though I regret bringing my mother.The most moving and complex was “Jane Alexander: Surveys (From the Cape of Good Hope)," which explores the legacy of Apartheid. Tucked away in various chapels at the back of St. John the Divine, these child-sized beast-human sculptures were strange and haunting. I half-expected them to start moving around and addressing me. Because of a calendar error, we caught the show on its last-last day, as it was being packed up, so it was doubly strange to see these small creatures being put into crates. Particularly arresting was "Security." It featured a large wingless bird enclosed in razor-wire inside a courtyard that was once the north transept of the church before the roof burned down in 2001. Surrounded by red rubber work gloves and rusting machetes and sickles and standing atop wheat and earth, the bird is watched over, sort of, by a dull-eyed, monkey-like "Custodian" perched on a window sill and a pointing "Monkey Boy". The New York Times has a photo gallery here.***In other news, I'm very happy to be on a panel at the 2014 AWP in Seattle! I will be reading at "New Fairy Tales from the North" with Maya Sonenberg, Valerie Arvidson, and Rikki Ducornet. The panel description begins with this choice Angela Carter quote from "The Werewolf":

"It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts."

For the APRIL festival, The Furnace teamed up with the Bushwick Book Club Seattle, asking three musicians to create original music inspired by the three pieces presented by the series so far. Bradford Loomis wrote "Come Dance With Me," an enchanting lullaby inspired by my story "More Like Home Than Home" and full of so much tender longing and hope.

Last month, I took an afternoon class at Richard Hugo House with Shin Yu Pai called "Maps for a Narrative Atlas" to, as it were, tickle my psychogeographic fancy. After some discussion of Denis Wood's Everything Sings and Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City, Shin sent us out into Capitol Hill to map some specific, observable aspect of the neighborhood and then try to transcribe what we found into text. I decided to focus on everything visible between parking signs and power lines, plus any sounds. I ended up with a catalogue of mostly tags and graffiti animals, an "urban bestiary" as one of the workshop participants noted (incidentally, this is a topic for another post I've been meaning to write as well as the title of a fascinating forthcoming book).Here's that catalogue.E. Olive Street, from 11th Avenue to 12th Avenueshoescrowspropeller affixed to pole, swayingcrowsparking sign: Hellawasted, Action for Animals, sad ghostbright yellow bits of a torn fliercrowsfuzzy green tree budsZ overlaying UNasty Nate Comfyfaded blue outline of a skeletonLost Cat: Adult Male Mostly Black with a White Belly. Will Give Generous Reward if Found and Returned to Owner. Contact Arlene.bright yellow flier, intact: Our Neighborhoods Under Attack! scary black towers descending upon single family homes with crash-pow comic book burstsNotice of Public Meetingfuzzy green tree budspolice car siren12th Avenueshoescrowsguttural other-bird song; rattle and click11th Avenue from Howell Street to E Olivecrowsparking sign: Hello My Name Is Nick Nack Records4 hour parking sing: No Big Deal, smiling prehistoric fish with wings, Nasty Nate Comfy, Blinkchildren squealingstick man with a briefcase and devil horns apparently going to hell4 hour parking Valid Here: love birdsnight owl with steaming cup of somethingshoes