Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Hunters in the Snow (Winter) - 1565

This winter, I'm teaching Writing About Place at Hugo House. In this six-week class, we'll read stories by Flannery O'Connor, Louise Erdrich, and Ursula LeGuin, among other illustrious authors. We'll write about places we know, places we don't know, and places that exist only in our imaginations. And, we'll talk about memory, research, and world building. Class meets Wednesdays 5-7 pm from 2/22-3/29. Hugo House is located in First Hill, an easy-peasy trip from downtown and right next to the always-free Frye Art Museum. Speaking of place, if you've not been to the Hugo House's temporary home, you're in for treat, with a light-filled atrium and mysterious winding hallways.  Registration is now open. The scholarship deadline is 12/16 and there's an early bird discount until 12/19! Hope to see you there.

There are just five spots left in Memory and Imagination, my one-day generative class at Hugo House. Join me for a Saturday afternoon of writing from memory and the senses! Wisdom from Rikki Ducornet, Jorge Borges, and Vladimir Nabakov will offer insight in the process. And here's Umberto Eco on the subject, in The Name of the Rose:"This, in fact, is the power of imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain."Class meets Saturday, August 13, 1-4 pm. You can register here.

I just got my contributor copy of Airplane Reading, an anthology about air travel edited by Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich which includes my essay "Mapping Imagination," about traveling to Argentina to research my first novel.I'm honored to be in some pretty outstanding company:Lisa Kay Adam * Sarah Allison * Jane Armstrong * Thomas Beller * Ian Bogost * Alicia Catt * Laura Cayouette * Kim Chinquee * Lucy Corin * Douglas R. Dechow * Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu * Tony D'Souza * Jeani Elbaum * Pia Z. Ehrhardt * Roxane Gay * Thomas Gibbs * Aaron Gilbreath * Anne Gisleson * Anya Groner * Julian Hanna * Rebecca Renee Hess * Susan Hodara * Pam Houston * Harold Jaffe * Chelsey Johnson * Nina Katchadourian * Alethea Kehas * Greg Keeler * Alison Kinney * Anna Leahy * Allyson Goldin Loomis * Jason Harrington * Kevin Haworth * Randy Malamud * Dustin Michael * Ander Monson * Timothy Morton * Peter Olson * Christiana Z. Peppard * Amanda Pleva * Arthur Plotnik * Neal Pollack * Connie Porter * Stephen Rea * Hugo Reinert * Jack Saux * Roger Sedarat * Nicole Sheets * Stewart Sinclair * Hal Sirowitz * Jess Stoner * Anca L. Szilágyi * Priscila Uppal * Matthew Vollmer * Joanna Walsh * Tarn Wilson.  

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.

August is Women in Translation Month (WITMonth), designed to encourage readers, reviewers, publishers, and translators to explore more books in translation by women. If you've been following the VIDA count, then the grim statistics around women in translation (gathered diligently by Meytal Radzinski) is, unfortunately, not a surprise: women writers comprise only about 30% of books translated into English. As I'm passionate about cultivating a diverse literary ecosystem, this is a project near and dear to my heart. And though I'm happy WITMonth is an annual event, I'm getting started right now. Because there are SO MANY good books and I'm sure there are SO MANY MORE out there waiting to be picked up by a publisher and gobbled by readers.I immediately pulled all the books from my shelves that fit the bill. I made a read pile and a to-be-read pile. Of the read pile, I'd like to make some recommendations, for those of you who'd like to join me in WITMonth. Read these books! And I'll be diving into the to-be-read pile and writing about the gems in that pile in August. Read those books too! Let's talk about 'em!Recommended BooksDeath in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from Catalan by Martha Tennent (Open Letter, 2009). A gorgeously written and harrowing novel about cruelty among humans and violence in nature.Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2005). A dark, slender novel about a woman abandoned by her husband spiraling into terrifying psychological territory, with a helpful dash of absurd humor and redemption. After devouring this book, anything else was VERY difficult to get into. So good. This brief review in The New Yorker is spot on. I have not cracked open her more recent Neapolitan series, but it is definitely on the docket.The End of the Story by Liliana Heker, translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger (Biblioasis, 2012). Another dark novel. I'm sensing a trend? This metafictional work explores Argentina's Dirty War. I reviewed it for Ploughshares.Death as a Side Effect by Ana Maria Shua, translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger (University of Nebraska Press, 2010). As I note briefly in my review of Heker's novel, Shua's is "dark and wry and screwed up in the best possible dystopian way." Is it weird to quote myself? Oh well.Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2004). I adore Archipelago for focusing on translation and producing truly beautiful books. Dreams and Stones is probably the least dark book on my list, a kind of treatise on cities and imagination.Mile End by Lise Tremblay, translated from French by Gail Scott (Talon Books, 2002). I read this novel a few times, starting in a class in college on literary Montreal. It's set in the neighborhood I lived in while at McGill, which may be part of my attachment to it. And, yes, yes, this is another dark story, about an obese pianist at a ballet school teetering toward psychosis.The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller, translated from German by Michael Hoffman (Metropolitan Books, 1996). Muller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature, paints a grim picture of life in Romania under Ceausescu. The language is highly poetic, and I've been working on an essay about it (among other things) for quite some time. In fact, the assignment I've given myself for the next few weeks is to cut that essay up paragraph by paragraph to figure out how to keep going with it.Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi, translated from German by Vincent Kling (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012). Told from the point of view of an unnamed young woman, this is the story of Romanian refugees who travel through Europe as circus performers. Yes, yes, dark. But also with absurd humor. (Some criticize Muller for being humorless. I say, bah. Read her still. Not everything is funny ha ha.)Phew. That's a lot of recommendations. There are more in my pile. I may write more about them. More likely I will tweet my favorite bits from them in August. But not just August. Probably all year. WITForever!My To-Be-Read Pile. Stay tuned for reviews & more !

Just in time for those real long summer wanders I love, my seventh set of writing prompts for the Ploughshares  blog tackles the wonders of walking and the importance of place, with wisdom from Luis Urrea. The uber-talented Melanie Masson was very generous in lending a few of her gorgeous landscape photographs to the post.As I'm nearing the half-way point in this year of blogging about writing prompts, I'll just put it out here: any requests for particular topics? So far I've covered portraits, eavesdropping, architecture, objects, dance, and music. I have other topics lined up, but I'm open to suggestions. Leave a comment here, tweet at me, or send me an email. And thanks!

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

I'm honored to have my story "The Zoo" included as one of four stories in Washington City Paper's D.C.-themed fiction issue .  Here's how the story begins:

The Zoo

That’s what my brother calls it. The quarantined room at the end of the hall. It has two sets of windows: one looking into an air lock, where two white bunny suits hang on the wall, then another looking into the room kept pristine for the most fragile.

Continue reading

One of my former professors from UW, Shawn Wong, advised us to write essays on topics related to our fiction projects whenever we felt stuck. After working through many drafts of my first novel, I've come to really appreciate this advice. Not only does it give you a new angle on your material, enabling a return to the fiction with fresh eyes, but it can also build your confidence about the research you'd done so far and raise new questions that enrich your understanding of your project. Writing essays can also make it easier to talk about your project with authority and maybe answer that dreaded question, "So, what is your novel about?" with less trepidation.Earlier this month, my friend SK invited me to speak to the creative writing classes held at UW's Robinson Center Summer College about travelling to Argentina to research my novel. Though my novel is written for an adult audience, the students in these classes are 5th and 6th graders. It was an enjoyable problem thinking about this different audience and really fun to just address the hands on, primary research I did: walking down Buenos Aires's wide boulevards and narrow alleyways,trying to get a whiff of the city's unique scent (note to self: "city scents" as future post), talking to locals who'd lived through the period I was writing about (1978), and uh, gorging myself on dulce de leche. The students had a lot of awesome, thoughtful questions, like what point of view did you write in, did you ever want to give up in the years that you worked on it, did you ever get stuck and what did you do to get unstuck?Around the same time that I was preparing this talk, I was also working on a short essay for a website called Airplane Reading, which collects "storytelling that can animate, reflect on, and rejuvenate the experience of flight." This essay, "Mapping Imagination," gets at some the anxieties I struggled with in writing and researching the novel and is featured there this week. Having worked on both a short talk and short essay, I'm feeling ready again to continue with all the work that goes into getting the novel out into the world.SK delivered a stack of thank you cards from her students a week after my talk. Some of the details they remembered from the talk and included in their cards were kind of incredible. One student wrote, "P.S. I love food too," which made me plotz, one student made the card in the form of a paper fortune teller (I learned from it that I will write 1000 more short stories in my lifetime), and two students made an elaborate card in which the Argentine flag opened to a diptych with their messages. It really made my week.

M and I went to Las Vegas last week. We spent Mother's Day there with our fathers. (Obviously, we'll do something motherly on Father's Day. ) My dad goes there quite often, on business; the last time I'd been was about twenty years ago, when we combined one of his business trips with a family vacation. Then, we rode the Canyon Blaster at Circus Circus and shuffled from 112 degree heat to the cool of Caesars Palace; I thought the ladies dressed as Cleopatra were pretty neat. We hiked Red Rock Canyon at sunset and drove through Death Valley, where I thought that if we opened the car door, we'd immediately crumple or explode.On this visit, I felt unsettled by all that excess in the middle of the desert. M and I wondered why the city had to be built so far from Lake Mead.  I found myself wondering how much longer Lake Mead has and why the casinos and hotels aren't totally clad in solar panels. (Happily, Las Vegas City Hall is.) I spent some time hiding from hotter-than-usual-even-for-Vegas heat on a comfy chair at the Bellagio, reading Diana Abu-Jaber's Birds of Paradise, a novel which, among other things, explores urban development in Miami in the face of climate change and worsening hurricanes. Of course, it *is* an exciting city that is "going for it," so to speak, which is what makes it so attractive for so many people. I just wish it was "going for it" in a way that is more obviously sustainable.Speaking of birds, my short story "Raven in a Jar" received a Special Mention in the Salem College International Literary Awards' Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, judged by Kate Bernheimer. Yay!

My third and final post about our trip to Japan.The Kobe Ropeway, I learned from Wikipedia just now, is nicknamed - quite appropriately-  the "Kobe Dreamy Balloon." Surely, it is a place where happiness is made. I took a half dozen pictures of the adorable mural beside the entrance to this aerial tramway, possibly the most cheerful mural I've ever seen. And then, silently, we zoomed 400 meters up Mount Rokkō , inside the little sleek black and red car, precariously attached to the cable by a tiny metal hook and swaying ever so slightly in the wind. Below us: lush trees, then the white-brick, gray-brick, and blue-glass city, then the glittering harbor melting into the milky horizon. Above us: the Nunobiki Herb Garden, an Alpine-style rest house, a concert hall, and a museum of fragrance. In the aromatherapy room, we made soap scented with lavender and geranium and tinted with turmeric and rosemary. Outside, snow whirled over snapdragons, white roses, a whole riot of springtime flowers. We wandered down the hill through the herb garden to a greenhouse with an exhibit on spices, smelling jars of cloves, saffron, anise, cardamom - essential, enlivening olfactory research!Out of the garden and hiking back down Mount Rokkō, we passed many tiny shrines nestled into the hillside, and a few waterfalls. J pointed out this habitat as a likely home for kappa, a mythical amphibious animal notorious for stealing cucumbers and, when provoked, ripping out livers via the anus. How incredibly specific!Here are some more pictures from the mural (click to expand):

Last week, I swooned over Tokyo's never-endingness. This week I want to tell you about tiny things.On a rainy night in Kyoto, we got lost looking for a restaurant recommended by my guidebook. (Silly me and my seven-year-old book!) We came to a lovely street, less bustling and generic than the downtown boulevard we'd been following and bisected by a canal, the yellow light of intimate restaurants illuminating the water. We poked around a few restaurants there, though the ground-floor ones seemed to cater to executives on expense accounts, and one that required taking an elevator gave off an unsettling-is-this-a-restaurant-or-not vibe, so we turned off this very-pretty-but-inaccessible street, onto an alley.We were tired, hungry, and wet.This is the first place we found:The restaurant was down a set of stairs and a sign above the stairway said "We have Yuba Food here!" J explained the yuba is tofu skin. A bearded man in a corduroy blazer rounded the corner, saw us deliberating outside, and smiled wide, encouraging us to go on in, so we took him up on it, descending the staircase and following a narrow cellar hallway to the front door. J peaked in the window. "It looks cozy," he said.It was, indeed, a tiny place, with one counter and one wooden table, which could seat about eight and at which sat two men just finishing their meal. The man in the picture (above), wearing a lab coat and a pink bowtie, greeted us and seated us at the table, telling the men already there to recommend dishes to us. We learned they were from Osaka, but regulars here. They asked if we like oysters (we do), but then went on to recommend a seasonal specialty, baby bamboo tempura.Before the food came out, the woman of the picture above, in a red headscarf and looking eerily like a Japanese version of my paternal grandmother, brought out three little ceramic dishes - an amuse-bouche of tiny raw fish in a ponzu sauce, topped with grated radish and hot sauce. The fish were not so tiny that you could not see their tiny eyes. Their silvery skin was translucent, beneath which ran a dark line from head to tail. Reader, I'm sorry that we were squeamish. The only thing to do was eat the tiny fish. J had a lot of practice with this, having lived in Japan as long as he did. We all took a big gulp of cold beer and downed the tiny raw fish with their tiny eyes and tiny intestinal lines. It couldn't be done in one bite, of course. There were lots of tiny fish in our tiny ceramic bowls. Actually, the dish was quite delicious (texture aside -- an acquired taste, I'm sure!). I got through about half. J got through about half. But M? M was resolved to eat all his many tiny fish. And eat he did! Which led to a discussion on the origin of the phrase "mad props". We ate crab wrapped in yuba and a tomato-cheese-in-a-skillet-thing, but by the far the most delectable dish was the spring vegetable tempura, which included asparagus, a "spring flower", a "tree root" (which I think was actually an exceptionally refined piece of broccoli), and the tender baby bamboo, crown jewel of the spring vegetables. Which just goes to show, always ask a local for a recommendation.Food aside, this was a neat little place. The stucco walls and the basement location made it feel like a cave whose walls had been whitewashed. A mask made of a coconut shell sat on a side table by the door and one wall was adorned with a motherboard. The music jumped from African to traditional Japanese (the koto, I think), to jazz. I felt like we were just hanging out at someone's house.I wish I could tell you exactly where this place was, but maybe the best way to experience it is to stumble upon it?

M. and I went to Japan last month to visit his brother J., who'd been living there for six years. We met J. in Tokyo, and traveled with him to Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe before hopping over to NYC for a wedding. I'm back in Seattle and not-too-jet-lagged and will write about the trip over the next few posts.The first thing that struck me about Tokyo, having grown up in Brooklyn but having lived in Seattle for the last few years, is how large - and dense - it is. For me, this is joy. I love to be on an elevated subway, careening past a cityscape (hence the glee I experience in Chicago), glimpsing life from an angle you can't get from any other vantage. I love, also, wandering the sidewalks, turning off from the bustle of boulevards to find a narrow alleyway filled with mom & pop restaurants, tiny art galleries, adorable (if, in Tokyo, overpriced) cafes.  (M.'s urban planning is really rubbing off on me!) The thing about Tokyo is that wandering its enormity is like wandering the best of my anxiety dreams. Do you have those dreams where you're lost in a city (for me, always a version of New York or Montreal or some fusion of the two) and the streets and trains never seem to end? I do. But in Tokyo, it felt right. Exhausting, as a tourist, but right. And despite that, one is never far away from a quiet garden or temple or shrine  - some place where the noise just falls away and you're in contact with the natural world. There is so much to say about Tokyo, I can't fit it all into a blog post. But, one of my favorite things we did was take a "Haunted Tokyo" walking tour, meandering the back alleys of Kabukicho, an older neighborhood that is now the red light district. Our tour guide, Lilly, has been living in Tokyo nearly 27 years and collecting its ghost stories all along. Our first stop was a Shinto shrine to the "mother of all angry ghosts," O-iwa. The gruesome story of her death (her husband poisons her slowly, and half her face becomes disfigured, her eyeball drooping off of it) reminded me of how the worst of my migraines feels. To soothe O-iwa's spirit, and to stay on her good side, local merchants leave her offerings of sake.We stopped by a Buddha of the Phlegm (which is not haunted, but a good place to cure congestion problems) and learned that workers in the Edo period believed earthquakes (which happened every 50 years or so) were caused by the cat fish god, which, Lilly said, they liked because the cyclical upheaval caused a radical redistribution of wealth and rebuilding the city meant more opportunities for work.Lilly told many more ghost stories, but perhaps my favorite morsel of her spiel was not ghostly at all. Walking down "Golden Alley," a nightlife area purported to be favorite haunts of Wim Wenders, Johnny Depp, and Tim Burton, she told us that *her*favorite bar, Cremaster, is hosted by a psychiatrist, who for 1500 yen will give you a drink and a 30 minute chat. Maybe next time I'm in Tokyo I'll go there and tell him about my endless-city-anxiety-dreams over a shikuwasa sour.

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One of my favorite things, which I don't do nearly enough, is to get lost in a city and stumble upon something wonderful. Yesterday, I took my father around Seattle, from Capitol Hill (where we chatted electric insulators at Arabica) to South Lake Union to Queen Anne to the Olympic Sculpture Park and finally to Pioneer Square, after which we plotzed on the 43 bus back up the hill. It was a lovely eye-feast of high end furniture, antiques (like this Japanese gourd, though there was a doubly-bulbous one as well as an enormous Turkish yogurt vat very much to my liking), and contemporary sculpture (plus some smoked salmon and cheese samples at the market!). My favorite stumbling place was the Sisko Gallery,where we were warmly greeted by Daisy, the gallery's terrier, and John Sisko, the sculptor-founder. The current show, "Aether",  features Phil McCracken's dark fruit wood sculptures made luminous by epoxy resin; one of my favorite pieces is "Arctic Night", pulsating midnight blue from a smoldering red center, around which orbit white and red splotches. Tony Curtis's poem "The Mole and Cosmos" opens "Aether", setting a warm tone for the whole show and also fitting in quite nicely with the welcoming atmosphere of gallery. More about McCracken's "cosmic turn" is here. The gallery features new work every four to six weeks. I'm looking forward to a return!Next up, the Arboretum's Winter Garden...

It came early this year. Earlier than the East, but also a month earlier than normal for Seattle. Cherry blossoms budding in late January and bursting in February. Then dogwoods. Then magnolias. The storm clouds were consistently inconsistent, but in them now instead of grays and blues there was also the reflected pink. On my birthday a tsunami warning. Then the fluffy white blossoms turned streets bridal. In early March, it was sunny and warm. M and I rented a canoe and paddled about Portage Bay, lightly buzzed from margaritas shared with friends earlier in the afternoon. We diligently avoided the Montlake shipping canal, the only instructions given by the boat rental place. Of course, even with my life vest on I was nervous of toppling over, every time a motor boat or yacht made waves and we bounced and I heard a faint trickling of water (was there a hole in the canoe?). Eventually I relaxed and we paddled proficiently and enjoyed the near-crisp views of the Cascades and Mount Rainier and contemplated life in Laurelhurst and Sandpoint across the water.

Driving to Portland this past weekend we caught even more spring. So much pink with occasional bursts of yellow forsythia. I couldn't remember a time I'd seen so many blossoms along the highway. Wandering the neighborhoods of Portland, we didn't need to stoop to smell the flowers, their fragrances wafted up to us. The friend we were visiting rasped with seasonal allergies. All the pollen, he explained, was stuck in Portland. The geography did not allow it to blow away. He told us it used to be called the sick place. Too much spring. I was relieved my own eyes weren't bursting with stinging moisture. We saw a play there at the Imago Theater, an "opera beyond words" about an authoratarian typing school, in which the task master (a bit like a business-y, malevolent bride of Frankenstein) skewered out one eye from each typist and hung the ball from its red cords above that typist as he or she sullenly tapped away. We brunched at Screen Door, where M spotted Catherine O'Hara, and then took the streetcar from Nob Hill to the waterfront. Of course we stopped at Powell's; M picked up Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends and I finally got Irene Nemirovksy's Suite Francaise, which I've been meaning to read for a long time.

Now spring break is upon us. We're heading back East to visit friends and family, where their own spring should be just emerging.

A very short story of mine appears in The Middle of Nowhere: Horror in Rural America, an anthology out from Pill Hill Press this month.

In other news, M. and I have explored and fallen in love with Georgetown, an artsy former industrial area south of downtown, chock full of studios in rickety old brick buildings (former bottling plants, iron and brass works). It felt like a combination of the Wild West and Red Hook. Their Art Attack (when studios are open to the wandering public) is every second Saturday of the month.

Eschewing sentences, paragraphs, and chronology, I’ve assembled a discombobulated list of lists. Like Gertrude Stein. But not. Mileage: Approximately 3200Days: 7 (5 driving)Start Point: Brooklyn, NYEnd Point: Seattle, WAParting Image of New York City: A fish-netted rump, bent over the entrance to the Holland Tunnel (a Jumbotron advertisement for Chicago)A propos song accompaniment to parting image: Sir Mix A Lot’s “Baby Got Back” (nice coincidence: Sir Mix A Lot hails from Seattle)Cities Stopped in to eat and/or sleep: Clarion, PA; Chicago, IL; Madison, WI; Twin Cities, MN; Sioux Falls, SD; Rapid City, SD; Gillette, WY; Sheridan, WY; Billings, MT; Bozeman, MT; Missoula, MT; Coeur D’Alene, IDDetours: Corn Palace; Badlands National Park; Mount Rushmore; the Berkeley Pit of Butte, MTPlanned Detour, Skipped: Milwaukee, WIParting Image of Pennsylvania: An Amish man rifling through the woods behind a diesel station.Parting Image of Ohio: a rest stop’s large rack of Amish and Mennonite-themed romance fictionMost Displaced-Seeming Image: A tumble weed rolling down the street in Madison, Wisconsin.Weird Recurrent Theme: Scarred Arms. Slashes on the man who picked up our old bed in Brooklyn; accidents and operations (including bolts) on a waitress in Gillette; purposeful horizontal lines on a waitress in our new favorite neighborhood bar.Best Contemporary Art: Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. See esp. Tomás Saraceno’s bucky balls of moss, black webbing, and PVC pillows.Best Architecture: Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing for the Art Institute of Chicago. The main hall is light, airy, soaring, and with a vista winking at Gehry’s bandshell in Millennium Park.Wildlife spotted: Hawks, buzzards, robin redbreasts, eagles, grasshoppers, one rabbit, one fox, and multiple “Beware of Rattlesnakes” signs. One little brown dot in a Badlands canyon purporting to be bison (sadly, no binoculars).Most Surprising, Spectacular and Varied Landscape: South Dakota, especially catching sunset in the Badlands.Colors of the Rocks in the Badlands: Stripes of yellow, gray, and rust.Most Pervasive Sound in the Badlands: Rattling (M: “Those are insects, not snakes.” Me: “Then why all the warning signs for snakes? Why all the rattling?” Debate on the difference between rattling sounds and buzzing sounds ensues.)Number of Hitchhikers Seen: 2Number of Religious Billboards: 6, 3 of which were anti-abortion, mostly in South Dakota (perhaps refer back to religious-experience sunset over the Badlands for partial explanation)Most Jarring Billboard (non-religious): [Picture of a filthy public toilet] “No one imagines losing their virginity here. Meth can change that.” (in Montana)Most Public Service Announcements Regarding Meth: MontanaMost Bleak, Monotonous and Post-Apocalyptical Landscape: northeastern Wyoming (brown hills, black shrubs, mining pits, oil derricks). Closely followed by eastern Washington (a vast desert of dull blue shrubs and dry fields, mini-tornados of dust on either side of the interstate; placards for peach and cherry orchards seemed like perverse lies)Most Welcome Body of Water: Moses Lake, Washington, after which the desert of eastern Washington gradually turns into Cascade National Forest and we fear not opening the car window again.Most Acidic Body of Water: Gathering ground water inside the Berkeley Pit of Butte, Montana. Popular myth has it that water fowl landing on the water die instantly. The newsletter given with admission to view the pit tries to debunk that myth. Also discussed in the newsletter: the curious iron-feeding algae thriving in the vinegar-like water.Most Disappointed Tourists: The Corn Palace (South Dakota)Most Frightening Industrial Complexes: The Exxon-Mobil and Philips Conoco plants (refineries?) of Billings, MontanaMost Disdainful & Smug Starbucks Employee: Inside the Crowne Plaza of Billings, MontanaMy best driving: southern Minnesota (straight, flat, empty)My worst driving: forgetting to take my foot off the gas entering a gas station in Bozeman, Montana (not to worry, nothing happened)Worst Smelling City: Gary, Indiana (Gowanus Canal is beaten by Wolf Lake, which can be sniffed from 10 miles away)Best Smelling City: Bozeman, MontanaFelt Most Out of Place In: Lulabell’s Café, beside the freight trains hauling coal out of Gillette, Wyoming.Overheard Conversation at Lulabell’s: How to win a lawsuit in which defendant broke plaintiff’s ribs after plaintiff insisted on hitting on defendant’s 15- year-old niece in a bar (defendant himself brought niece into said bar). Speakers (both in cowboy hats and both with booming voices) were on side of defendant. Strategy: demand a jury trial and get at least two jurors with teenage daughters.Most flavorful (and most expensive) burger: Ted’s (e.g. Turner) Montana Grill in BozemanBiggest Attempt at Appearing Green: Ted’s (recycled paper mats, 80% paper straws, claim that their cow and bison live happy lives)Overheard Conversation at Ted’s: Favorite American sculptor, living or deadMost Well-Travelled Orange: Bought in Sheridan, Wyoming, apparently shipped from Australia, and eaten in Seattle.First Memorable Experience in Seattle: After arriving in town on an uncharacteristically hot day and schlepping boxes and luggage up three flights of stairs, falling victim to a drive-by water gunning on the corner of Harvard and Harrison.Strange bookends to our journey: Watching the first half of There Will Be Blood in Brooklyn surrounded by our packed up boxes and finishing it in Seattle in the chaos of unpacking. Simplified take-away from the film: greed and religion go hand-in-hand until greed bludgeons religion to death with a bowling pin. Mm. Welcome home!

My short story "Ebb and Flow" has been accepted for the Fall 2009 issue of Yellow Medicine Review. This issue, guest edited by Andrei Guruianu, will focus on Eastern Europe twenty years after the fall of communism. Very much looking forward to seeing the issue!

M. and I are moving cross-country to Seattle in August, something we've toyed with for a few years now. I'll be pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Washington-Seattle; he'll be doing his urban planning thing, hopefully (fingers crossed on this whole sour economy thing). We're ecstatic and planning a cross-country drive which will cover a swath of the northern states. This means I will have to finally take some driving lessons so M. doesn't drive all 2,000+ miles (even if I did have fun testing out GoogleMaps'experimental walking option: it would take us 39 days of non-stop walking, apparently). As it happens, that first trip to Vancouver and Seattle was where I drove for the first time, in an icy parking lot at the University of British Columbia; M. told me to drive in a circle and all I could do were figure eights.

On that note, here are two fun mapping sites:
1. triptopnyc
2. literature map

It took me most of the semester to read Halldor Laxness's Independent People and all its Icelandic digressions on sheep guts and merchant cooperatives; it took me four days to read Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli. But then, they are very different works. Even more different is Mile End, by Lise Tremblay, which I reread while in the thick of Laxness's novel.How to put them all together? They do share a thread.Independent People is the grandest in scope, putting rural Iceland and the stubborn shepherd Bjartur in an epic frame, with violent ghosts haunting sheep, World War I a distant event in the periphery, and America a destination to which a young, ambitious son escapes (and, we are told, dies). It is through Bjartur's son and daughter that we see a yearning for cities (the mysterious glories of Reykjavik never revealed)-- a tugging away from the rustic life Bjartur clings to, though conditions for the sheep and shepherds are so grim (we read of constant summer rain, green snot, heaps of snow, ring worms, and tuburculosis) it can hardly be described as pastoral.The other two works are slender and focus their energies on those urban tugging forces. At first I thought Dreams and Stones was a novel, but it is difficult to call it that. A treatise on cities and imagination? One hundred pages of generalizations, punctuated with wonderful specificity? A long prose poem, perhaps-- a poetic myth. Trees vs. machines. City vs. countercity (our conceptions of cities). Does she say that memory = water? Or that water = oblivion? Or was there a more complex equation? There was an archaeological bend to it: dreams as stones. Stones as building blocks. Buildings, stones, as representations of our elusive dreams. Something concrete to dig our fingernails in.There is no specific character in Tulli's work. A city emerges. Then groups of people. Workers and builders are of different classes. Our imagined Paris, Belfast, Hong Kong, New York. The A of the Eiffel Tower. The Arc de Triomphe. The mythic quality of the book complements Laxness's epic; the subject matter works well with the next and last book.Mile End is set in Montreal. The obese narrator buries her anger under her layers of "yellow fat," drinks Southern Comfort in large glasses, and hovers toward psychosis as a mediocre pianist at a ballet school. Paris and New York are mentioned as stand-ins for other forces, influences on the Quebecquois city. So cities here have characters too, but the narrative, the characters are specific again. The language is more simple than Tulli's and Laxness's works and the underlying anger of the book seems to compel a quick read like a gust of hot air, whereas Bill Johnston's translation of Tulli's book requires a careful chewing of sentences. Laxness's book, finally, is sprawling and wonderful, but may send one's imagination careening to other places in multiple digressions (not always a bad thing). Read slowly and enjoy.