Comprised of vivid vignettes, Chasing the King of Hearts (Feminist Press, 2017), a novel based on a true story, speeds across time and borders. Izolda is a Jewish woman in Poland who hides her identity during the Holocaust and strives to free her husband from Auschwitz. She often contemplates levels of blondness—”straw” blond hair in Jews with naturally blond hair, the ash blond she chooses to dye her brown hair, the peroxide blond of other Jews attempting to hide their identity, which she looks down on. A Gentile woman giving her temporary shelter tells her not to put her handbag on the table, which she says makes her look like a Jew—and consequently Izolda questions each gesture, expression, and minute detail—is this Jewish? Is that? She decides being Jewish is “worse” than being Polish and resolves to hide her identity after the war is over. This element of the novel is what really stuck with me, giving me visceral insight into a phenomenon I have often thought about—the post-war assimilation of Jews into Christianity or at least some vague secular non-Jewish identity. (In my own family, my grandfather changed his name from Schwartz to Szilagyi for this reason, though the name change came after the war; I wrote about that here.)

The novel bills itself as a story of survival, and Izolda’s luck and timing is often remarkable. This theme, with glances into the future when she is an elderly grandmother (and in fact no longer hiding her identity) is one of the elements that kept me hopeful as I read material guaranteed to depress. I also appreciated the afterword from Mariusz Szczygiel about the genesis of the novel and the real life Izolda, plus the afterword from Boehm on the laconic, intuitive fairy tale nature of the novel, no doubt the main reason I was so aesthetically taken with the book. The vignettes are occasionally confusing in terms of minor character, where Izolda is going, what she is trading for what (tobacco? sheets? stockings?), but I think it’s supposed to be confusing and if you go with the flow as in a fairy tale, it’s not a major stumbling block. In all, it’s an urgent book that I recommend!

Happy first book birthday to my second book baby, Dreams Under Glass! I am so grateful for the love this book has received from readers, bookstores, and book reviewers. Thank you for buying, reading, reviewing, suggesting your library obtain a copy--it means so much to me!

Thank you to the fantastic independent bookstores carrying my second book baby on their shelves:

• In Chicago: Exile in Bookville, Women & Children First Bookstore, RoscoeBooks, & The Understudy Coffee and Books.

• In Seattle: Elliott Bay Book Company, Third Place Books, & Queen Anne Book Company.

Of course, thank you to my fantastic publisher, Lanternfish Press! You are all such a joy! More exciting news to come... In the meantime, some highlights from the past year in the pictures below.

By skin of my teeth I am getting this Women in Translation Month blog post out into the ether. I thought it would be cute to read Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season after reading Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over. Colwin’s essay collection Home Cooking was a great comfort to me and, not surprisingly, there was so much to love about her last novel, which is the first novel of hers that I read. At the same time, I can see issues of race in this 1992 novel that feel a bit out-dated, but I can relate to the protagonist’s anxiety as a Jew and her desire to belong.

The transition to Melchor’s 2016 novel Hurricane Season (translated in 2021 by Sophie Hughes) was not at all cute. That novel is as intense as its title suggests and then some. The chapters are long and devoid of paragraph breaks, creating textual claustrophobia as the cherry on top of the unrelenting anger, violence, misogyny, lust, and homophobia that wreaks havoc on a poor Mexican village where, at the opening of the novel, a witch has been murdered. The lack of paragraphs reminds me of László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango (trans. George Szirtes), another novel of unrelenting darkness, but that one moved like suffocating sludge, whereas Melchor’s novel is more propulsive (if also increasingly horrific in its violence). I would not recommend Hurricane Season to the faint of heart, but if you can handle a dark story that will get you outside of your comfort zone and show you a desperate corner of the world, and if you’d like to see how the author manages a different point of view in each chapter (with something of a dusky reprieve by the end), definitely check it out.

I’m so delighted to see Dreams Under Glass included in this Buzzfeed Books list by Wendy J. Fox, “17 Recent And Upcoming Books From Indie Publishers You Need To Read,” among so many great books. Fox writes:

Dreams Under Glass captures both the struggle between art and economic stability and the deeply precarious nature of simply staying alive. A novel for our modern times.

See the whole list here.

I’m grateful to Alex Carrigan for this kind review of Dreams Under Glass in Necessary Fiction. I so appreciate how different reviewers have highlighted different aspects of the novel, whether the creative process, Jewish identity, the romance, or here, the power dynamic of work:

One of the novel’s central themes is how forces beyond an artist’s control can stymie both art and artist. Binnie works in the Lipstick Building, which housed Bernie Madoff’s organization and was at the center of the housing market collapse. Her firm is run by three people who are set in their ways and comfortable throwing their wealth and power around. Binnie may enjoy the fruits of their occasional generosity—chocolates in the break room, free opera tickets—but her bosses demand ever more in return for these perks, which they use to wield power over Binnie.

Read the full review here.

A few pictures from the launch party for Dreams Under Glass at Exile in Bookville: Javier Ramirez introducing the book, chatting with Rebecca Makkai, and signing books.

As one might anticipate from my end-of-the-year post of 2021, parenting a toddler has been the almost-all-consuming phenomenon of 2022. As my son approaches the age of two, the vocabulary explosion is a wild ride. He can repeat most words (careful what you say!) or will try to in an extraordinarily cute manner. The simple sentence that melted my heart last week: “Nene read it.” (“Nene” is the nickname he came up with for himself.) But my writing life did not come to a halt either.

In the spring, The Fiddlehead published my essay “Boiled Boot,” exploring the intergenerational trauma of wartime starvation in my family. The essay is in print only, but will be part of the collection of lyric essays on food and cultural memory that I’ve been working on the last several years. In the summer, The Fiddlehead published my appreciation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile, which you can read here.

The big publishing event of my year was, of course, the release of my second novel, Dreams Under Glass, from Lanternfish Press. I’m grateful for positive reviews from Newcity, which called it “sensitive, unsettling” and “revelatory” and from Windy City Reviews, which called it an “engaging…impressive tale.” You can watch me read a couple excerpts from the novel at recorded events on my YouTube channel.

In conjunction with the release of Dreams Under Glass, I wrote three companion pieces:

• In “Vision Loss and the Ekphrastic Novelist,” published online in Poets & Writers Magazine, I reflect: “In artist statements, I have often written that in my work I am trying to capture what’s fleeting, but I had never contended with the possibility that this would include my own vision.”

• For Monkeybicycle’s “If My Book” column, I compare Dreams Under Glass to weird things, for example: “If Dreams Under Glass were a breed of dog, it would be a Chow Chow with a Pomeranian complex.”

• In “I Had a Mysterious Infection, It Changed the Course of My Life,” published in Newsweek, I explore how a month as in-patient at the National Institutes of Health back in the summer of 2001 made a significant impact on my life.

Another highlight of the year was having my story “Street of the Deported” included in Lilith Magazine’s first ever anthology, Frankly Feminist, collecting 45 years of Jewish feminist fiction. The story won first prize for the magazine’s 2017 contest. It’s a thrill to see the anthology available in 148 libraries worldwide.

The final highlight of the year was a gift I gave to myself in anticipation of the stress of publicizing Dreams Under Glass. I hired my friend and fellow University of Washington MFA alum Piper J. Daniels, author of the essay collection Ladies Lazarus, for help with my own essay collection. I couldn’t be happier with the progress I’m making on that project! I’m dedicating the first two weeks of 2023 to my writing, tackling a revision of my third novel and drafting a few more pieces of flash nonfiction for the collection. In the fall I’ll have some new essays out and I’ll happily share more details here when I can.

I hope you had a marvelous 2022 and look forward to a fantastic 2023! I know these past few pandemic years have been trying, but taking a moment to reflect on all the good is always a balm.

Five years ago today, my debut novel Daughter of the Air was born. It was 15 years in the making (yowza) and the launch party was that very night at the beautiful Hotel Sorrento. I was in conversation with my dear friend Corinne Manning. What a cherished memory!

It’s been such a joy to see my book make it’s way out in the world. I’m grateful for all the praise it’s received, including this generous response from acclaimed Pulitzer-finalist and MacArthur genius Karen Russell:

"What a strong song Daughters of the Air is, a chilling and beautiful novel that has left its indelible mark on me—I am simply in awe of Anca Szilágyi's prose, her Calvino-like gift for illuminating the darkest subjects, and her fearless, fever-bright imagination."

You can order copies from your favorite local bookstore or choose from one of my favorites like Elliott Bay Book Company, Powell’s, Exile in Bookville, and Madison Street Books (which still has a signed copy!). Here are a few photos from that night (full photo album on Facebook here).

I had a delightful time chatting with Joy Lanzendorfer yesterday on her radio show “What’s the Story?” which airs on The Krush 95.9 in Sonoma County. You can listen to the podcast here:

Be sure to check out Joy’s novel Right Back Where We Started From, which shares American Dream themes with Dreams Under Glass.

There’s a great review Dreams Under Glass in Windy City Reviews this morning. Florence Osmund writes:

The Dreams Under Glass main storyline is interesting, engaging, and one to which many people will relate. Three story elements—Binnie’s passion for art, her relationship with her boyfriend, and the untimely, suspicious death of one of her co-workers—are woven together into a cohesive and impressive tale.

Read the full review here.

I’m grateful for this great review of Dreams Under Glass in Newcity. Mara Sandroff calls the novel “a sensitive, unsettling look at young adulthood and the contrasts between art, money and greed.” She writes :

Szilágyi is a confident writer with a crisp, clean voice and deep empathy for her characters. ’Dreams Under Glass’ may deal with familiar themes, but Szilágyi treats them with authenticity and grace. In a genre that can err toward cynicism, this comes across as revelatory.

You can read the full review here. Signed copies are available for sale from Exile in Bookville and Women & Children First. Be sure to leave a note in the comments if you’d like a signed copy. Thank you for your support!

Lilith's first-ever book, Frankly Feminist, a curated collection of 40+ short stories from 45+ years of publications is officially out today from Brandeis University Press. This groundbreaking Jewish feminist short story collection, I am honored to say, includes my story “Street of the Deported,” which won first place in Lilith’s 2017 fiction contest. I love how “Street of the Deported” came out soon after my first novel Daughters of the Air came out and how this anthology is now being released the week after my second novel Dreams Under Glass is released: coincidence or something cosmic? Buy Frankly Feminist today from your favorite local bookstore!

I have been wanting to read The Hottest Dishes of Tartar Cuisine (Europa Editions, 2011) for years. I don’t know why other books kept getting in the way because I very much enjoyed finally reading this dark, prickly novel. Narrated by the highly unreliable Rosalina, a controlling matriarch in the Soviet Union who fears her daughter Sulfia is an inept mother to her granddaughter Aminat, the story is both hilarious and depressing. We learn about the effects of the Soviet Union on ethnic identity, the ways Rosalina twists things to get her way, and how this unravels in her attempts to marry Sulfia off to foreigners who could, in theory, help them leave the crumbling USSR. Each of these attempts feels quite tragic, even when successful!

Rosalina, or Rosie as her husband Kalganow calls her, knows little of her Tartar background, having grown up in an orphanage. Her husband’s family is also Tartar but she views them as back-country rubes—though she enjoys taking Sulfia to them as a child so she can drink their goat’s milk (viewed as nutritious to Rosalinda, and as vomit-inducing to Sulfia). Kalganow prefers to use Russian names—Sonja for Suflia, Anja for Aminat—he prefers to erase ethnic identity. But Rosie, who believes Aminat resembles her and who names her after her grandmother, “who’d grown up in the mountains,” insists on calling her Aminat and that she not become “just another Anja.”

As I mentioned, there’s a lot of humor that shows the sad state of things. Condoms are “rare and valuable” so while Rosalina believes child-rearing is a bad idea, she washes them and hangs them to dry for re-use: “I let them dangle from the clothesline in our room. I had a feeling that the longer they hung there, the less frequently my husband made advances on me.” A couple pages later, this image of dangling condoms is juxtaposed with horse meat sausages made by Kalganow’s relatives, hanging “out in the sun for several days.”

Rosalina is highly critical of just about everything and everyone. I found myself wondering what Alina Bronsky’s background was as the narrator poked fun at rural ways and especially as Jewish characters came into the picture and Rosalinda’s anti-Semitism comes out. Sulfia’s other daughter, by a Jewish man, is welcome to emigrate to Israel with her father; Rosalinda just doesn’t seem to care. I found this interview with Bronsky interesting, and I appreciated her insight into her sense of humor:

Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It’s despair — just keep laughing, until you are dead.

For my second Women in Translation Month post of 2022, I’d like to tell you about Winter in Sochko (Open Letter Books, 2021), which I devoured in May on the flight home for my grandmother’s funeral and back, the first novel I have been able to devour since becoming a parent in January 2021. Its spareness, and its tense family relationships in relation to food, reminds me of another favorite work in translation, Lise Tremblay’s Mile End (trans. Gail Scott, Talon Books, 2002), though here the anger is more subdued and there’s no psychosis. The comparison to Marguerite Duras on the cover also feels apt. The writing is quite fluid and poetic. In fact, perhaps because of its fluidity, I read it too fast to truly appreciate the lyricism.

Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited.

Here is a characterization of Sokcho, the resort town on the border of South and North Korea. The protagonist is a young French-Korean woman working in a hotel, relieved to not be living with her mother anymore, who stuffs her with food and comments on her appearance and suffocates her each weekend visit. It’s the off-season, windy and raw; few guests are in the shabby hotel: a woman recovering from plastic surgery and, just arrived, a French graphic novelist who asks the narrator to show her around town. She has a boyfriend, an aspiring model, but surprise-surprise, it’s an unsatisfying relationship and the graphic novelist, an older man, holds a certain amount of intrigue. While she cooks for him she thinks:

Beef and raw fish smells were wafting together, heavy and pungent. I pictured Kerrand at his desk. Lips pursed, hand drifting through the air before landing at exactly the right spot on the paper. I always had the finished dish in mind when I cooked. Appearance, taste, nutritional balance. When he drew, he gave the impression of thinking only of the movements he made with his wrist and hand, that was how the image seemed to take life, with no prior conception.

An image taking to life with no prior conception: this seems to bring together for me the themes of identity in this book, of how to forge one’s identity through creative acts and how to try to live comfortably within one’s own skin. The many accolades this book has received comes as no surprise!

I am so excited to share that you can now pre-order my second novel Dreams Under Glass. Pre-orders through Lanternfish Press will include a signed book plate; they’re also offering a bundle of both of my novels for $32. I would be thrilled, also, if you supported your local independent bookstore! Two lovely independent bookstores where I have events planned so far: Exile in Bookville in Chicago, where I will launch on September 29 in conversation with Rebecca Makkai, and Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, where I will be in conversation with Maya Sonenberg on November 3. If you’d like to stay in the loop about other events, you can sign up for my monthly newsletter here.

It’s Women in Translation Month! For The Fiddlehead’s Stop! Look! Listen! series, I wrote about Scholastique Mukasonga’s haunting novel Our Lady of the Nile. Here’s how the blog post begins:

Recently, I read Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile (Archipelago Books, 2014). Set in a Catholic lycée for elite young women in Rwanda in the 1980s and told in a lyrical style, the novel develops an atmosphere of dread for the genocide to come while shedding light on the legacy of colonialism. 

continue reading

Stay tuned for one, hopefully two, additional reading recommendations for Women in Translation Month (#witmonth) , right here on this blog.

I'm honored to have my short story, "Street of the Deported," included in Lilith Magazine's forthcoming anthology, Frankly Feminist (Brandeis University Press, November 2022), collecting 45 years of Jewish feminist fiction published in the magazine. My story won first prize in their 2017 contest and is included in the anthology's section on war. The collection is edited by Susan Weidman Schneider and Yona Zeldis McDonough and includes a forward by Anita Diamant. You can pre-order the book now. You can also add it your Goodreads. I am so looking forward to reading all of the other stories in the anthology!

When AWP announced their 2022 conference would be in Philadelphia, I was super excited to go and hang out with my publisher Lanternfish Press in their hometown. During the pandemic, I became a mom, and I'd thought by now perhaps there would be a vaccine for the littlest humans, but as the conference approached it became clear that there would not be one in time. I decided to attend virtually instead. (Fingers crossed for an in-person return to AWP in Seattle in 2023!)

I like to choose a theme for each AWP to narrow down the many options. One year I focused on literary agents. Another year I focused on learning more about the literary magazines I wanted to submit short stories and essays to. This year, I am putting the finishing touches on my third novel, set in the Netherlands in the late medieval/early Renaissance period and in 2016, and I am trying to make progress on my collection of lyric food essays that blend research and memoir, so I am focusing on panels on historic fiction and creative nonfiction.

What follows are some notes from the virtual panels I attended. I hope you find them helpful!

Staying in Key: Recognizing & Avoiding the False Notes of Anachronism

Panelists: Janet Benton, Donna Hemans, Keenan Norris, Jennifer Steil; Moderator: Aimee Liu

Liu invited each author to read a brief excerpt of their work and discuss the challenges they faced writing particular times and places.

Benton read from Lilli De Jong, set in a 19th century alms house in Philadelphia, near a swamp. In this scene, a pressing question for her was: what is the condition of a baby close to death? Her Quaker protagonist meant attending to language, interaction, spiritual belief, and characters' views of the choices they are making in very particular ways. In this time period, Benton noted, Quakers "were not slavish to religion" and "were willing to buck convention," something she wanted to stay cognizant of. At a reading, an octogenarian Quaker asked Benton how she managed to capture the voice of her grandmother, which sounds like quite an accomplishment!

Stiel read from Exile Music, which tells the story of Jewish refugees from Vienna in Boliva in the 1940s. She chose a passage that required a lot of research: what did La Paz look like in the 1940s? How did the refugees communicate, socialize, get help from refugee organizations? What was the effect of altitude on the body? One strategy for writing this book was to make Viennese culture as clear as possible first to demonstrate the sense of loss and disorientation upon arrival in La Paz. As someone who moves to a different country every few years, she now makes sure to take extensive notes upon arrival in each new place, to maintain that perspective.

Liu's novel Glorious Boy is also set in World War II, but on India's Andaman Islands, off the coast of Burma. Researching this novel is what gave Liu the idea for this panel. One question she had as a writer: what is it like to move through a forest that’s never been penetrated and you’re on a spy mission where you can’t leave a trace? The area was used as a penal colony by the British so there were also people from all over India, therefore making it quite a multicultural place. One strategy Liu used was to choose an American protagonist to help avoid anachronisms; she makes mistakes because she is American and then Liu as the author can make those mistakes clear to American readers.

Hemans's novel Tea by the Sea flashes forward to 2010, in Jamaica, where Plum, a young woman born in New York, is in search of the daughter that was taken away from her. As a Jamaican-born author, Hemans had to take care to consider how Plum would see Jamaica. She also needed to take care to depict the landscape of 2010 and not the one she grew up with; for example, a plant disease has ravaged many a coconut farm and there are less cane fields and orange groves than Hemans saw growing up. Hemans also talked about imbuing the landscape of Brooklyn upon Plum's return with a sense of loss.

Norris's novel The Confession of Copeland Cane is set in Oakland from 2020-2030. An important challenge was the need for "fidelity to present tense conditions while looking forward to the future.” For example, COVID emptied out San Francisco in the short term and he had to speculate how that might reverberate over the decade. A special challenge was that he began writing this novel in 2015. Liu remarked that his novel, published in 2021, was the first that showed people grappling with masks. He said, "The desperation of having to rethink my book was a great lesson in the creative risk of writing a book.”

What’s Form Got to Do with It: Finding Shape in Memoir Projects

Panelists: Tyrese Colman, Krys Malcom Belc, Marcos Gonsalez; Moderator: Sarah Fawn Montgomery

I came to this panel thinking about my essay collection but I came out of it also thinking about my one-day memoir of living with a rare chronic illness and choosing to grow my family through adoption.

Tyrese Coleman read from How to Sit, a memoir that is not 100% nonfiction: "Memories are not facts…they contain their own truth regardless of how they’re documented." She recommended David Sedaris's Barrel Fever as an example of a work that mixes fiction and nonfiction in one volume, though the genres are clearly delineated, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street as examples of "memory writing." Her next book will mix historic fiction and memoir (exciting!) and as a memoirist who is not an academic or journalist she encourages others in the same position to provide context before feeling free to offer conclusions, e.g. don't feel obliged to be neutral in your own memoir.

Krys Malcom Belc's The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir in essays that also includes speculative nonfiction, a genre I'd love to learn more about. As he was writing the book, he wondered: was this an essay collection that needed to be diversified or was this a memoir that needed more blending and cohesion? The book's central question: what does it mean to be a transmasculine person who has given birth? Each essay looks at this question but has its own aesthetic and level of research versus personal exploration. Belc spent a lot of time looking at pictures from childhood and legal documents, trying to understand his passage through time, and offers these materials to readers— it’s a visual book. Regarding the question of what research to include and what to exclude, he noted that editors can help point out where there is too much research--the stuff you’re nerding out on that an audience beyond you would not be so interested in.

Marcos Gonsalez wished that before he wrote Pedro’s Theory he'd asked himself “What is the narrative I want the reader to leave with? What are they moments?” The pre-writing process, he advised, should put key moments under a microscope and incorporate the perspectives of others even if it don't align with your own. He also urged the audience to consider: how can you make research reader-friendly and reader-inviting and integrate it into the fabric of the story? How do we include literary criticism or historiography, for example, while still inviting the reader in? Two inviting examples: Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Of course you need to think about your audience when you consider this question. A final important consideration: what painful moments do you want to share with readers and what meaningful moments do you want to share on your own terms, without feeling overexposed?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery spoke to resisting the traditional narrative arc of memoirs of mental illness. She urged the audience: "don't revise your life." She said, "Flirting with the truth" helped her "stay true to madness" in her first memoir Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir. Her intended audience was her family, which did not go to the doctor, so she took medical language and research to show how doctors were overly sedating women or categorizing normal emotions as madness. Her forthcoming lyric memoir, Halfway from Home, blends Montaigneian essays with hermit crab essays and research in “the psychology of mirror and 19th century oil painting and the science of nostalgia" among other super intriguing topics!

That's all for today; hopefully I'll be back tomorrow with more tidbits. If you're attending AWP in person or virtually, what are some pieces of advice you're gleaning that you're finding helpful?

January is almost over. Is it too late for a blog post on setting intentions? I would venture not! The pandemic and being a new parent (do I still get to say "new" now that my child is one?) is a constant reminder to be gentle with myself and find the right level of ambitious that I find fulfilling without giving myself a migraine.

What soldiering through a migraine feels like?

So what are my writing and publishing goals for this year? With my second novel releasing from Lanternfish Press in late September, I have to be mindful of the marketing and publicity work just around the corner. I learned with my first novel, Daughters of the Air, that marketing and publicity can be ::e n d l e s s:: I do like it! But I also need to keep space for work-work, creative writing, and life.

I started writing my second novel two days after I began submitting my first novel—with a haiku workshop as a palate cleanser in between. I started writing my third novel, my current work-in-progress, just a year after starting my second novel. It's a long story as to why that I won't get into here, but I was heartened to learn that Jess Walter juggles multiple book projects simultaneously, and I'm sure many other writers do as well. Welp! The big hope for this year is I "finish" that third novel. (NB: Here's my silly essay "How to Finish a Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years"; I love that this essay landed in The Nervous Breakdown.)

My other writing goal is write two more essays for the collection that I began the same year as Novel #3. I'm taking an essay writing class through Atlas Obscura, where I've been having a great time teaching fairy tale writing. It'll be my first time as a student since taking a wonderful Hugo House class in 2016 with Alexander Chee on making fictional characters of historic figures, and I'm really looking forward to it. My plan is to write one piece arising from the class and one essay after finishing reading A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, which I have ordered from one of my favorite Chicago bookstores, Exile in Bookville, which is located in one of my favorite buildings in the city.

That's it for my writing. I think those are plenty of goals for the year, given what I've got on my plate. I stopped aiming for 100 rejections per year a few years ago, though I do think it's a good goal to have if you're starting the submissions process and need to develop a callous against rejection. By my calculations, I had a 17% acceptance rate in 2021 so I do need to aim a little higher as my general goal, per advice from Creative Capital, is 10%. But I'm not going to tear my hair out over this one. As I say to my son, "Gentle! Gentle!"

My last goal is to continue to help emerging writers stretch their craft and hone their approach to getting their work out in the world. If you have short stories or a novel you're working on and if you'd like to work one-on-one with me, you can check out my coaching and consulting page at Hugo House here.

What are your goals for 2022? Any special plans for writing, reading, publishing? Or maybe you want to learn to cook something special this year? My cooking is toddler-centric now, but I've been dipping in and out of Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I love her opinions: "Powdered rosemary must be shunned." Onward & upward & twirling, twirling, twirling!

I am delighted to have a pair of short fairy tales in Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, out now from Scablands Books! This beautiful foil-stamped anthology, edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller, features an incredible roster of Pacific Northwest authors, such as Gary Copeland Lilley, Rick Barot, Shawn Vestal, Tess Gallagher, Ruth Joffre, Nicola Griffith, Kate Lebo, Elissa Washuta, and Lucia Perillo, to name just a handful, and has some wonderful illustrations as well—you can preview a couple of them, including one from my story "Moss Child," here. You can pick up a copy directly from Scablands Books, or at Atticus, Auntie's, From Here, and Wishing Tree Books in Spokane. If you're based in the Pacific Northwest, your local library might like to know about it! Here is the "Suggest a Title" form for Seattle Public Library; many library systems have similar forms.

I'm delighted to share that my short story "Hinges," published in Gordon Square Review last November, was nominated for the Best of the Net. Many thanks to Prose Editor Nardine Taleb for the nomination! You can see the list of nominees here and check out their work here. Hooray!