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.

Self-Portrait inside of "My soul and I love you" by Belkis Ayón

So, my first Chicago-based publication is about life here as an immunocompromised person during the COVID-19 pandemic...I wrote the piece a month ago, and it's a snapshot of my last day in the "normal" time of moving freely about the city, taking public transit, going to a medical appointment, going to a museum. A silver lining is I get to mention the work of Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón, which I encountered at the Chicago Cultural Center. You can explore more of Ayón's work here.

Here's how my piece in Another Chicago Magazine begins:

I was sitting inside an airtight booth with my nose clipped shut, inhaling and exhaling into a tube with all my might.

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In the Badlands in 2009

In 2009, Michael and I drove west from Brooklyn to start a new life in Seattle. I was beginning the MFA program at the University of Washington, and we were ready for a new adventure in a region neither of us ever thought we'd live in. I documented that first cross-country drive in a list of lists here.

Nearly ten years later, we felt the pull to come back east; in April, we packed up our things and now we're in Chicago, starting the next chapter of our lives. But of course! We had to take another cross-country drive, partly retracing our steps but also seeing lots of new things. And herein is a list of lists for our second crossing:

• Mileage: Approximately 2400
• Days: 9
• Start point: Seattle
• End point: Chicago

Parting image of the Pacific Northwest: Wet roads, sopping dark evergreens.

Cities stopped in to eat and/or sleep: Ellensburg, WA; Spokane, WA; Missoula, MT; Bozeman, MT; West Yellowstone, MT; Jackson Hole, WY; Rock Springs, WY; Laramie, WY; Cheyenne, WY; North Platte, NE; Lincoln, NE; Omaha, NE; Des Moines, IA; Iowa City, IA.

Detour: Petrified Ginko National Forest

Notable Spokane radio: Developing a trauma-informed perspective, on Native America Calling

Rivers crossed: Cle Elum, Columbia, Coer D'Alene, Clark Fork, Boulder, Jefferson, Missouri Headwaters, Madison, Gallatin, Snake, Buffalo, Hoback, Little Sandy, North Platte, Medicine Bow, Laramie, South Platte, Platte, Blue, Missouri, West Nishnabotna, East Nishnabotna, South Raccoon, North Raccoon, South Skunk, North Skunk, Guernsay, Iowa, Cedar, Mississippi, Fox.

Fauna spotted: bald eagles, hawks, bison, elk, alpaca, orioles, cardinals, starlings, geese, hundreds of horses, thousands of cows.

Best smelling city: Still Bozeman, ten years later. This time, instead of pine trees, it smelled of apple and smoked pork.

Most public service announcements about meth: Still Montana, ten years later. "Ask Me How My Gun Went Off."

Most fun billboard: "Rock Creek Testicle Festival," also in Montana.

Most awe: Western Wyoming.

Aw!

Best business name: Pickle's Discount Mattress in Rock Springs, WY.

Promising overheard dialogue in Rock Springs: "I used to listen to Morning Joe, but I can't anymore. I just wanna know what's going on. Don't rant at me!" This jived with our similar feeling of watching Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC for half a minute. Maybe we can turn it all off? Then again...

Notable Nebraska radio: Christian homeschool radio on social media and the "Pakistinian-Israelite Conflict"

Scariest downtown on a Sunday: North Platte, NE, mostly boarded up and closed, save for Hometown Cash Advance, Cash n' Go, and a dollar store.

Scariest Victorian home to visit at dusk when no one's around and the horses across the street are all staring at you: Buffalo Bill's home, also in North Platte.

Notable Iowa radio: Agritalk. Regarding leaving the TPP: "Was the juice worth the squeeze?"

Happiest lunch spot: cheeky Gazali's in Des Moines, IA, where we ate garlicky chicken shawarma after several days of burgers burgers burgers.

Unicorn in our Iowa City hotel room, with an excerpt from The Glass Menagerie

Best town name: What Cheer, IA.

Most adorable stop: Iowa City.

Most roadkill: Illinois :( Intestines coiled in the street like giant fusilli. My next novel will be a horror novel.

Notable Chicago radio that filled me with glee: Cardi B. on Polish-American Radio. Brr!

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This past weekend was my sixth time attending the AWP conference. My first was in New York in 2008, an overwhelming affair of 8,000 writers crammed into a couple Midtown hotels. That year, I sat on the floor beside a woman from Texas Tech who thought my plan to wait five years before getting an MFA was absurd. The next thing I knew, I was working as a paralegal to save money for graduate school, and by August 2009, I had a full ride to the University of Washington and Michael and I moved cross-country to Seattle. You could say that AWP changed our life pretty radically.

Over the years, we went to a smattering of conferences, but each year I went to fewer and fewer panels, as they tend to repeat and I learned you can only soak up so much information. In 2015 in Minneapolis, I mostly had lunch and dinner with friends, a most pleasant experience, but I'd realized the conference fee had been a waste. Next time, I resolved, I would go to AWP without going to AWP.

Last year in Tampa, with my novel just out, I didn't get to do that. But *this* year, in Portland, it finally happened, and I highly recommend it to folks who've been around the AWP block. I was more relaxed. More hydrated! I had time to stay on top of my online teaching, so less stressed.

Now for some highlights:

Wednesday night, we started at The Old Portland, a wine bar owned by Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. They only serve old French wine; I misheard the description of the Corsican rosé as "foggy" and enjoyed it very much; Michael enjoyed a ten-year-old red Bordeaux. Then, the very Portland-y (more stoner than twee Portlandia) bartender said, "Yeah, we don't like advertise or anything," and showed us the Odditorium, the band's 10,000-foot "clubhouse," where they rehearse, record, film music videos, and the like. It was cavernous and quiet. Michael, a big Dandy Warhols fan, was in heaven.

"Ice Cream," the mono-print I made at VSC when I was sad that the ice cream shop had closed and there was no ice cream to be had.

Thursday afternoon, we went to the Vermont Studio Center alumni happy hour. I'd finished a first draft of Daughters of the Air there back in 2007. Three former literary staff read poetry from their recent releases. A line from Nandi Comer's American Family: A Syndrome: "If there is blood, the artist has chosen to omit it." Ryan Walsh spoke of the connection between visual art and writing at VSC (I still cherish learning how to make a mono-print there) and vegetable poems. Zayne Turner read from "Her Radioactive Materials."

Most of the other readings I attended featured numerous readers, so, forthwith, more of a collage:

Reading "Cauliflower Tells You"

At Strange Theater: A Fabulist Reading, there were spiders and trousseaus and swans roasted in revenge and Japanese monsters and red rooms and porcine men and tyrants and cauliflower-fueled murder. A doll's head was raffled off, among other trinkets; I offered a rare talisman of Cyndi Lauper's trip to Yemen.

Friday, we went to the PageBoy Magazine Happy Hour, featuring 17-word poems and prose. It was a fun afternoon of zingy one-liners and dreamy experimental works and Gertrude Stein jokes. Then we were off to Literary Bingo with Lilla Lit, a new Portland-based reading series; it was fast and furious with four-minute readings (a loud buzzer ushered off writers going over). Chocolate was pelted at every shout of "bingo!"; I caught a peanut-butter ball overhead with my left hand and won a copy of Jennifer Perrine's In the Human Zoo. I also read a poem and someone won a copy of Daughters of the Air. All readings should have strict word and time limits and buzzers and prizes!

Saturday, we paid $5 to get into the convention center book fair. I had a lovely time chatting with Chicago-based folks in advance of our move (yes! big news tucked away over here; more on that in a future post), signing books at the Lanternfish Press table, and seeing fellow LFP authors Charles J. Eskew (Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark) and Andrew Katz (The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls). It was also super cool meeting Carmen Maria Machado, who signed Her Body and Other Parties and Carmilla, an LFP reprint of a lesbian vampire romance that predates Dracula, with a Borgesian introduction and footnotes by Machado.

Fun!

We also picked up a whole slew of poetry in translation (from Romanian and Hebrew), essays on art, novels, short story collections. I can't wait to read it all! Our last stop was the Northwest Micropress Fair at the Ace Hotel, where I signed copies of Sugar, my chapbook from Chin Music Press, and hung out with regional small presses, which felt like a special little send off before we leave the Pacific Northwest.

I heard that the conference had ballooned to 12,000 (15,000?) attendees. Amazing! Perhaps, perhaps, we'll be in San Antonio next year, and if not San Antonio, Kansas City, and if not Kansas City, Philadelphia...?

Paintings helped me grope through the dark of my first draft of Daughters of the Air. I wrote a guest blog post about that process on Lisa Romeo's blog. Here's how the piece begins:

When I was just starting to write seriously, I fetishized notebooks—and, like an eight-year-old—stickers.  I preferred black, hard-backed notebooks with graph paper that forced my writing into small, neat boxes.  My favorite treat was popping into a stationary store in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, to buy a cheap book of Dover Art Stickers depicting famous paintings by Michelangelo, Kahlo, Goya, and the like. I was trying to write the first draft of my first novel, Daughters of the Air, using Hemingway’s supposed model of 300 words a day, no more, no less, stopping mid-sentence and all that jazz.continue reading

Years later, still enraptured with the process, I ended up teaching several classes on writing from art for Hugo House at the Henry Art Gallery (you can see my students' work alongside the art that inspired them in these e-booklets the Henry made here and here) as well as several blog posts for Ploughshares, including this one on writing from abstract art. And, my next novel features an artist. And, many of my essays engage with art in one way or another, like this one on Goya, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. All this writing about writing—it's time for me to get back to a gallery and refill the well!

I am pleased with how fitting it is to have an essay called "How to Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years" in The Nervous Breakdown today. Here's how it begins:

1.  Choose a horrific moment in history you know little about, in a country, Argentina, you know little about, but which seems to have troubling similarities to the here and now. Research for years. Images from the Dirty War sear into your mind.continue reading

In other news, I made a handy-dandy card with all of my upcoming out-of-Seattle readings (as always everything is on my appearances page).Huzzah!

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

Well, gosh, November snuck up on me! I try not to let a whole month go by without popping in over here, so here's what's been cooking.  Daughters of the Air will be out in 18 days (you might add it to your Goodreads list to be notified of giveaways); the last several weeks featured early mornings hunched over my laptop pitching book critics and events to bookstores and a handful of book clubs. Anxiety-fueled self-googling is at peak levels, which, yes, I know I should not be doing. But every now and again someone says something lovely about the book, which, as I've said on Instagram, has me rolling around like a happy puppy. (Also: I am increasingly on Instagram, where I overuse creepy filters, such in the photo above.)I just finished teaching for the first time a fiction thesis writing class in the online MA program I work for. It's an interesting class that coaches students through the first 30-50 pages of a novel or story collection, and I am embarking upon it once again very soon, just as my own novel will be hitting shelves. Our final week's discussion on paths to publication (traditional vs. hybrid vs. self-publishing) will be rather timely.  In related news, as I head out on book tour next year, I'll be teaching online for Hugo House as well: an eight-week intermediate fiction class touching on point of view, dialogue, and scene construction. Watch for one-day classes at Chicago's StoryStudio and Port Townsend's Writers' Workshoppe! Amidst all this activity, I'm looking forward to some holiday downtime, if that is even possible. Lately I've been starting my day with Anne Carson's Plainwater and ending it with Mavis Gallant's A Fairly Good Time: a superb literary sandwich. Before the year is over, I hope to get to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gothic novel The House of the Seven Gables. I picked it up from a used bookstore in Montreal, The Word, just before graduating from college...in 2004. Yes, I guess it's about time I get to that one.Stay tuned for stories forthcoming from Lilith Magazine, the New Zealand-based Geometry, and the new Pacific Northwest-based Cascadia Magazine. If you'd like monthly news in your in-box, which will include information for upcoming events across the country, you can sign up here. Until launch day!

I'm excited to have another essay in Los Angeles Review of Books today, "Twenty-Six Notes on Cannibalism," on Francisco Goya's painting Saturn Devours His Son. This painting makes a cameo appearance in my forthcoming novel Daughters of the Air. You can read the piece here.

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!

Behold, Seattle's gloriously long spring, stretching from February to late June. In my youth, the colors of my birthday month featured gray slush and the unnatural blue icing on Carvel ice cream cakes. Now, there is a profusion of pink in all the azaleas, rhododendrons, early cherry blossoms, meaty camellias.Speaking of meat, I'm reading at a"Moveable Feast" themed reading on Saturday, March 5 at 7 pm, alongside my fellow Jack Straw'ster Bernard Grant and Emily Holt. They're promising a themed cocktail and open mic to follow, so come have a drink and bring food-themed work to share. This will be at a private home in Madrona on 34th and Columbia, as a part of the roving Makeshift Reading Series. Incidentally, this is also the second time I'm reading at a private home, which is just a lovely experience. A few weeks ago, I read at a party Artist Trust threw for me (!), hosted by Gar LaSalle. It was surreal and delightful and an honor. Pictures here!Then on Wednesday, April 6 at 7 pm, I'm reading at the third anniversary edition of Lit Fix at Chop Suey, alongside Anastacia Tolbert, Michelle Peñaloza, Sean Beaudoin, Gint Aras, and acoustic solo project The Wild. I'll be reading nonfiction, a genre I've been diving deeper into in the last year or so, and which I've never performed before.Lastly, on Wednesday, April 13, I'm returning to Castalia, the University of Washington MFA program's monthly series at Hugo House. Details on the line up to come!I'll have copies of my chapbook I Loved You in New York on hand at each of these readings, for $5. You can also get them from alice blue books at the APRIL book expo on March 20, at AWP in Los Angeles March 31-April 2, or via Etsy.

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:

I've been feeling anxious about the many things I'm juggling at the moment, so I just did a "brain-dump," hashing out my immediate deadlines and less imminent ones, projects where I owe work to others and projects where I owe work to myself, and when in the coming months I will be able to do that. This is something I do from time to time, but having just finished auditing the ArtistTrust EDGE program, I have a few more tips and resources under my belt, with healthy reminders about making time for the writing and valuing that work. I feel a lot better. Of my own projects, there are a handful of short stories that I want to develop further, a handful to submit (or continue submitting), and a general plan to arrange the collection (in hard copy, not in my mind, which I've pretty much done) in September.Anxiety-reduction aside, the brain dump also got me excited about looking ahead to my second novel. I wrote a quick, rough sketch of about 115 pages last April and put it aside to simmer. I took a number of inspiring and invigorating classes at Hugo House in March, including Chris Abani's class on voice and Sam Lipsyte's class on keeping a story going. Now, I'm taking Peter Mountford's excellent class on narrative structure, and had a really productive workshop of my synopsis and first chapter. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into the main conflict of the story before I set out to rewrite with more intention. And I'm excited to keep reading novels that I think will feed this book. For my first novel, I read countless books. I wish I had kept a more careful list all in one place, but my notes are scattered over many notebooks, and it would take me some time to sift through the pages to put it all together. I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on that was from or about Argentina and seemed remotely related, as well as a number of books that used magic realism in some way similar to how I tend to write it. I'm trying to be more organized about my second novel.So far, here are some of the works feeding into Novel # 2. If you have any recommendations that fit into the nodes developing here, feel free to leave a comment!Related posts:

1. On Reading
2. End of the Story
3. Narcissus and Goldmund

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):

Carciofes a la Malaise

Photo from my reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe, courtesy of Max Tzinman.

Reading
Originally uploaded by burningsnail.

Here's another photo from Thursday's reading.

Squinty
Originally uploaded by burningsnail.

Here's a photo from my reading on Thursday. I look a little demonic, but I guess that's me getting *really* into character.