Puzzle:Cinderella Picture Puzzle
Parker Brothers, ca. 1920
I’m thrilled to have a new essay online at Orion Magazine today, “All in the Pumpkins.” This is my third piece in Orion, and another essay from the collection I’ve been working on since 2013, on food and cultural memory. Here’s how it begins:
“I feel tender toward you, and not like that pumpkin we threw out today,” my husband said. It was October 2020 in Chicago.
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!
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.
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.
In 2012, two days after I thought what would become Daughters of the Air was finished, I started writing what would become Dreams Under Glass. Ten+ years and many drafts later, it is out in the world! Thank you so much to those of you who pre-ordered the book. If you'd like to help me get the word out, here are some things you can do:
Join me at the launch party at Exile in Bookville in downtown Chicago on Thursday at 7 pm. I’ll be in conversation with Rebecca Makkai! RSVP here for this free event. Or join me at one of my upcoming events around the country. Bring friends!
Buy the book at an independent bookstore to show booksellers enthusiasm for the book and support all the great work booksellers do.
Review the book on Goodreads, Powell’s, Amazon (you can review without purchasing there), Storygraph, LibraryThing, your personal blog or wherever reviews are shared.
Request your library purchase a copy.
Suggest it to your book club. I will be happy to join a discussion over Zoom if you would enjoy that!
Tell friends who read literary fiction, like a bit of dark humor, like Joseph Cornell or other surreal artists, stories set in New York City, or about struggling artists, or are interested in stories of the financial crisis of 2008 or the Bernie Madoff scandal.
Let me know if you'd like me to read at your reading series or come talk to your students or would like to adopt the book for a course.
Send me photos of you with the book and I will post it on Instagram! Or tag me, and I will happily repost. Tag the bookstore where you bought the book too!
Of course, these are all good things to do for any and all books out in the world that you wish to support. Thank you so much for championing literature!
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.
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 can count on one hand how many publications I had this year, but it was a year full of tremendous personal highlights. Mainly: M. & I became parents in January! One day when I catch my breath I will write about that journey. There's a lot to say, and I need a lot of childcare to get it done. :)
In February, Capra Review published my short story "The Samoyed." Here's an excerpt I like:
In a large glass case beside a tapestry where the beast was hunted and speared, the horn of a narwhal gleamed. “To prove the existence of unicorns, men would drag back these tusks from poor old narwhals. The horn of a unicorn would have remarkable curative qualities, they claimed, for anything from rheumatism to insomnia to impotence.” Robert and Jane walked on into other rooms. The docent’s voice trailed behind them. “You could grind it up into a powder.” Jane imagined sprinkling narwhal horn powder atop her head, imagined coarse, white sand falling through a shaft of sunlight, an iridescent shower of skittering grains.
In June, Orion Magazine published my lyric essay "A Dill in Every Soup." Following the medieval theme of the prior excerpt, here's another excerpt I like:
“During the Middle Ages,” WebMD tells me, “people used dill to defend against witchcraft and enchantments.”
Finally, in November, Scablands Books, based in Spokane, put out their beautiful anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller. I have two short fairy tales in this volume. Why not pick up a copy from Spokane's Wishing Tree Books or Auntie's? Here's an excerpt from "Moss Child":
A lace of bright lichen crept up her arms, chin, cheeks. The green crept from her limbs up the sides of the thickened tree trunks, under so much soft moss that the echoes of footsteps and animal sounds grew muffled in the gulch.
Another very bright spot of the year was chatting with Karen Russell at Hugo House's Novel Nights. Here is Italo Calvino's essay "Lightness," which is a favorite of mine and which she brought up in conversation.
There's much to look forward to in 2022. Among other things, I am especially hoping there will be a COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5. In the meantime, I'm teaching a few virtual classes for Hugo House and Atlas Obscura, January-April, both over Zoom and in an asychronous format. Maybe I will make to AWP in Philadelphia in March? As that is Lanternfish Press's homebase, it would be sweet. Then in the fall Lanternfish Press will release my second novel. Huzzah! I also have a couple short publications in the pipeline, another lyric essay and a short story.
But before all that, I am turning back to revising my third novel and sinking deeper into Maggie O'Farrell's beautiful and absorbing novel Hamnet. Hope you have a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season!
I am so very delighted to share that I've just signed a contract with Lanternfish Press for my second novel, to be published sometime in 2022. Some of you following this blog may be familiar with bits and bobs from the book, which for many years had the working title Paralegal, and which tells the story of a diorama artist working as a paralegal during the economic crisis of 2008, in the same building in which the Bernie Madoff scandal explodes. (Binnie, the protagonist, is influenced by the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, hence the choice in art for this post. This particular collage also been my laptop wallpaper for ages...) The project received early support from 4Culture and the Jack Straw Writing Program, and it's so exciting to shepherd it on toward existence in the world!
ETA: Here is the official announcement from Lanternfish Press!
I'm happy to have new fiction in The Capra Review, and I love the art selected for the piece, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, which is tangentially part of the story. (Just for fun, I chose a different unicorn piece for this blog post.) Other art mentioned in the story include Greco-Roman sculpture, Piet Mondrian's abstractions, and Martha Graham's choreography.
In a way, "The Samoyed" is a companion piece to my story "Old Boyfriends," which appeared in Propeller Magazine in December 2013. Both stories started out as structural "imitations" of Chekhov stories, "Old Boyfriends" using "Gusev" as a starting point and "The Samoyed" using "The Lady with the Dog," though I use the term imitation loosely. I wrote about that exercise here on my blog as well as for Ploughshares here. Anyway, here's how "The Samoyed" begins:
“Modern art is fine for decor,” he said, popping a vodka-soaked olive into his mouth. “But I don’t find it meaningful.” His lips were full, his eyes a gelid blue, his jaw-line well-defined with a stubble that seemed to Jane too calculated.
Back in December 2016, I remarked that world affairs were horrendous but that I would take a moment to celebrate some bright spots in my life. I'm not surprised that in the intervening years, I didn't write a similar end-of-year post, and I know we're not quite out of the dark yet, but I'm feeling hopeful for the future, nonetheless. Some reading, writing, and cooking highlights, forthwith!
According to my Goodreads Year in Books, the most popular book I read this year was War and Peace*, which in truth was a partial re-read during Yiyun Li and A Public Space's TolstoyTogether pandemic book club (which continues on as APSTogether). I first read War and Peace the summer between my first and second years at the University of Washington MFA program, as a way to counter my tendency toward sparse detail. It was quite pleasant to return to it this spring, but, alas, my reading life was too over-committed to stay the re-reading course with such a tome. The "least popular" book (for now!) I read won't actually be released until April 2021; please add my college friend Julian Mortimer Smith's wonderful collection The World of Dew and Other Stories to your to-read list!
Speaking of speculative short story collections by people named Julian, my one book review this year was of Julian K. Jarboe's Everyone On the Moon is Essential Personnel. I am sad The Seattle Review of Books went on hiatus, as it has been a wonderfully thoughtful venue for book reviews. My "Dispatch from a Pandemic" in Another Chicago Magazine might be another "highlight" from 2020 except for the whole pandemic part! At least I got to fall in love with the art of Belkis Ayón, profiled in my ACM piece. My last writing highlight of the year is my first short fiction published since 2018 (!), "Hinges" in Gordon Square Review. I had a lovely time at their virtual launch party getting to know a segment of the Cleveland literary community, which I wouldn't have been able to do under normal circumstances. This also gets me to closer to a side-goal I've had for several years, which I picked up from Seattle poet Susan Rich: get published in each of the 50 states. Still have quite a few states to go!
I am currently revising two novels, and between that, the pandemic, and writing 200+ "please vote" letters and postcards before the election, I think I'm going to cut myself some slack on "only" publishing three things this year. I think my biggest accomplishment, however, is learning how to make soup! I've made soup before. But it was always lacking the oomph my grandmother's boasted, even if I knew the secret ingredient in her chicken soup is beef. I've started collecting vegetable scraps in a big tub I keep in the freezer. And, at least once a month this spring and fall (not so much in the summer), I have had a cauldron bubbling, and my, what a comfort that has been.
My winter break plans? Chinese BBQ, baby bok choy, rainbow cookies shipped from Brooklyn (courtesy of my sweet MIL); Robert Altman's film Kansas City via our artsy cinema subscription, Metrograph; and, of course, the necessary trifecta of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, currently: Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, Michele Bombardier's What We Do.
Have a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season!
*NB: Links to books go to my Bookshop.org affiliate page. If you click through and make a purchase, you're simultaneously supporting independent bookstores, other authors, and me, via a small commission. (Want to make sure the commission goes to me? It should say "Anca L. Szilágyi" in the top left corner of the screen.) Thank you!
Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
I'm so glad I finally read Magda Szabó's The Door (trans. Len Rix), which Michael has been urging me to read for years. Set in Hungary after World War II, The Door is a rich exploration of the complicated friendship between Magda, a writer, and her formidable housekeeper Emerence. The mysteries that surround Emerence and her past give her a witchy quality. She almost never allows anyone inside her home where there are nine cats and, Magda guesses at one point, furniture and china looted from a Jewish family during the war. Here is Emerence bottling cherries for winter as she and Magda discuss the recent suicide of Emerence's friend Polett:
The stream of cherries tumbled into the cauldron. By now, we were in the world of myth—the pitted cherries separating out, the juice beginning to flow like blood from a wound, and Emerence, calmness personified, standing over the cauldron in her black apron, her eyes in the shadow under the hooded headscarf.
The slow revelation of Emerence's life before and during the war is balanced with a clash of personalities as Emerence foists her ways upon Magda's life, such as throwing a bit of hot mulled wine at Magda to get her to drink it when she is distraught over her husband's surgery. She is an infuriating, fascinating character, one of the most complex I've encountered in recent memory.
There is something about Emerence's strong personality and guarded history that reminds me of my great-grandmother from Budapest, who I didn't know very well and who I wrote about in my piece "Threads of Memory" in Jewish in Seattle. There is something about the metaphor of the door that has me scrabbling at it, anxious to understand so much that I never will. It's the sort of anxiety that fills novels; one day when it is safe to travel to Budapest I will do so, if only to be physically in that city, to be closer to that which I can never fully understand.
Here is a source of comfort in difficult times: all issues of Fairy Tale Review are free for the foreseeable future. Kate Berheimer wrote on Twitter:
This doesn't put a dent in the painful news today, but maybe it will help some people through the difficult hours. I've always found that being in the company of a good fairy tale helps me do a little bit better, be a little bit kinder. It's why I founded this journal in 2005. xo
I wrote "More Like Home Than Home," the title story of my story collection, as an antidote to the darkness of Daughters of the Air. It was meant to comfort me, and I hope you find comfort in it too. It appeared in the Wizard of Oz-themed Emerald Issue. Now free and online, thanks to Fairy Tale Review , JSTOR, and Wayne State University Press.
I'm thrilled to have my essay "Cosmic Fruit" in the gorgeous summer issue of Orion Magazine. It's part of a collection of lyric essays on food and cultural memory that I've been slowly pecking away at for several years now, which includes "Dark Fruit: A Cultural and Personal History of the Plum" in Los Angeles Review of Books and "Used to be Schwartz" in The Rumpus. You can subscribe to Orion Magazine or pick up a copy at your favorite bookstore or newsstand. Here's a taste of "Cosmic Fruit":
UPDATE (7/9): You can also read the essay online here.
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.
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:
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.
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...?
Yesterday, I got a sneak peek at a song Sean Morse is writing in response to Daughters of the Air for Word Play: Original Music inspired by Seattle7Writers. The theme of the concert (happening on March 2 at Hugo House) is "Transformations," which is certainly fitting for the metamorphoses in my novel. But it's also super cool to experience a transformation of one art form to another. And what a honor to have one's own work transformed!
I've long used visual art as inspiration for my writing. I've also reflected upon writing in response to music and dance. Whenever I'm stuck in my writing taking in another form helps. (Long walks also help, almost always.) Hearing Sean's concepts and interpretations gave a whole other dimension to the difficult mother-daughter relationship in my book, and the larger societal problem of looking away from atrocity. I'm looking forward to sharing a link to all the songs once they're recorded—Sean's has been looping in my head all day today!
And, I'm excited to hear songs from the rest of the Bushwick Book Club, which is such a neat organization that has put on numerous concerts launching from classics, new releases, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and the like. Several years ago, The Furnace partnered with BBC and Bradford Loomis wrote a beautiful song in response to my short story "More Like Home Than Home" which is now on his album Banner Days.
So, on March 2, Sean Morse, Alex Guy and Joy Mills will perform music inspired by Daughters of the Air. Wes Weddell, Simon Kornelis, and Reggie Garrett will perform music inspired by Michael Schmelter's book of poetry Blood Song. And, Amanda Winterhalter, Nottingham/Wicks, and Nessa Grasing will perform music inspired by Laurie Frankel's novel This is How it Always Is.
Hearing all of these transformations live will be a real treat. If you're in Seattle, I hope you can make it! Proceeds from ticket sales will benefit STYLE: Songwriting Through Youth Literature Education.
The Seattle Review of Books invited me to participate in their fun & breezy column, "Whatcha Reading?" I touched on dark psychological fiction, heartbreaking poetry, an essay on the cleverness of crows, and more. Something for everyone! Plus: a preview of some Women in Translation Month picks.Over on the Magic Realism blog, Zoe Brooks had this to say about Daughters of the Air: "In every way this is a mature intelligent book which may not suit all readers, but it is an example of how magic realism is so suited to ambiguity and to difficult subjects." You can read the whole review here. Also, I wrote a very personal essay about life choices here on Healthline.Finally, this Monday at 6:30 pm at the Phinney Neighborhood Association, I will be participating in a panel discussion on the author-editor relationship at the Northwest Independent Editors' Guild. The panel will include Dave Boling, author of The Lost History of Stars and Jamie Swenson of the University of Washington marketing and communications department. Matthew Bennett of the guild will moderate. Not in town but curious about the topic? You can tune in live on YouTube.
I'm excited to have a new short story, "Sneaking Into Dr. Zhivago," in the spring issue of Confrontation. It's an honor to be in a journal that's published the likes of Cynthia Ozick and Joseph Brodsky! Here's how the story begins:
If not Paris, Vienna. That's where I should have landed. My father sent my brother to medical school in Vienna, and I, I was being groomed for the Sorbonne. I would have studied history. And literature. Between the wars, many of my cousins moved to Vienna, London, New York. Children of my seven uncles.
In my last post I promised blood. Well, I'll just say I slid my boot off Friday night and it was like I was one of Cinderella's stepsisters. I'm still limping. On to day 3!What is a better breakfast than a leftover Cuban sandwich? Leftover fried oysters. Just kidding! The Cuban sandwich was much better. Day 3 was the best because Michael got a one-day pass and we got to roam the book fair together."The Worst Writing Advice I Ever Got" is an irresistible title, so of course we wrenched ourselves away from the book fair for it. Here, without narrative, a fun grab-bag of quotes:
I appreciated Limón's story of navigating two groups of people: those who roll their eyes at "abuelita poems" and those who say, "where's your abuelita poem?" And Melissa Stein's remark that dread may be a sign that advice you've been given may not be for you, anxiety might mean it's worth exploring the challenge, and excitement is obviously a good sign. Abani noted that "Craft advice is only important if you're asking questions. What are you trying to do?"We stuck around for a reading and conversation between Min Jin Lee and Sigrid Nunez. Nunez on writing about sex: "The vocabulary is not there. It's either coy, clinical, or filthy, none of which do justice to human sexuality." At the book signing, Lee called Michael and me adorable. So that happened.My attention span went out the door by mid-afternoon, so it was off to the hotel bar for wine and fried calamari! Naturally, someone in panda suit wandered in. 
Next year in Portland! Maybe Seattleites can get some party buses organized...
The Friday of AWP is always the best day. The nervous energy of Thursday has dissipated, and the inevitable Saturday flu epidemic has not yet emerged. I woke early to respond to student stories and breakfasted on a leftover Cuban sandwich, wondering if it would make me barf later. Reader, it did not! A fortifying start.Alan Sincic, the fantastic Orlando-based writer who was The Furnace's Writer-in-Residence, was on a 9 am panel on the lyric sentence. I'm a fan of Sincic's prose *and* mad presentation skills, so the early start was well worth it. The moderator, Pearl Abraham, kicked off the discussion with this advice: "If the voice doesn't work, write better sentences." Then Sincic woke up the crowd with a call-and-response activity, that gradually built up to us chanting together: "I am an individual and will not surrender my voice to the crowd." He said, "A sentence is less like the beam of a house and more like the branch of a tree," that a sentence has ghost limbs lost in the editing process. He proceeded to take apart this Mark Twain sentence, examining each word choice and its placement as a way of generating suspense and delight: "Is a tail absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog?"Baylea Jones analyzed a sentence from Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, graphing sounds and letters, including patterns of consonant use, and internal rhymes: "Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Wow! I had fun retyping that.
I ducked out early to get to my book signing at the Lanternfish Press table, where I got to hang out with my editor Christine Neulieb and publisher Amanda Thomas, and connect with new readers and old friends, including Julia Mascoli, who was in my Tin House workshop in 2013 and who is Deputy Director of Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop doing great work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in Washington, D.C. (Seattle-area folks, you can donate books to prisons and other under-served communities via Seattle7Writers Pocket Libraries program.)Later, I chilled at the Cambridge Writer's Workshop table, celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, which includes my "Summer-Inspired Writing Prompts." Co-editor Rita Banerjee was there with her mythic poetry collection Echo in Four Beats, as was Maya Sonenberg, whose new chapbook After the Death of Shostakovich Père is out from PANK Books.That night, the celebration continued at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, a beautiful old mansion a mile away from the convention center. There were many, many readings. One was from Women in the Literary Landscape; crowds whooped in appreciation for Anne Bradstreet, Virginia Kirkus, and the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. (I am a rube for not remember which biographer was mentioned, so here are five of them!) Nell Painter, author of A History of White People, read from her forthcoming memoir Old in Art School, Diana Norma Szokolayi read her poem "Sarajevo," Sonenberg read an anti-plot manifesto, and I read an excerpt from Daughters of the Air in which Pluta has committed arson in Brooklyn and found refuge in an abandoned Times Square theater. Fun! There is so much more to write...! I'll wrap things up in one more post. Sneak preview: there will be blood.
I'm back home after a whirlwind book tour that ended with AWP in Tampa. Michael and I drove up from Delray Beach through the Everglades, hoping to spot alligators, and though there were none, pelicans abounded.We arrived in time for me to catch one panel Thursday afternoon, "Difficult History: Jewish Fiction in the Alt-Right World," which began with brief readings from each panelist. Emily Barton read from The Book of Esther, an alternate history in which a Turkic Jewish warrior state that disappeared in the Middle Ages existed into August 1942. Simone Zelitch read from her novel Judenstaat, another alternate history, this one set in 1980 in the Jewish sovereign state established in the province of Saxony in 1948. Amy Brill read from Hotel Havana, about Jewish refugees in Havana in the 1930s and '40s, highlighting the fresh pain German Jews felt compared to Polish Jews, since Polish Jews had always been considered Jewish rather than Polish, whereas German Jews had thought of themselves as German. And Irina Reyn read from a work-in-progress ending on this note: "A Russian woman doesn't wait. A Russian woman acts."On the question of what is Jewish fiction, Zelitch quoted a character of hers: "We don't bow down. We cross borders. We remember." Reyn recalled her unhappy Jewish day school experience as a Russian immigrant who never felt she belonged (I totally related to this, being neither a "real" American or Israeli at my elementary school); she said, "Jewish fiction is constant negotiation: where do you belong?" Brill remarked that as a reform Jew who went to Sunday school and never really understood her bat mitzvah asked: how do you handle writing a character that is either less than or more than your own religiosity? Barton said that for The Book of Esther she generated 90 questions and found a rabbi willing to discuss them all with her; then she showed the finished manuscript to another rabbi. She said that after revision and publication she still got things weirdly wrong. Oy! On the question of how much to explicate for the reader, Barton said she wants Christian Americans to know what's like to be a religious minority: "I looked up pentecost; you can look up havdallah."Barton also made a point I feel strongly about (and have written about in Salon and Jewish in Seattle): it is important to revisit history and re-enliven it. Alternate history, she suggested, is one way to get around Holocaust fatigue. Zelitch added, "Judaism has to be more than the Holocaust and Israel," that we should look to the international Jewish experience and the refugee crisis. Reyn then touched on "diasporic anxiety," the need to be more Jewish than you really are in order to connect with Jews in a new place (again, something I totally relate to since moving to Seattle from New York, and touched on in an essay for The Rumpus). Zelitch added that today dystopian fiction seems like a cop out and the challenge is to write engaging utopian fiction, that we need to see powerless people taking power and people need to lose themselves in this kind of story. Before opening up the discussion to audience questions, Brill said: "The arc of justice is not necessarily moving on its own. We need to push it."It was certainly an invigorating panel! One or two more posts to come...
