Writings in the Raw
Many thanks to the talented team who made this happen:
Characters:
Narrator 1: Alexander Flores
Narrator 2: Emily Choi
Fran: Avantika Chitturi
Wren: Georgia Kerr
Marian: Emily Hamill
Kira: Isabel Chen
Fran's parents: Emily Choi
New roommates: Alexander Flores
Editors: Luna Garza-Hillman & Kylie Min
I’m delighted to share that my story, “Wild Dogs,” was published today by The Dodge Mag, a wonderful venue that features eco writers. This story, which follows Grace and Rachel as they journey through the Chilean wilderness, was made richer thanks to the thoughtful feedback of my writer pal Candice May (read her stories please).
It has been a special few weeks for me as a writer. In early April, I was lucky to spend a week at the Porches residency in Virginia. Thanks to generosity of a unique fellowship program that provides one on one editorial consultation on a novel manuscript, I spent more concentrated, uninterrupted time working on fiction than I probably ever have. My brain feels both stimulated and nourished. Ready, hopefully, for whatever comes next.
The view from Trudy Hale’s porch.
Grateful, always, for the exceedingly kind Trudy Hale, who transformed her magical property into a haven for writers at all stages of their careers, and to Greg Michalson, for treating my imaginary friends with such care, and to Michael Smith, who funds the fellowship.
None of this would be possible without my better half, who is holding down the fort and supporting me in my perhaps cockeyed efforts to chase a long-held dream. Sometimes the biggest gift one can give or receive is time.
I’m honored to share that my short story, “Human Resources,” has been published by Manifest-Station.
I’m delighted to share that my short story, “A Question of Karma,” has been published in issue 43 of the Berkeley Fiction Review. I especially love this illustration by Tracy Sun. It means a lot for me for this piece to find a Bay Area home, as this is an especially regional story. Many thanks to the editorial staff housing this story about intentional living.
I hit an important milestone this week.
I finished the first full draft of my novel manuscript, currently titled THE NEWCOMERS CLUB. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as proud as I do right now.
My mind is full of disclaimers—it took me 11 years! To write 79,426 words! There’s so much more to revise!—and yet and yet and yet. I did it. I saw this project through. I created a narrative arc and executed it. I have been living with these characters and conflicts and scenes in my mind and in my body for well over a decade and now, finally, they are free on the page. I’ve opened the door to their cage and they are running, swimming, dancing, moving forward. The relief is palpable.
This book was born in October 2006, when I moved to southern Spain as a teaching assistant. I spent so much of that year alone and scribbling in notebooks that still live under my bed. Every day I wrote five observations that interested, confused or startled me. All the mistakes I made, all the words I learned, all the people I met, all the food I ate, all the places I went. I didn’t know what these words would become, if they would become anything, but I knew that each one felt important.
When I returned to California in summer 2007, I knew I wanted to get a graduate degree in creative writing. I wanted to polish my craft, learn from experts, immerse myself in the creative process. But I also needed health insurance, a job, stability, some semblance of adulthood. So I moved to San Francisco and worked multiple gigs, writing and doodling and reading and absorbing as much as I could. I didn’t know what I wanted to say but I knew I wanted to say something. I also needed to figure out how to pay for insulin and rent and food and the life I knew I wanted to lead.
So I applied for graduate school, got into a few places, quit my job as an international student advisor and enrolled in San Francisco State University’s MFA in creative writing program. A truly wonderful opportunity, and an amazing experience, and yet it was 2009 and no one was hiring and I took out one year of student loans and was amazed and frightened by the bills that kept coming. I say this with a heart full of gratitude to my parents, who graciously saved me by covering my healthcare for three years—a cost that, because I live with a preexisting and expensive condition, I’ve never forgotten. A cost that I know prohibits countless talented people from pursuing their dreams—or forces them to take on insurmountable debt.
So I applied for graduate school a second time, this time focusing only on schools that offered tuition remissions. By some miracle I was waitlisted to UC Davis for the second year in a row, admitted only when someone else dropped out. I’ll never forget the amazing writer Lucy Corin calling my cell phone to explain how, if I could secure an on-campus job for the following year, the program would waive my graduate tuition. That, plus I’d be moving to my hometown with minimal household expenses, which meant I’d be able to pursue my dream of getting a graduate degree without taking on extensive debt. Did I mention that UCD has great student health insurance?
And so I moved home. There were no teaching assistantships left, so I applied for everything I could find until I landed a graduate research assistantship with an anthropology professor, who hired me half-time to manage her lab. It was a huge learning curve—I was her office manager and intern wrangler, plus I assisted with grant writing—and I’ll never forget dedicating an entire week to resetting her entire IT platform. But it afforded me the chance to take classes with writers I admired immensely—the aforementioned Lucy Corin, plus Pam Houston, Yiyun Li, Lynn Freed. My classmates were (and are) so smart and accomplished and taught me so much about writing, revision, reading, workshopping. I always felt like I was running to catch up with the others but that urgency kept me hungry, creative, striving.
My second year at Davis I taught undergraduate creative writing workshops to offset tuition, perhaps one of the greatest joys of my school career. Our students were intellectually curious and fascinating and also actively engaged in the Occupy movement. The fall of my second year, faculty and graduate students from my department camped out on the Davis quad lawn and many of them were victimized by the now-infamous pepper spray incident, in which campus police retaliated against protesters. It was an interesting and complicated time to be studying writing; so much of the rhetoric that we examined was being played out in the media by and about our own campus.
I concluded my graduate career with a 140-page thesis, a jumble of stories and 100 flash fiction pieces which, together, sparked something deep inside me. I included three stories that I presented as a “story cycle” set in Spain and it wasn’t until my thesis defense that Pam looked at me and said, “Julia, these aren’t stories. This is the beginning of a novel.”
It honestly never occurred to me that I could write a novel. I had always pictured myself writing a “book,” but a novel? I spent so much of that year writing the shortest stories I could imagine. A novel sounded impossible. And exciting. I’ll never forget Pam’s words that day: “Julia, you are a worker. I could see you working and working on this and maybe one day, 10 years from now, you’ll come back with a book.”
I must have made a face because she laughed and said, “Or I don’t know, maybe five years?”
Ten years seemed so long at the time. I didn’t realize that in ten years, a person can launch a career, get married, have children, survive a pandemic.
Because that’s what happened next: I moved to San Jose to live with my then-boyfriend Ryan, who was in his second year teaching high school English. I brought my thesis with me. I took furious notes. I wrote in coffee shops. And I still needed health insurance, so I began applying to jobs in tech and higher ed, eventually becoming an assistant editor, then editor, at a university extension program.
Creative writing became, quite literally, my margins. The margins of all my notebooks, the margins of my life. Ryan and I got engaged, spent 18 months planning a wedding. We both lost family members. We traveled. I began applying for writing conferences and was completely startled to receive a work-study scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2013.
Those two weeks were incredibly formative. I studied with the great Charles Baxter and roomed with Lydia Conklin (whose amazing debut collection RAINBOW RAINBOW came out last year). I met writers who now, years later, are Stegner fellows and authors of multiple books. I met my first agent and was too terrified to show him a single word of my work. I remember him looking me in the eye and saying, “Take your time. I’d much rather you spend years finding your voice and creating an amazing book than sending me something before it’s ready.”
Little did he know.
Back in San Jose, I craved literary community, so I partnered with the fabulous actor, director and writer Melinda Marks and the writer Nicole Hughes, then a graduate student at San Jose State, to launch a performative literary series. Play On Words started as a lark and in time became a quarterly event series that showcased the work of more than 70 writers in our 8-year run. Our last show was held virtually in 2021, and while we are not “over” by any means, we decided in 2022 to go on hiatus while Melinda pursues her PhD and I…finally finish this damn book.
Meanwhile, Ryan and I got married. We traveled. In 2016, we welcomed our first child. Our lives were consumed by her, in learning how to be parents. I believe there was a terrible election that year as well. Activism and community engagement became even more important to us. I transitioned from my copyediting job to one as a writer for another university, where I started applying some of my creative writing techniques to narrative journalism and news writing.
I applied for and continued attending writing conferences—Lit Camp, Tucson Festival of Writers, Napa Valley Writers Workshops, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, Writers in Paradise. I workshopped chapters that I had written as short stories, and though I got some very helpful feedback, I found it hard to apply the commentary once I returned back to real life.
And then in 2019, we lost our second pregnancy. For months I felt adrift and lost, wondering what and how to write. Something big happened in 2020—I believe the world shut down? Due to a global pandemic? I got pregnant again and gave birth to our son three months into COVID. Life was chaotic and confusing and the rules to the universe appeared to be changing daily.
Along the way, I couldn’t help myself. I kept scribbling in the margins. I kept a massive spreadsheet of rejections and the occasional acceptance and bookmarked opportunities that gave me hope. Something in me kept going back to the page. Why isn’t this working? I wanted to solve this puzzle that had stymied me for so long. And every time I told myself, that’s it, the story’s no good, I felt the characters call me back. You’re not done, they yelled. You don’t get to stop til you’re done.
In 2021, I took a leap and applied for the Lighthouse Writers Book Project, a two-year program designed to support writers as they complete their manuscripts. Billed as an MFA minus the degree and grades, the program creates small cohorts of writers who are assigned mentors to guide them through the writing process. Again I was startled to be admitted, and even more surprised when the great Erika Krouse agreed to work with me for two years.
And that’s, finally, when the words began to flow. Ryan and I talked through a workable budget and we found babysitters who could help out on the nights when I had class. For the first time in so many years I remembered how thrilling it is to discover a story in motion. My grad school experience was so focused on producing short story writers and I had long assumed that my book was to be a collection of linked stories. Because that’s what Jennifer Egan did, and her book blew my mind. And Elizabeth Strout.
But then I remembered Pam’s words and realized, no, these aren’t linked stories. This is one unbroken story, told in two voices. And after living with those voices for so many years, I sensed that I knew what they would say. I knew what mistakes they would make. I knew how they’d push each others’ buttons and commit real cruelty and rare compassion.
Over the past two years, I’ve rediscovered, yet again, the power of writer friends who don’t mind reading shitty drafts. I’ve relied on friends like Melissa Flores Anderson and Tiffany Edwards, and members of my Lighthouse cohort Nur Ibrahim, Jihyun Yun, Candice May, Aakriti Pandita and Emily Werner. I took some mind-blowing classes from Jacinda Townsend, Rachel Weaver, Tiffany Quay Tyson, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz.
I’ve also rediscovered the joy of reading, though as a working parent “reading” means audio books. Thanks to our public library’s app, I’ve devoured about 40-45 books a year, and many of these novels and essay collections have influenced how I consider narrative, character and voice.
I set a goal to finish the novel in June 2022, which became October 2022, then December. Losing hope, I finally promised myself the first full draft would be written by March 15. And then I signed up for a writing class that met twice a week from 5-7 am (!), and by some crazy miracle I upped my word count to about 1000-2000 a day. This, from the woman who spent years revising 100-word stories.
And then, on Monday, January 30, 2023, after a full day of work and parenting, I returned to the page once more and completed the book’s 31st chapter. I wasn’t intending this to be the final chapter, but something shifted as I wrote the last few paragraphs, because I realized that there was nothing more to say. I had outlined a few additional chapters but they didn’t seem necessary any more. The characters had completed their arcs. I had written through the climax and its other side. And there, somehow, it was. The end.
The epiphany stunned me. It was as if time itself stopped. Yes, the characters had been freed from my mind’s cage, but already I missed them. Where did they go?
The next day I uploaded the full document and printed it at FedEx, paying extra to put it in a three-ring binder. The pages are glossy and gorgeous and I can’t stop touching the paper.
I know this isn’t the end. I know that many writers go through multiple full drafts of a manuscript, and that’s before they begin querying. If this book sees the light of day (and by god I hope it does), I am sure it will look very different by the time an agent or an editor engages with its words. And that’s okay. I look forward to that. But more than anything, I am proud.
I did it. I’m going to keep doing it, and I did it.
Welcome to the Newcomers Club.
I’m thrilled to share news of two upcoming publications. Tahoma Literary Review will be publishing a series of my 100-word stories entitled “A Posse of Parables,” and Berkeley Fiction Review will be publishing my short story, “A Question of Karma,” in Vol. 43.
Persistence (and revision) pays off!
I’m delighted to share that MAYDAY Magazine has published “The Closet,” an excerpt of my novel-in-progress.
Elizabeth Johnson, Split View, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
I’m thrilled to share that “Starburst,” a series of 8 of my 100-word stories, was published by Okay Donkey Mag last week. Check out their archive of flash fiction!
I keep a five-year diary where I write one sentence a day, every day, over a five year span. Starting March 13, 2020, I began a quarantine tally to see how long we would be living from home, telecommuting and tele-learning and tele-living. I made it as far as 450+ days before I gave up counting, depressed by how seemingly permanent the pandemic has felt.
And yet, and yet, and yet: My big kid started in-person (masked and socially distant) kindergarten this fall! And my 1-year-old is in daycare. And Ryan is teaching in person. And I am occasionally on campus and have even started conducting the first of many in-person interviews for stories. I got both doses of the Pfizer vaccine as soon as I could and eagerly await my booster shot. I can’t wait until my kiddos are both vaccinated as well.
The weather is finally starting to change, and though I know fire season is far from over, I can’t help but feel hope. Play On Words’ first-ever virtual show was a huge success! The persimmons on our tree are changing colors. And I have renewed my focus on fiction by enrolling in Lighthouse Writer’s Book Project, where I’m working with a small cohort to complete my manuscript by 2023. (Fingers crossed!).
And finally, there are the achievements of SJSU students, faculty and alumni that I’ve gotten to interview recently. A few highlights:
Transforming the Way We Teach: San José State University’s Connie L. Lurie College of Education encourages students and faculty alike to reimagine the future of education.
The Metamorphosis of Recovery: Community leader and alumna Kathy Córdova’s desire to serve started at San José State University.
How Can Educators and Parents Prepare for the K-12 School year? A Q&A with Lara Ervin-Kassab
San José State University’s Reed Magazine Earns Its First Pushcart Prize
Grateful for the opportunity to shine a spotlight on these wonderful Spartans.
I’m excited to share that my fiction piece, “Tap Show,” has been published on The Racket. Noah Sanders, who produces The Racket, invited me to record the story. You can read the story and listen to it here. Thanks Noah!
I'm delighted to share that I've been awarded the Byerley Memorial Scholarship to attend the 2018 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. I am beyond excited to attend a novel workshop with the amazing Shanthi Sekaran, a fiction writer whose novel Lucky Boy left an indelible impression on me. I also cannot wait to return to the beautiful north coast, which Ryan and I visited for the first time shortly after Christmas. There is something about that wide open sky and the rugged cliffs along the water that make anything feel possible.
Many, many thanks to the kind folks at MCWC for making this possible for me. For the first time since having my daughter I feel ready to rework my novel--to call out characters who have lived inside me for more than a decade. I can't wait to see what this brings.
You know those writers you meet at a young age whose work you follow for years? Melanie Unruh is a writer I met in 2005, when we were both undergraduates studying abroad in Granada, Spain. I've always felt a certain kinship with artists that I meet while traveling: When we gravitate beyond what is comfortable, when we take in the world in all its glory and messiness, there's usually room for a great story. Melanie's work is vibrant and raw, real and well-crafted. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico and has a young son. I'm inspired by her work and her clear ability to juggle. Thanks for being game to answer my questions, Melanie! And now, our latest conversation about parents who write:
Melanie Unruh is a writer in New Mexico.
Name (or pen name): Melanie Unruh
How many children do you have? How old are they? I have one son, who is 2.5 years old.
How many hats do you wear in your household? I.e. how many gigs do you have?
I’m an adjunct writing instructor at a community college; I’m enrolled in school part-time; I’m the primary caregiver for my son; I do a lot of the household duties because my husband works long hours; and a friend and I have been dabbling with starting our own business. In my free time, I try to write and work out and, you know, be a person. Maybe that’s a lot? I think most of us wear numerous hats!
How long have you been a writer?
It’s hard to pin down a date, so let’s say forever? My first real memory of considering myself a writer was after I wrote a short story for a class in 8th grade. My teacher and the student teacher working with her had me convinced I was going to write novels. I’m glad they said this because it motivated me to pursue writing fairly early, but looking back the story was terrible (The main character was a young girl who rode around on a horse named Rocket… in the 1800s…).
Tell me about your relationship to writing before you had children.
I don’t want to say that I took writing for granted before I had my son, but in a way, I did. I had a dedicated home office, and when I wasn’t working, I could pick and choose when to write. Although it’s hard to find as much time now, I do think I appreciate those moments I can dedicate to myself and to my writing more.
How did you expect parenthood to impact your writing? Did it?
I knew things would change; however, it’s easy to idealize in your head, “Oh, I’ll write while the baby sleeps on me” and then you’re so exhausted and one of your arms is pinned down by his head, so you just end up on your phone pinning recipes you’ll never make. Now that my son is older and a good sleeper, finding time (and arms!) is a little easier.
Have you shared your writing with your children? If not, do you plan to someday?
I haven’t yet. I wonder if he’ll have an interest or if he’ll just think it’s weird (especially the sex scenes…). But I’ll be open to sharing anything he wants to read when he's older.
Is there a poem, short story, novel or play that you return to when you are stuck in your writing?
When I get stuck, I often re-read the beginning of Janet Fitch’s novel White Oleander. It’s the perfect marriage of plot and prose. Her writing style is gorgeous and it always compels me to try harder.
How has your approach to the artistic process changed since becoming a parent? (If it has?)
I tend to let things sit longer. Before I would be actively juggling multiple projects, but now I might have one or two pieces I’m working on, while the others stay dormant for months, if not years, at a time.
What piece of culture are you obsessed with right now?
The Handmaid’s Tale has me on the edge of my seat! I finally read the book right before the show came out and I loved it. The show is taking liberties with the source material and expanding upon it, but I’m on board for what they’re doing so far. Movie/TV adaptations of books can be fraught with so many issues, and yet I’m addicted to them (Others I love include Game of Thrones, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and Me Before You). I love seeing the way someone interprets a piece of writing for the screen.
Do you have any projects or publications you’d like to tell me about? Or goals for future projects/publications?
I recently had a short story published in Sixfold.
I have one YA novel that I’m submitting and another that I’m revising. Ideally, in the next year or so I’d like to get the second book to a place where I wouldn’t want to hide under a rock for five years if someone read it.
I’ve also gotten more into nonfiction this year, so I’m working on a couple of essays.
Melanie and I in Granada, spring 2005.
I am applying for the SV Creates Artist Laureate award in the off-stage category. I am attaching my writing sample here. All of these pieces have been previously published, and in the case of "Soloist," performed.
As proof of my literary contributions to Silicon Valley, I'd love to direct reviewers to the Play On Words YouTube channel, where you can watch recordings of past performances.
To anyone else who might find this: I hope you enjoy my work.
I'm thrilled to announce that my short story, "Exposure," was a finalist in the 2015 Reynolds Fiction Prize, awarded by the Center for Women Writers. Congratulations to all involved!
In other news, tomorrow night is Play On Words: Take Flight at San Jose's Cafe Stritch. I'm so unbelievably excited. This production represents more than six months of dedicated work--soliciting submissions, collaborating with artists and performers, networking with San Jose businesses. Tomorrow will be our biggest, boldest show yet, showcasing the work of 13 Bay Area writers. We even got a mention in the San Jose Mercury News! On my birthday, no less. It has been a good week.
The pursuit of creativity is often as wonderful as any one "thing" we can create. And the beat goes on.
"....what is wisdom anyway? It's usually just the feeling, 'I better not do that.' 'She better not do that.' 'We better not do that.' What is wisdom? It's just the word, 'No.'"
--Charles Baxter, in conversation with Jeremiah Chamberlain, from the fall 2012 issue of Glimmer Train (Issue 84)
I'm turning 30 at the end of this month, just three weeks before Ryan and I get married. May is always the most frenetic time of the year; birthdays, graduations, weddings. Days are long and endless and hot. Secretly I love spring sweat, the adolescent twinge of warm evenings, sitting outside after sunset with strawberries and root beer, everything so very ripe. I always wanted to get married right when spring met summer. I've never cared much for frills, pomp or circumstance; what was always important to me is the quality of the air. I want to be outside on my wedding day and know that we are all on the cusp. A very specific cusp, one I won't really have the words for until we're all there together.
The space I typically reserve in my brain for writing fiction has been temporarily rented out to event planning--not just our wedding, but a career fair that attracted 350 job seekers to my place of work, as well as our third installment of Play On Words, scheduled for a week from tonight (May 22 at the Blackbird Tavern, and yes, in case you're wondering, you should definitely come, because it will be an amazing evening). (And yes, and that plug was 100% intentional.)
The weeks when I can't or don't write fiction, I imagine that creative space in my brain to be an empty radio station, nobody home but the microphones are still running. I tell myself that though I'd rather be writing, sometimes the leg work can be done in one's head. I see the hours of the day as all opportunities where my characters are interacting--that every hour I'm not with them, they're off doing the truly fiction-worthy things. Today I came across a 2012 issue of Glimmer Train that featured an interview with Charles Baxter, whose essays and lectures on craft are among some of the most informative and accessible that I've read. Like this:
"People spend much of their lives trying to repress and hide things, and I've come to feel that it's the business of fiction to bring up to visibility those things that families and social groups and individuals habitually hide. And you don't have to make explicit what's up to the surface, but something has to come up there."
I read this today and it hit me in the gullet. Fiction is often undervalued for its social and cultural power, but maybe that's because so much "marketable" fiction lacks that focus. What do we respond to? We respond to stories that call us on our shit, even if we lack the courage or self-awareness to realize that's what's going on. Controversy, intrigue, mystery, tragedy, hell, even romance--in some way we crave an honest mirror.
Sometimes I don't write because I'm not ready for that mirror myself.
And then I remember that I'm right there on that cusp--that the sun sets late, that the hummingbirds in the tree outside our bedroom can see us through the mirror, that when I go to bed and when I wake up I'm lying next to someone I love in an entirely new way every day--and then it's time to write.
One of my favorite writers, Jennifer Egan, breaks down one of my favorite books, The Great Gatsby, with Stephen Colbert. I have always loved those blinking green lights.
Tuesday nights are sacred because Tuesday nights are writing nights. Every Tuesday I drive to San Francisco to attend Matthew Clark Davison's Writing Lab, a six-week generative writing workshop. Since completing graduate school I have felt anything but that--complete. The stories I started in Davis and San Francisco rattle around in my bones like a lost ache. In Matthew's class I've had a chance to step back and see the characters and conflicts with a greater kindness and compassion than I ever did in grad school. Last night's lesson had something to do with that.
Matthew shared an interview Cortney Davis did of poet and physician Rafael Campo. Campo believes that poetry is not only an expression of humanity, but an ongoing exercise in empathy. The interview, which is available on Poets.Org, explores how Campo turned toward medicine because he first thought it might "straighten" him out and "whiten" his identity. Over time, though, poetry became an important part of his practice. I was especially moved by Campo's belief that patients need to hear both a data-driven narrative and a poetry-driven one:
I think my patients are surprised sometimes to find a poem together with patient education pamphlets or scientific articles—and yet so often that’s what they want to discuss at the next visit. A poem says to a patient that I want to know more than just my own biomedical narrative of her illness—that I want to take care of her as a whole person, with attention to both the blood sugar results and also her struggles to maintain them in our target for treatment—that slice of birthday cake she couldn’t eat at her child’s party, the sting each time she must administer her insulin, are just as important. Such an approach, I think, not only has practical value—because the patient who trusts me will confide in me the detail of a symptom that helps me reach the correct diagnosis more expeditiously—but also is more rewarding on a personal level. So many docs these days feel alienated from their own work and from their patients. I think that’s largely due to all the obstacles to caring for patients, really caring for them, that poetry can help short-circuit: the burdens of such a rapidly expanding knowledge base, the constraints imposed by managed care on the time we can spend with our patients, the challenges of caring for increasingly diverse, multicultural patients. Poetry gets us past all the machines, literally to the heart of the matter; poetry expands the interaction with a patient to a space without time limitations; poetry bridges those cross cultural gaps by speaking in the most elemental and mutually understood form of language we have.
Last night I was struck by how perfectly Campo captured the exact feeling I have had, time and time again, while sitting in a doctor's office. I've written before about that gap that so often occurs between bedside manner and effective treatment. Test results and emerging technology can help us analyze data, but data is useless without full human understanding. As a type 1 diabetic, few things speak to me more than a physician's ability to see a blood sugar result and fully see the person behind it--the circumstances that caused a high number or the stress that caused a low one. As a writer, it is always my intention to approach my subjects with compassion, but that means seeing beyond deeply embedded cultural stereotype. That's the crux of it--that's where stories get interesting.
When Campo says that "poetry helps us get past all the machines," I think of all the times we find the easy story, versus the honest, more compelling one. Writing honest fiction to me means being patient with my characters, really doing my homework, reading, traveling, listening to other writers read, accepting shitty first (and second...and third...) drafts, and aspiring for empathy. When I sit down to write, it's hard not to take all of these expectations with me.
When I go to the Lab, though, the rules are different. Time is set aside to think and write. The burden of accomplishment, of having a fully realized, living story, is secondary to the greater intention to explore who we are, who our characters might be. That freedom reminds me of why I like to write in the first place.
I write.
I doodle.
I'm at work on my first book, a collection of linked short stories that follows a community of expatriates living on the southern coast of Spain.
I care about stuff. Like curing type 1 diabetes. And marriage equality. And rights for immigrants. And public radio. And espanol. And Frank O'Hara and Jennifer Egan and Federico Garcia Lorca and Tony Kushner. You know, cool stuff.
I make postcards that are also stories.
Sometimes I read stories and poems out loud.
Sometimes I go to conferences.
You can find my short stories, essays, poems and flash fictio in a variety of places in print and online. If you Google really hard, you might find the two short radio pieces I produced on a badass NPR affiliate in San Francisco.
This is where you can go to find out who I am.