Welcome 2021

Well, 2020 is finally over. A long and relentless year, marked by social isolation, unrelenting political unrest, and worst of all: the loss of more than 340,000 American lives to the Coronavirus. The number is so big that it is almost impossible to fathom—it’s about six times the population of my hometown, gone.

When I need comfort, when I need consolation, when I need hope, I always turn to words. Poems by Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Naomi Shihab Nye. Novels that provide escape yet challenge me to think. Podcasts and radio interviews and white noise.

And yet: 2020 brought me a beautiful, healthy son, cheeks apple-red, smile big and full of wonder. 2020 brought us the first Black, southeast Asian woman vice president. 2020 brought us long days stuck with our “pod,” the people with whom we have quarantined, our worlds both small and intimate. 2020 forced a laser focus on our immediate environs, on the food we eat, the projects we can create when stuck inside for weeks, months at a time.

I find myself at a crossroads in my professional life as a writer. I want more than anything to tell meaningful stories of meaningful people. I want my words to create meaning. Inspire action. Over the past four years I’ve been lucky enough to interview Spartans whose stories have moved and compelled me. I plan to continue doing so, but it is hard not being on campus. Here are a few recent stories I’m proud to share:


My goal this year is to focus on gratitude. To not take any of this for granted: our air, our water, our limbs, our songs, our dinners together, every day that dawns bright and new. I hope to listen more and talk less, to value the power of my voice. I hope to write more fiction, to judge myself less, to continue devouring audiobooks, to pick up the pace on my sauntering runs. But more than anything: I hope to hope.

Blog Hop: On Writing

My friend Ben Black invited me to participate in a blog hop--a series of writers answering questions about their writing. Ben writes really fast and furious, compressed and delicious short fiction. Ben’s work has appeared in Harpur Palate, New American Writing, The Los Angeles Review, and Smokelong Quarterly. He recently completed his MFA at San Francisco State University, where he also teaches. His stories have been finalists for the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Contest and the Calvino Award.

I met Ben in a graduate creative writing course at SF State in 2009--and then again in 2012 when I moved to San Jose, walked into my first-ever Trials Trivia night, and there Ben was, sitting at the back of the bar. What follows are my answers to his questions, and the bios for 3 more writers whose work and aesthetics I admire. Thanks, Ben, for passing the blog-hop baton.

What am I working on?

I’m currently at work on my first novel, which I’m writing as a series of linked stories set in southern Spain. Technically this project started in my second year of grad school at UC Davis, but in truth these stories started in 2006, when I moved to the Costa del Sol to work as an Auxiliar de Conversacion at a Spanish elementary school. A few of these stories have been published--most recently, “The Africans” was published by West Branch Wired in January 2014. The remaining four or five are still lying dormant in my brain. I have yet to crack them open.

I also write very very short fiction in the form of 100-word stories. A number of these I have illustrated as postcards.

I also co-founded and co-curate a collaborative literary arts series in San Jose called Play On Words. This volunteer effort, which I run with Nicole Hughes and Melinda Marks, has really fed my literary brain while working in the corporate world. As a professional marketer I feel it my duty to mention that our next show is this Thursday, May 22, at the Blackbird Tavern. I’m a strong believer in group creativity and fostering a real sense of artistic community. It’s hydrating for your brain.

How is my work different than others in its genre?

I don't really ascribe to a genre. I suppose I aspire to be read as contemporary realistic fiction, whatever that means on a given day, though I don’t care that much about genre. I’m much more obsessed with language, character, place, and action. I’m fascinated by fictional topography. What characters look like when they’re fully realized and put in opposition to one another. I’m very interested in language on a literal and spatial level. I like learning how we acquire vocabulary, and how we keep it authentic. The stories I’m currently writing grapple with that weird gap in language acquisition--how sometimes we just don’t have the words for something, on a very basic level, and so we have no choice but to make decisions with our bodies.

My favorite writers make this look effortless, and they do it in their own unique and distinctive voice. I discovered Lydia Davis’ collected stories in grad school and they cracked me right open. Aimee Hempel, Danzy Senna, Jennifer Egan, Junot Diaz, Horacio Quiroga, Toni Morrison, Charles Baxter. These writers don’t ease you in; they sit you down and say, where on earth have you been?

How does my writing process work?

It changes, but typically I am the kind of writer who writes several drafts. Writing is such a series of contradictions for me. I love writing exposition but I hate reading it--so often I’ll write a very long first draft, wait a few weeks, then return to it and cut it in half. I once saw Dorothy Allison speak about character, and she said that when she is writing a new character, she writes a five-page monologue in that person’s voice, most of which she never keeps. The exercise is about knowing who this person is, and the kinds of words she uses. That piece of advice has stayed with me.

I also rely on critical feedback. I have a few friends from grad school whose opinion I hold very dear, and who are familiar with my goals and questions, and we try to swap work when we can. I also love generative writing workshops. I took a few taught by my friend Matthew Clark Davison (shoutout Matthew) that were such a breath of fresh air. It is a real treat to be in a room full of writers and to get their feedback.

Revision is key. If you give a draft long enough to breathe, and then return to it, revision can be a truly rewarding, fun exercise.

Why do I write what I do?

Because I have to. It’s an impulse that is never quenched, which makes it both unbearable and ecstatic.

Next week three writers I love will be carrying the Blog Hop torch:

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Rachel Van Blankenship is a poet/photographer/designer raised in Northern California. She studied Photojournalism and Creative Writing at The University of Montana, Missoula and has recently relocated to Phoenix, Arizona to daylight as a Features Designer. Her nomadic tendencies have taken her to Oklahoma, Texas and Pennsylvania. "Menacing Hedge," "Gather Kindling," "Cease, Cows" and "JMWW" have published her poems and she placed 4th in the international "Flash Mob 2013" competition. She is still working on her first poetry chapbook and manuscript. (She knows she's slow). Visit her website and blog at www.rachelvb.com.

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Marta Moreno and her partner, photographer Lorenzo Hernandez, have been editing COLLAGE magazine, an independent multilingual online publication, since 2008. She has also been the editor and coordinator of “Through the Eyes of Love”, a collaborative project that aimed to bring to the ESL classroom engaging literacy activities for the students. The result of this project was a workbook containing activities that serve as a supplement for a book of short stories written by Irish writer Siobhan Galvin. After spending several years teaching EFL in different Official Schools of Languages in Spain, Marta decided to move to London to work for the European Reminiscence Network, an organization that aims to promote best practice in reminiscence work, especially with people with dementia and their carers, and to share experience across national frontiers. She is also digitising the contents of Pam Schweitzer’s Reminiscence Theatre Archive at the University of Greenwich. Marta’s blog, “Remembering in London” reflects this experience together with her very personal view of a city that constantly stimulates creativity. A key element in this blog is Lorenzo’s exceptional photography.

Writer, performer, Zen-ster, Gray Performs is on a mission to love Who We Are (in all of its incarnations) with such wild abandon that she inspires in you the courage and enthusiasm to do the same. She was once described by a producer as, "not an ordinary human being… She has the spunk of Punky Brewster, the mind of General Patton, and the awkward neuroticism of Woody Allen. She is lively, honest–full of piss and vinegar." Read Gray’s blog at www.notkeepingscore.com.

On wisdom and fiction

"....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.


An Ode to Pens

My love of writing is in part due to my love for pens. In junior high I was obsessed with a blue Bic pen whose ink I swore had magical qualities. I loved the way the pen's point dug into the surface of the paper; it seemed proof that writing was work, that by putting one letter in front of another, I had made an impact. Pencils were important too, because nothing felt quite so good as pressing my full weight into the lead, implying an emphasis that made bold and italics pale in comparison. Now that I spend most of my professional life perched at the edge of a keyboard, sometimes I’m surprised what can happen when I pick up a pen or pencil.

Ryan and I have an odd collection of pens hidden in various places around our apartment. My favorites are accidental mementos of places we’ve been together--the triangular green pen from Celadon, the restaurant where we dined after we got engaged, or the pens emblazoned with the logos of national parks where we’ve camped. There are fine-point pens for drawing and thick black pens for labeling and dozens of ball-point pens for writing checks, keeping records, and (my favorite) handmade recipe books. The best ones don’t just tell their own stories--they beg for you to write yours down. If I owned my own business, I’d market guerrilla-style, sneaking pens like these with secret messages on them into stores and restaurants.

Is it odd to praise pens in a digital medium? Perhaps. But consider for a moment what happens when you hold a pen. Its very architecture demands that you do something. When you write with a pen or pencil, there is no blinking cursor, just the infinity of blank space. There’s less pressure to stay in line. An implied permission to break the rules. You could take meeting minutes, outline a project proposal, draft a new campaign idea, or you could draw Shakespeare in dog form, or a map of all the countries you’d like to visit. A good pen is an invitation to create. And I’m always up for that.