Back in June, my story “Keeping” was selected by the editors at The Missouri Review for the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. In this video, I read from the story and respond to questions from the contest editor, Bailey Boyd.
Blog
More than Warming: Writing the Anthropocene
ResearchThis past year I’ve been writing and revising stories about the human impacts of our ongoing ecological crisis: a petroleum geologist coming to grips with his culpability for climate change and man-made earthquakes, an environmental lawyer searching for the source of an invasive plant species, a beekeeper facing colony collapse. I like to think I’m […]
Steve Almond and the Allure of the Unlikeable
Craft, Reading, Steve AlmondAbout once a year, I take a fiction writing workshop through Harvard University’s Extension School. This fall, I observed something I hadn’t seen in previous years: many of the writers in the class seemed not to identify much with the flawed characters we encountered in stories by writers like Junot Diaz, Mary Gaitskill, and T. […]
Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award
Contests, JournalsI was excited to learn today that my story “All at Sea” has been chosen by Glimmer Train as a finalist for its Short Story Award for New Writers (September/October 2017). The story draws on the many conversations I had with my friend Abi about what it was like to seek romantic fulfillment as a woman living […]
Sky-dancers and Second Drafts
Charles Baxter, Denis Johnson, Reading, Research, Russell BanksToday I’m working on a second draft of a story about a librarian who catalogs the lives of Tibetan saints and spends his off-work hours at a dive bar. At the bar he meets a woman he initially finds repulsive, but then warms to. That part of the story was partly inspired by a classic […]