Curiosity & Ritual newsletter gets a shoutout in Electric Literature

Many thanks to Nancy Reddy for including my Substack newsletter, Curiosity & Ritual, in this roundup of “8 Newsletters to Spark Your Creativity.”

For the full article, including additional newsletter recs, click here.

To subscribe to Curiosity & Ritual, click here.

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If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay—or you’re looking for accountability and feedback while drafting your book-length manuscript—I’d love to work with you. Fill out my contact form here.

Announcing Book Club Workshop!

I’m teaching a class, you guys

(cross-posted from my Substack)

One curiosity I’ve had since childhood is what it’s like to live another life, and the ritual that lets me do it is reading. I used to get a little carried away. (Apparently you’re not supposed to read novels at the dinner table, or during math.)

Fast-forward to my adulthood and reading still occupies most of my time. I’ve read thousands of published books by this point. Between client projects and my acquiring editor days, I’ve also read hundreds of not-yet-published books.

So many unpublished novel manuscripts (that have beautiful prose, interesting settings, and charming characters) feel like they’re missing some subtle, subterranean wiring. Readers can watch a character experience a big emotion but not necessarily feel invested or emotionally impacted ourselves—especially if we haven’t been primed to hope for or dread any specific actions or outcomes.

Plot points are satisfying when (forgive me)…they don’t just fall out of a coconut tree. When they exist in the context of all in which they live and what came before them.

I’m saying you can get tricky and go back and reverse-engineer that context.

You know who’s great at doing that? Poets! For poets, the structure of a work (how it is told) is essential to the meaning of the work. So when poets write novels, those novels tend to be cool as hell. They satisfy reader cravings for structure but often in unusual ways.

I could teach a class on this, I thought. Participants could read two different novels as part of a wider study on structure—and, through that study, create outlines for their own novels. A book club, but not a regular book club. A workshop, but not a regular workshop.

This idea has been turning over in my mind for months now. I made a syllabus but tucked it aside for a rainy day, then took

Esmé Weijun Wang’s excellent workshop on online workshops (more of her classes here) and decided that the time is now. (Thank you, Esmé!)

Book Club Workshop is born!

This first iteration is focused on novels by poets, specifically Monarch by Candice Wuehle (which I had the pleasure of acquiring and editing for Soft Skull Press) and Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (which I had the pleasure of reading and enjoying). We’ll also talk about some poems, John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, and Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode.

Class meets on Zoom and starts August 13th. Candice and Melissa will join as special guests for the final class on October 22nd! (You could have a full outline in time for NaNoWriMo.)

~ * ~ Full deets here. * ~ *

I’d really appreciate help spreading the word if you can!

Interview with Brad Neely at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine

A real dream come true to chat with Brad Neely about his funny and philosophical new book, You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant, hero narratives, cults, and meat-bodies. Many thanks to Brad, and to X-R-A-Y for hosting the interview! For the whole shebang, click here.

2023 brought me my first BOOK DEAL

Hey.

It’s me.

We made it to the end of the year, pals.

Last year was the first time I noticed that the coldest winter weather doesn’t coincide with the solstice, the shortest day (at least in the northern hemisphere). There are weeks of little light, and then weeks of bitter cold. Same for summer: the solstice brings the longest day and the most light, but I don’t feel the hottest heat until the following months. Maybe the weather is different where you live, but it was true for me again this year and I found something beautiful in that: how it looks doesn’t have to match how it feels. (And how it feels doesn’t have to match how it looks.)

As a writer, I tend to have long, slow seasons of output that no one sees. Eventually, months or years later—when I’m further away from the self who made the work—it (that self and that work) finally meets other people through publication.

The oldest poems in my forthcoming poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, will be eight years old by the time the book is out. It’s a collection I wrote years ago, burned to the ground (excepting those few old poems), and rewrote hoping to match the kind of winking melodrama of the title. It’s absurd and serious, like a life.

Here’s the official announcement screenshot, with a collage-border embellishment of my making. I’ve been in these before as an editor, but never for *~*~my own book, as the author*~*~

By the time I was given the okay to share the good news on social media, I had already known for several months that the book would eventually exist in the world. I’d had my private peak-experience solstice-y feelings about it before I could share the news with others. Maybe that’s the way. We are asked to hold and process so much on any given day—often so much pain and horror, so much to fight against and live alongside and through. I got to hold this joy and let it gestate a while, and now I’m glad to share it with you to pick up and set down again, or file away in your mind for a better time.

Because December is a month for accounting, beyond the book announcement, here’s What Else I Got to Share in 2023:

• The Zürich-based art gallery Sgomento Zurigo commissioned a poem from me for their show, “Singalong,” featuring artworks by Ken Kagami and Anders Dickson. In addition to using the poem in the exhibition’s pamphlet, they hung it in the gallery!

• My press-mate Michael Chang invited me to read a few poems at the launch for their poetry collection, Synthetic Jungle. Books Are Magic recorded the reading.

• The Millions published my review/essay on Lucy Ives’s excellent novel Life Is Everywhere, Cyrano, Sarah Bernhardt, alter egos, and reality vs. “reality.”

• Taylor Byas’s brilliant debut full-length collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, which I had the pleasure of editing, was published in August and has already won the Maya Angelou Book Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award for Poetry!!

• With Summer Farah, I co-edited Best Debut Short Stories 2023: The PEN America Dau Prize and wrote an intro about art as “content,” the writers’ strike, AI art as “a manifestation of an authoritarian fantasy: an ‘artist’ that can’t say no, and works for free,” and how these winning stories are the result of each writer’s choices and refusals. This year’s prizewinners were selected by judges Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz. The winning writers are Dailihana E. Alfonseca, Ren Arcamone, Sonia Feldman, Stephenjohn Holgate, Faire Holliday, Mengyin Lin, Verity McKay, Clara Mundy, Jo Saleska, Annabelle Ulaka, Lisa Wartenberg Vélez, and Patrick J. Zhou. You can read interviews with the winners here.

• My essay on John Darnielle’s Devil House, homes with dirt rooms at their secret centers, and the nightmarescape of California real estate was published in Vol. 1 of the print edition of word west revue.

• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s daring, touching, experimental memoir, Touching the Art, which I also had the pleasure of editing, was published in November. In a Between the Covers conversation with Mattilda, David Naimon describes the book in a way I love, as “speculative nonfiction,” a “beautiful gesture against, I think, the inevitability of history.”

• After many years of submitting work there (by postal mail!!), I was really honored to publish a poem in ZYZZYVA. “Baby Island” appears in their Fall Issue, No. 126.

• In honor of the Gemini Full Moon (and because I’m a Gemini Rising 😈 ), my tarot teacher Jeff Hinshaw invited me as a guest on their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. Jeff did deep reads of a few of my poems and explained how they relate to my astro chart, which was pretty sick.

• I’m slowly making paintings that correspond with my poems, with excerpts of the text pasted on, zine-style. I partnered with a local print shop that will print and ship any ordered through my website.

• And I read and edited over a million words this year in client projects—about 1.36 million across developmental edits and editorial assessments for novels, memoirs, story collections; copyedits, cold reads, and proofreads of novels and narrative nonfiction; book proposals; and misc. excerpts, essays, and stories.

I hope December is treating you as well as it can, and that you can linger for a while in this between-time of the end of the year. Wishing you catnaps (in lieu of hibernation) and hearty foods. Now that the shortest day has passed, each day offers a little more light.

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If you enjoyed this newsletter and want more, sign up for my Substack here.

If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay, I’d love to work with you. You can fill out my contact form here.

2022 publications, an end-of-year roundup

Watching the end-of-year lists roll in from authors I admire, on the one hand, I feel like I didn’t publish much this year: a few poems, a book review. But it was gratifying to see so many books I had a hand in finally enter the world as beautiful, tangible objects meeting a brand new audience of readers. It’s also been a year of beginnings. I launched a newsletter mid-year, and started a business. I think it’s easy to feel like things we can make happen for ourselves “don’t count” or matter less, but lately I’ve been thinking of lighthouses, how they send out a glow that helps people orient themselves and find the glow’s source.

I’m grateful to the online journals that published my work this year, and to the amazing authors whose work I had the pleasure of editing, and/or who I had the honor of supporting in-house at Soft Skull and Catapult.

High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez, published 1/11/22. This hilarious, beautiful memoir on fighting machismo and finding joy in queer spaces was reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lambda Literary, and On the Seawall, with other press at Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, TODAY, NBC News, the Los Angeles Times, and Oprah Daily,. And it’s sweeping the end-of-the-year best-of lists at Goodreads, HipLatina, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere.

I got to talk about High-Risk Homosexual at Publishers Weekly on 1/28/22, celebrating Edgar and their book being selected as an American Bookseller’s Association “Indies Introduce” title.

Path of Totality by Niina Pollari, published 2/8/22. This poetry collection, on the sudden and devastating loss of a child, is incredible. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said “Pollari writes with straightforward, heartbreaking clarity. These poems are unflinching and powerful.” The New York Times selected Path of Totality as a best poetry book of the year.

MONARCH by Candice Wuehle, published 3/29/22. This novel, at the intersection of trauma psychology, Y2K aesthetic, and occult academia, received rave reviews at NPR (and was named an NPR best book of the year), ZYZZYVA, Chicago Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal, with other press at NYLON, CrimeReads, Cleveland Review of Books, Luna Luna Mag, and Spin. MONARCH is also a contender in the 2023 Tournament of Books!

The Red Zone by Chloe Caldwell, published 4/19/22. This candid, funny, searingly honest memoir on PMDD was well received in reviews at the Washington Post, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Full Stop, with other press at AutoStraddle, the Cut, Electric Literature, BBC, and Thinx, and more.

Two of my poems— “APPLICANT MUST HAVE” and “LOCAL BEAST, KIND OF A LITTLE BITCH, ACTUALLY” were published at HAD on 5/1/22.

I launched this newsletter, Curiosity & Ritual newsletter, on the summer solstice, 6/21/22 :)

Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk, published 7/19/22. This essay collection on plants, fiction, journalism, boundary-blurring, and the anthropocene was reviewed (and starred!) at Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, The Nation, and The Atlantic, with other press at The Paris Review, n+1, LitHub, CRAFT, The Creative Independent, and BOMB.

Normal Distance by Elisa Gabbert, published 9/13/22. This poetry collection on paradoxes and the tragicomedy of needing always to contend with time was reviewed at Publishers Weekly, Ploughshares, and Poetry Foundation, with other press at New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, LitHub, Chicago Review of Books, and The Slowdown with Ada Limón.

Best Debut Short Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize, edited by Yuka Igarashi and me, with winning stories selected by judges Sabrina Orah Mark, Emily Nemens, and Deesha Philyaw, published 9/20/22. Catapult published a roundtable interview with the judges and PEN America interviewed all twelve winning writers. Other press at Debutiful, Book Riot, and LitHub. An excerpt of the book—Yuka’s & my co-written intro—ran at Hobart.

My poem, “I Could Signal Dominance in Email Correspondence as Trained But the Concept Is Offensive and I’m Baby” was published at Hobart on 9/27/22, with many thanks to guest editor Taylor Byas.

After I dispatched my 9/21 newsletter, my beautiful friend Jeff Hinshaw invited me to record myself reading it for their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. The episode aired on 9/25/22.

The Tiger and the Cage by Emma Bolden, published 10/18/22. This softly fierce memoir on endometriosis and the misogyny of modern medicine received great reviews at Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and LitHub, with other press at Shondaland, Motherly, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Catapult, Electric Literature, Hazlitt, and Salon.

Annnd after ten years of freelance editing around whatever else I was doing, I officially launched my manuscript-consultation business as an LLC on 10/31/22, a nice Halloween birthday.

At the tail end of 2022, on 12/27, The Rumpus published my review of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s novel Disorientation, one of the best books I read all year.

See you all in 2023!