Crafting Very Short Fiction
A good friend of mine, Tamar Levi, interviewed me about writing short fiction. When we had this discussion a 700 word short story of mine had just won a short fiction competition. Then, last week a ten...
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The Paris Review's Flash Fiction Contest
The Paris Review had a flash fiction contest. They challenged writers to compose 300 words, narrating this picture, in the style of a well known author. I, of course, chose Hemingway. Then they picked...
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I Won Literary Death Match, London!
The first round of LDM is competitive literature on stage, the second round is usually some kind of party game that they pretend is about literature--but is actually about charades, or dancing, or...
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Writing in Tunisia
It was the last summer before the Tunisian revolution and the first summer after I got married - and I was traveling across Tunisia next to a Jesuit priest. The priest and I had become good friends...
View ArticleThe Not Walrus
Every time I tell this story I say it was a walrus and my husband interrupts and says it wasn’t a walrus, because there are no walruses in Wales. He says this fact in a voice that implies that everyone...
View ArticleThe House-Anthropologist
I travel for work. Actually, my husband travels for work and sometimes I go with him — one of the main reasons we got married was because we like spending time together. The other reasons are more...
View ArticleThe right word.
I’ve been searching for one word to describe the texture of light that comes through antique windows. You know, the kinds of windows that look like a tile of clear, cold river. I searched through...
View ArticleSubmission Fees
I send out a lot of work. Mostly short stories. Or short short stories. I submit to contests, literary journals, the kinds of things where there is a pot of cash and the tantalizing promise that I...
View ArticleGood Bad Women: Irene Adler
I’ve been thinking a lot about Irene Adler, you know, “the woman” from Sherlock Holmes. You see, I’ve been looking for good bad women in short stories. Murderers, criminals, drug dealers and scoundrels...
View ArticleWomen in Refrigerators
Fifteen of us were watching Colin Farrell talking fast and sweet at a woman who communicated almost entirely by lowering her head, raising her eyes, and simpering. This was a few months ago and I was...
View ArticleViolence Against Women in Fiction
Four of us writers were critiquing each other’s novellas which all happened to have female protagonists. Three of the protagonists were victims of sexual assault, which then caused these characters to...
View ArticleErotic Parodies of Women
A writer and I were on the sunny plaza outside the Nobel Museum in central Stockholm and she was telling me about an erotic parody project she’d collaborated on. The project was called Fifty Shelves of...
View ArticleGood Bad Women: Goldilocks
We were discussing the character of teenage girl in a fantasy novel. “I like that the girl is not what you expect,” said one writer, “You expect girls to be sweet and innocent, but she’s strong and...
View ArticleGood Bad Women: The Sea Witch
A band, made up of eight young Swedes playing steel drums, had set up just outside the bookshop where I work. I didn’t step out of the shop to watch them until, almost without realizing it, I was...
View ArticleSome Call it Dick Lit
Some call it Dick Lit, others call it Lad Lit, but many male authors reject both of these genre categories as being reductionist, inaccurate, and for unfairly lumping disparate novels into a single...
View ArticleReading in a Brown Body
During my first week of college, at the University of Iowa, several of us students were playing cards in my dorm room, when, unrelated to the game or to the conversation, one of the other freshmen...
View ArticleChicanas in Literature
First, let’s you and me get in my time machine. . . . Suddenly we are in a world in which the Mexican-American border is being nationally debated, the Mexican-American people are being treated as...
View ArticleAn Unconventional Nobel Laureate
Have you ever found yourself looking at the heteronormative sausage-fest that is the Nobel Prize lineup and said, “I wonder if the hoity-toity Swedish Academy will ever give the Literature Nobel to a...
View ArticleFirst Women in American Literature
If you’re anything like me (and lucky for you if you’re not) then you’ve spent most of the last week wallowing your way from one shot glass to another and brushing your teeth with the cuff of your old...
View ArticleWriting Fiction from Life
Some writers that I know are at times so unsure of whether a story is theirs to tell that they will shelve a project for years at a time, waiting for some kind of permission to be granted, or for...
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