New Fiction in Hobart

I'm thrilled that Hobart published my short story "M80" today in honor of Independence Day! This is a story about a guy with nine fingers that comes back for more on July 4th. I love Hobart and I'm so honored they published this story on my favorite holiday. Big thanks to founding editor and fellow writer Aaron Burch for publishing this story. You can read it here. As always, thanks for reading!

Writing Out of the Wilderness - Speaking to the Writers' Guild of Texas

I was invited to speak to the Writers' Guild of Texas at the Richardson Public Library next Monday night (5/18) at 7:00pm. My talk is titled Writing out of the Wilderness: How to Survive Rejection and Forge a Path to Publication. My talk should last about an hour and is free and open to the public. In a John Steinbeck letter from 1953, republished in The New York Times, he wrote:

The process of acceptance-rejection is not unlike the lone dance of the fiddler crab. A man writes a book - why? Because he wants to...Now the purpose of a book I suppose is to amuse, interest, instruct but its warmer purpose is just to associate with the reader. You use symbols he can understand so that the two of you can be together. The circle is not closed until the trinity is present - the writer, the book, and the reader.

I'll be talking about how we as writers can close that circle: you, your book, and your reader. And you can find more information about my talk at local NPR-Affiliate KERA's Art&Seek Website, which I'm thrilled is promoting the event. So if you’re in the Dallas area next Monday night and hankering for a talk about writing, I’d love to see you!

Heading to UC-Irvine

Three years flies by. We're packing up and getting ready to move out of Iowa City, where we have lived for the last three years. My wife, artist Danielle Huey Kimzey, just graduated from the MFA painting program at the University of Iowa and it really does feel like just yesterday that we were unpacking boxes and trying to make friends.

And now we're off to Irvine, CA. I was accepted into the MFA fiction program at UC-Irvine and I couldn't be happier. We couldn't be happier. At least three years of sunny southern California are stretched out before us and while we will miss Iowa City like crazy, we'll be happy to sell our snow shovel in a garage sale this month.

UC-Irvine is awesome. I'll be an Anteater. I'll get to study with Ron Carlson and Michelle Latiolais and I feel so lucky that they offered me a spot. The program also counts some of my favorite fiction writers as alumni: Michael Chabon, Joshua Ferris, Aimee Bender, Alice Sebold, David Benioff, Elise Blackwell, Richard Ford, Glen David Gold, and many more.

So if you ever need a place to crash in Orange County, let us know. We'll have a pull-out couch by then, which will actually be quite nice with a couple of Asprin in the morning.

Reading December 4th

I'll be reading at the Iowa Writers' Workshop Anthology on Friday, December 4th. I go on at 8pm and I'll have 3-5 minutes to share my work (the location rotates for each Anthology, so that is TBD). This will be the second time I've gotten to do a reading (the first was at the Vermont Studio Center) and I'm quite excited. If you are in Iowa City and are free that night I hope to see you there!

George Saunders

I look forward to a George Saunders story the way a breast-feeding child nips at the air, hungry for mama’s milk. I just finished “Victory Lap” in the latest New Yorker. My new favorite. Reading Saunders gives me the same feeling each time: guess I can't write this story, since he just did. But a story like "Victory Lap" makes me want to sit at the keyboard and write, and that is just as good.