On The Virtues of Slow Writing, at The Millions

I wrote about writing that takes time to as a way to investigate my own slow pace, and to learn from other writers how to cultivate the patience that’s necessary to get through. I shouldn’t have been surprised when the essay took far longer than I expected. Pages had to be thrown out, ideas ditched, examples streamlined, and in that sense, the essay was not so different than the projects I’d undertaken to examine. So when I learned the essay would be published by the wonderful book site, The Millions, that made the experience that much more rewarding In the process of writing the piece, there were abundant resources available—Louise DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity, for one, along with testimonials from writers I reached out to who provided wonderful insights on how they manage time when their books go into overtime. You can read “The Virtues of Slow Writing” here.

Art: David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Two Turtles (1690)

See you in Kansas City at AWP

If you’re headed to AWP in Kansas City next week, put the museum on your dance card! We’ll be at Nighthawk for a casual meetup with museum staff, friends, and contributors. Nighthawk is located in the Hotel Kansas City, one block from the Kansas City Convention Center at Baltimore & W. 13th St.

Join us!

Where: Nighthawk Bar at Hotel Kansas City
1228 Baltimore Avenue (at W. 13th St), Kansas City, MO 64105

When: Thursday, Feb. 8, after the keynote, 9:45 pm

Who: museum staff, friends, and contributors

You can also find me at the bookfair staffing Booth T1422 for WTAW Press, and via Connections in the AWP24 app. See you there!

A Year in Reading

My aim this year was to read 100 books, while my 2023 total of print, audio, and ebooks comes to 42, my goal may have been too ambitious—but there’s always 2024. Here’s this year’s breakdown: 19 novels, 7 memoirs, 4 short story collections, 4 poetry collections, 3 essay collections, 3 novellas, and 2 chapbooks. Some highlights:

Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of Istanbul is a deep dive into a place over time—the city where Pamuk was born, and still lives, and knows intimately. The memoir looks at the city’s history, geography, and collective psychology in chapters on Istanbul’s artists, poets, and writers (along with terrific photos), alongside the intersection of person and place that has driven Pamuk’s fiction and nonfiction. It’s also a memoir of becoming a writer, one raised in privilege, and yet there doesn’t seem a corner of the city in which Parmk doesn’t see something of himself. • If you’re looking for a sharp, fresh read—don’t miss Open Throat, by Henry Hoke—a novella that will leave you seeing the LA hills, and mountain lions, in a new way; and Sidik Fonfana’s terrific collection, Stories from the Tenants Downstairs. •  Another story collection not to be missed, Andrew Porter’s The Disappeared, which looks at youth with thoughtful nostalgia, and in settings that are meticulously realized. Keith Pilapil Leismester’s novella, Mississippi River Museum mines place with elegiac tone and beautifully calibrated detail. For the sheer beauty and power of language and image, there’s none better than Hala Alyan’s poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year and Zaina Hashem Beck’s O. • My lighter reads this year included Alan Bennett’s classic novella, The Uncommon Reader, a fantasy of Queen Elizabeth and a bookmobile, and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, a fairy tale of LA seventies rock and roll. • Among the outstanding audiobooks I listened to this year was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, read incandescently by Meryl Streep, and Elizabeth McCracken narrates her novel/memoir, The Hero of This Book—I can’t imagine the book without her wonderfully wry tone. Ditto for Harry Windsor’s Spare, whose narration was both elevated in tone (given his British elocution), yet beautifully down to earth. • In books on writing craft, Edith DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing was a revelation—not everyone it seems writes a book in a year; and Colm Toibin’s essay collection, A Guest at the Feast, makes one feel precisely that way. I grew up in Los Angeles—east of the 101—and loved Matthew Specktor’s essays on LA, Always Crashing in the Same Car, on his youth there, and the writers, filmmakers, and highly particular mix of weather, geography, and culture. • John MaGahern’s memoir, All Will Be Well, like the Irish writer’s fiction, is filled with moving detail of character and place; as was Genanne Walsh’s chapbook memoir, Eggs in Purgatory, which looks at caring for an ill parent in prose that illuminates the empathy and complexity of the father-daughter bond; and Stanley Tucci’s memoir, Taste, on a life of food and cooking is not only entertaining and instructional, but ultimately arrives at a much deeper place. I’d love to know what your standout reads were for 2023!

My December newsletter is live

My last newsletter of 2023 is live with thoughts on deep dives and the unexpected connections that come with revision., along with news on writing that’s hitting the airwaves in 2024, and the year in cultural consumption. You can read here, and don’t forget to subscribe—it’s free!

Pictured: (clockwise from left) My paternal grandmother, Fausya Zemberekci, photographed at home in Beyoğlu (then Pera), Istanbul, about 1919; (right) The Grand Rue de Pera (now Istiklal Street), Beyoğlu, 26 July 1912; film still from “Past Lives,” dir. Celine Song (2023).

Forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review!

A story from my novel-in-progress recently found a home at the terrific Alaska Quarterly Review, and I couldn’t be happier. “Eraser” is told from the point of view of six-year-old Gillian, and features an earthquake, shoplifting, lies of omission, and father-daughter prevarication against the backdrop of southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. Michael Dirda, of The New York Review of Books, calls AQR “one of our best, and most imaginative, literary magazines.” Watch this space for the publication date!