The return of our AWP panel—High Style and Misdemeanors comes to 2021’s virtual conference

It’s been a long road for our panel, but High Style and Misdemeanors: The Virtues and Vices of Elevated Prose, which we’d first planned to present last year in San Antonio, will broadcast March 5 as part of AWP’s 2021 virtual conference. If you’re going, please join me, Anita Felicelli, Olga Zilberbourg, Lillian Howan, and Aatif Rashid for our conversation on elevated prose—when we ask the question, “Can writers whose work concerns immigration and displacement embrace a stylistic approach that has historically been disengaged and apolitical?” We’ll look at how high style has progressed to include contemporary writers of fiction, and as a result, taken on broader and more varied meanings, and the wonderful panel will discuss high style in their own work and read excerpts.

We’re providing an outline that includes nearly the full text of our panel, available for download in our AWP chat space which opens on March 3.

I’ve turned comments on, so if you have questions, just drop them here.

New year, new newsletter

Issue one of my long-in-the-making newsletter is officially out. In 2021, I’ll be sending quarterly dispatches on reading, writing, and the road to book publication. I’ll also include thoughts on writing craft, and flash interviews with writers—talking about literary fiction, writing life, and their new books. I’ll be using Mailchimp, so in the world of proliferating newsletters, it’s easy to unsubscribe anytime. To sign up, just head to the Subscribe block at the bottom of any page here. And to read issue one, you can go here.

This is one of my favorite photos of myself—walking in the garden at Henry James’ Lamb House, in Rye, Sussex.

“A Brief History of the Colloquial Title” at The Millions

This essay, published in 2014, is one of my favorites, so I was delighted to see The Millions recently re-upped it on Twitter. The writing arose from a fascination of what seemed a vernacular drift in titles of novels and story collections, so it was a pleasure to dive in and investigate how this direction came about and the extent of its variations.

What I’ve come to think of as the colloquial title rejects literary tone for the purely voice-driven. Colloquial titles can be wordy, even prolix, and often make use of a purposefully curious yet catchy syntax. The colloquial title is based in common parlance, but also draws on aphorism, the stock phrase, and familiar expressions. For a more elevated voice-driven title, look to the literary/biblical allusion, the colloquial title’s highborn cousin. With exemplars like As I Lay Dying and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the allusion-based title has undisputed gravitas, and frankly, when it comes to authoritative tone, is hard to beat. Think of The Violent Bear It Away and A River Runs Through It.

Read the entire essay here.

The 2018 O. Henry Prize Stories in a new Persian transation

Via The Tehran Times, the 2018 edition of The O. Henry Prize Stories is now available in a new translation by Ali Famian, and has just been released in Iran. The edition is titled for one of the stories, “Lucky Dragon,” by Viet Dinh, and my story, “An Amount of Discretion,” which first appeared in The Southern Review, is included. The 2018 anthology, edited by Laura Furman, features stories by Jo Ann Beard, Jo Lloyd, Jamil Jan Kochai, Brad Felver, Thomas Bolt, and more. Read the story here.

And thanks to Jo Lloyd for this great link on bookstores in Tehran!

My latest column at Invisible History.

“Searching for Family History in My Grandmother’s Embroidery,” runs today in my column at Catapult Magazine. My grandmother, Fausya Zemberekci Alwan, lived a life bound by family and cultural expectations, and to many her life might have appeared small from the outside—but her life was extraordinary. Growing up, I was always fascinated by her embroidery, so I’m grateful to be able to share this story of the new pieces we recently discovered. It’s those latest pieces that seem to tell a deeper, more personal story.

And if you are one of the many sheltered in place today in the SF Bay Area (as I and my family are), or those around the world working from home or taking classes from home, be safe, take care, and take care of each other.

We'll miss #AWP20 in San Antonio

In a turn that no one expected, our panel for High Style and MIsdemeanors, scheduled for this Thursday, March 5, at #AWP20, is cancelled. The decision was a difficult one, but the right one for us. For those headed to the conference, I hope you have a fun, enriching, and healthy visit to a great city. It would have been lovely to go to San Antonio, but for now, my panel colleagues and I are looking forward to #AWP21, where we hope to bring the discussion to the conference in Kansas City next year.

AWP Panel handouts available for download now!

If you’re headed to AWP in San Antonio , come to our panel on high style! Thursday, March 5, 10:35 am, Room 211.

Get all the details, and download the panel outline and high style examples in contemporary fiction here. The panel has chosen some terrific examples that innovate upon the traditional apolitical stance, and the discussion promises to be a fascinating one—hope to see you there!

New post for my column at Catapult

The second installment of my column “Invisible History,” at Catapult looks at my father—his bicultural heritage as an American born son of Arab immigrant parents and the conflicts he faced living between cultures. I’m so grateful to Catapult and to Nicole Chung for this opportunity! And especially thrilled I’m able to include family photographs and other images. For this latest column, “Why My Father Could Not Embrace His Name,” the cover image is a watercolor my father painted, likely sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Tuesday, Feb. 11 is Pub Day for A MAP IS ONLY ONE STORY!

Happy pub day to A MAP IS ONLY ONE STORY, the first published anthology of writing from Catapult magazine! So grateful to editors Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary for including my essay in this beautiful collection: twenty writers sharing stories of migration, family, the search for home and belonging, and what it means to exist between languages and cultures.

Praise for A MAP IS ONLY ONE STORY:

“At Catapult, Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary have worked to publish voices from all over the world on the human geography that defies political borders and how immigration policy takes shape in the everyday lives of individuals. A Map Is Only One Story draws from that work, presenting pieces from 20 writers that weave reporting with personal stories of immigration and identity.”

—Corinne Segal, Literary Hub

The collection is now available in bookstores and libraries everywhere!

Hope to see you in San Antonio at AWP!

If you're headed to the 2020 AWP Conference & Bookfair in San Antonio, TX, join Anita Felicelli, Olga Zilberbourg, Lillian Howan, Aatif Rashid, and me, discussing "High Style and Misdemeanors: The Virtues and Vices of Elevated Prose," as we discuss the intersection of elevated prose and socially and politically engaged work. Thursday, March 5, 10:35 AM, Room 211, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level.