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Thoughts on the Writing Process: Optimal Conditions and Tips

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(Detail from Theo Ellsworth’s contribution to the expanded edition of my Wonderbook, out in July)

I just completed my ninth novel, the first volume in the Adventures of Jonathan Lambshead series, working title “I am Squishy” (that will change, I’m sure). I’m also working on the tenth novel of my career, Hummingbird Salamander. This doesn’t include a number of unfinished or crappy novels written in my teens—or hundreds of short stories.

If nothing else, being a novelist for decades gives you some hopefully useful ideas about process. I’m loathe to ever suggest that there is only one way to do something—it’s different for every writer. But I do think that examining someone else’s process can be of use for your own, even if it’s just to reject everything another writer does!

So, with that caveat, here’s what I’ve learned over time. If some of it seems basic, that’s important, too. Because at the end of the day, there is no magic solution, no short-cut, to writing something that hopefully will last. No matter how we search for one. I also believe strongly in letting the things about writing that should be organic remain organic, but also working in targeted ways on those things that can be improved mechanically.

(These ideas should work for writers who have a day job as well as full-time writers, as I do not stress needing to write every day. In fact, points 1 and 2 should offer relief for writers who beat themselves up about not writing as much as they want to. It’s important to be generous to yourself if you’re in circumstances where sustained writing is not possible, because pushing yourself to write in those circumstances may short-circuit your creativity.)

1—The amount of time you spend writing isn’t necessarily as important as the time spent thinking about what you are going to write.

I often feel it is easier to spoil a novel by beginning to write too soon than by beginning to write too late. Perhaps this is because I need to know certain things before I can even contemplate writing a novel.

For example, I need to know the main characters very well, the initial situation, and the ending (even if the ending changes by the time I write it). I also have to have some kind of ecstatic vision about a scene or character, some moment that transcends, and I have to have what I call charged images associated with the characters. These aren’t images that are symbolic in the Freudian sense (humbly, I submit that Freud just gets you to the same banal place, as a novelist, every time), but they are definitely more than just images. They have a kind of life to them, and exploring their meaning creates theme and subtext. For example, the biologist encountering the starfish in Annihilation or Rachel in Borne reaching out to pluck Borne from the fur of the giant bear. (Both of which also have their origin in transformed autobiographical moments, and thus an added layer of resonance.)

Once I know these things, it may still be six months to a year before I begin to write a novel. The process at that point is to just record every inspiration I have and relax into inhabiting the world of the novel. To not have a day go by when I’m not thinking about the characters, the world they inhabit, and the situations. If I lose the thread of a novel, it’s not because I take a week off from writing, but because I take a week off from living with the characters, in my head. But, hopefully, the novel takes on such a life that everything in the world around me becomes fodder for it, even transformed.

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Introduction to Ottessa Moshfegh’s Reading at Hobart and William Smith

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Ottessa Moshfegh read last night at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY) as the last speaker in the 2016-2017 Trias reading series, which I curated as the writer in residence. She was remarkable, doing a sustained reading of her long story “The Weirdos” that transfixed the audience and demonstrated just how much care she takes with her sentences, her characterization, and her performances. The Q&A that followed was so sharp and brilliant I didn’t want it to end. (The video will be posted soon.)

As with the prior two speakers in the series, Dexter Palmer and Amelia Gray, find my introduction to Moshfegh’s reading below.

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I first encountered Ottessa Moshfegh’s fiction when I picked up her first novel, McGlue, about a rather dysfunctional sailor’s misadventures…to put it mildly. McGlue pretty much blew me away—it was such an unusual narrative and one of those books where the cliché “take no prisoners” is fully justified as is the overused word “transgressive.” Although when we use such labels we also need to think about why that might be—and who we think part of society and who we don’t, as Moshfegh herself pointed out at her lunch-time discussion with HWS students today. But whatever words you use to describe McGlue, it clearly marked the arrival of a fresh and genuine talent. I remember thinking “this is a no-bullshit writer.” The best kind.

Eileen, Moshfegh’s next novel, which has been optioned for film by Scott Rudin Productions and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, provided readers with yet another deep character study of a loner, but with more dark absurdism and twisted humor. It keenly evoked the 1960s in a small, insular Massachusetts town and the titular character’s attempts to break free of an alcoholic father and a dead-end job. The book can be melancholy and dark, but it is shot through with such vivid and unusual observations, courtesy of the unique narrator, that it achieves the rare distinction of being downbeat but also immensely readable. There are also so many wonderful sections, including parts in which the architecture of the house Eileen lives in is mapped to the emotional resonance of her life and the people in her life—such clarity, in fact, of both description and characterization intertwined that it’s a textbook example of how to make sentences do more than one or two things at once.

If, like me, you are looking for books that don’t go where you expect them to, and which feature characters that feel like real, flawed people—that don’t flinch away from showing us as we are than as we pretend to be, then Eileen was a singular triumph, and it rightly received high critical and reader praise.

Which is all to say that when I heard Moshfegh had a story collection coming out, I begged an advance copy from the publisher as soon as they were available and read it from start to finish in one or two sittings. Homesick For Another World, in addition to having a great title, displays great cohesion in its depiction of a series of misfits and down-and-out characters who are fascinating in part because of Moshfegh’s great eye and ear for the unusual detail. From the mental contortions the title character in “Mr. Wu” puts himself through in his infatuation with a woman at a video arcade to Jeb in “An Honest Woman,” who is grotesque in his interactions with his neighbor but rendered startlingly three-dimensional, Moshfegh displays a gift for interiority that astonishes. By the final story in Homesick for Another World, “A Better Place,” so many unique inner landscapes have been revealed to the reader that the sense of the speculative or surreal seems well-earned not despite the realism of what has come before but because of it. Her work is beautiful because of what it lays bare.

This is all a remarkable gift for the reader, yes, but also for writers, in how Moshfegh makes mundane, in the best possible way, the perverse and the things we try to edit out of the myth of who we are—restoring what was often always there but not put onto the page. This isn’t just a case of having a map showing one way to do deep characterization—it is also about liberating the imagination from the self-editing that can occur, to not say the forbidden thing, to shy away from topics that have been categorized as taboo or have been marginalized and pushed to the edges. I know that just the sheer bravado of Moshfegh’s fiction has had a deep effect on what I feel I can tackle in my own work—similar in a way to how encountering Vladimir Nabokov and Angela Carter’s fiction when I was just starting out put me on a path to becoming a better, more mature writer. Moshfegh’s stories are also for this reason essential reading for beginning writers today, who need the reminder because they exist in the public sphere amid an ever widening maelstrom of reactions.

It’s not a given that writers who take chances get rewarded for it. Thankfully, though, Ottessa Moshfegh has been rewarded for those chances. In addition to wide-spread critical acclaim, Moshfegh has won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, the Believer Book Award, the PEN/Hemmingway Award for debut fiction, the Pushcart Prize, an  O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Please join me in welcoming Ottessa Moshfegh to Hobart and William Smith….

2017 Books: Eight Blurbs and an Introduction

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I thought I’d provide a round-up of all the 2017 books I’ve blurbed, along with one reprint, Lives of the Monster Dogs, that I’ve written a new introduction for. I’m really enthusiastic about all of these titles, and hopefully there’s a little something for everyone! My blurb in italics before a brief description. – Jeff VanderMeer

Lives of the Monster Dogs, Kirsten Bakis (FSG Classics, May)

“An unforgettable meditation on both animals and humans, and the ways in which we are entangled, and the ways in which neither party can escape the methods of our genesis and our upbringing.” – from my introduction

After a century of cruel experimentation, a haunted race of genetically and biomechanically uplifted canines are created by the followers of a mad nineteenth-century Prussian surgeon. Possessing human intelligence, speaking human language, fitted with prosthetic hands, and walking upright on their hind legs, the monster dogs are intended to be super soldiers. Rebelling against their masters, however, and plundering the isolated village where they were created, the now wealthy dogs make their way to New York.


The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Leonora Carrington (Dorothy, April)

“The definitive collection of Carrington’s short fiction is a treasure and a gift to this world. A stunning achievement.”

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life. Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, the complete stories collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), this collection captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist’s life.


The Grip of It, Jac Jemc (FSG Originals, August)

“A stunning, smart genuinely creepy page-turner that I couldn’t put down. It’s got depth, thrills, twists, and great writing. I’d recommend this novel to anyone. One of the few haunted house stories that sticks the landing.”

The Grip of It tells the eerie story of a young couple haunted by their new home. Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move?prompted by James’s penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check?is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But this house, which sits between lake and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple.


Tales of Falling and Flying, Ben Loory (Penguin, September)

“Parables, dark fables, quirky flash fictions—call them what you will, Ben Loory has perfected the form and in Tales of Falling and Flying proves once again he can disturb a little and entertain a lot. Easily read, not easily forgotten.”

Ben Loory returns with a second collection of timeless tales, inviting us to enter his worlds of whimsical fantasy, deep empathy, and playful humor, in the signature voice that drew readers to his highly praised first collection. In stories that eschew literary realism, Loory’s characters demonstrate richly imagined and surprising perspectives, whether they be dragons or swordsmen, star-crossed lovers or long-lost twins, restaurateurs dreaming of Paris or cephalopods fixated on space travel.

Her Body and Other  Parties, Carmen Machado (Graywolf Press, October)

“Genius: part punk rock and part classical, with stories that are raw and devastating but also exquisitely plotted and full of delight. This is a strong, dangerous, and blisteringly honest book—it’s hard to think of it as a ‘debut,’ it’s that good.”

Machado’s stories mix sci-fi, horror, frank realism, and fabulism as they shift from urban legend to post-apocalypse and more. A woman lists her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the world. A resident at a writers’ colony is haunted by the memory of a long-ago night at Girl Scout camp. A young wife refuses to remove the green ribbon from her neck, despite her husband’s pleading. And the centerpiece is the virtuosic novella “Especially Heinous,” in which Machado recaps every single episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, dropping Benson and Stabler into a phantasmagoria of doppelgängers and girls-with-bells-for-eyes.

The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio De Maria, translated by Ramon Glazov (Liveright, February)

“A chilling novel that conjures up the creepy claustrophobia of The Tenant and the mind-bending epic horror of House of Leaves?except spread across an entire city. Odd libraries, uncanny monuments, horrific deaths, and terrifying puppet shows…even days later, I’m still flinching at shadows, unable to forget the riveting details of a newly unearthed uncanny classic.”

Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut. In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create “the Library,” a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries but when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity.


Creatures of Will and Temper, Molly Tanzer (John Joseph Adams Books, November)

“A delightful, dark, and entertaining romp with serious intent behind it. The writing is so smart and sharp—Molly Tanzer is at the top of her form in this beautifully constructed novel. Sure to be a favorite of readers and critics alike.”

Victorian London is a place of fluid social roles, vibrant arts culture, fin-de-siècle wonders . . . and dangerous underground diabolic cults. Fencer Evadne Gray cares for none of the former and knows nothing of the latter when she’s sent to London to chaperone her younger sister, aspiring art critic Dorina. Unfortunately for Evadne, she soon learns too much about all of it when Dorina meets their uncle’s friend, Lady Henrietta “Henry” Wotton. A semi-respectable aristocrat in public, in private she is secretly in the thrall of a demon obsessed with beauty and pleasure. Combining swordplay, demons, and high society, Creatures of Will and Temper shows a timeless world and adventure readers won’t soon forget.

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck (June)

“Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka is a stunning, truly original exploration of the mysteries of reality and what it means to be human. It’s brutally honest and uncompromising in its vision—a brilliant short story writer has been revealed as an even more brilliant novelist. One of my favorite reads of the past few years, an instant classic.”

Vanja, an information assistant, is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka with an assignment to collect intelligence for the government. Immediately she feels that something strange is going on: people act oddly in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion. When she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony, and a cover-up by its administration, she embarks on an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk. In Karin Tidbeck’s world, everyone is suspect, no one is safe, and nothing—not even language, nor the very fabric of reality—can be taken for granted. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by a captivating new voice.

The Vines That Ate the South, J.D. Wilkes (Two Dollar Radio, March)

“A sly, rollicking Southern phantasmagoria that finds the sweet spot between tall tale and something more dangerous and psychological. Hilarious, profane, entertaining, and sneakily written. The illustrations are brilliant, too.”

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as “The Deadening,” where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice—the one and only, Carver Canute—set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine. Their quest leads them face to face with albino panthers, Great Dane-riding girls, protective property owners, and just about every American folk-demon ever, while forcing the protagonist to finally take stock of his relationship with his father and the man’s mysterious disappearance.

Nonfiction This Year: Scenes, Weird Florida, Black Clock, Black Mirror, Squirrels, and More


 

It’s been quite a year for me writing-wise. I’ve finished a couple of long novellas–“Bliss” and “The Journals of Doctor Mormeck”–made significant progress on two novels and something weird called “Nice Is Just Another World for Terrible,” and I wrote a fair amount of short fiction.

This in addition to selling the movie rights to my forthcoming novel Borne to Paramount and having The Big Book of Science Fiction, co-edited with my wife Ann, come out from Vintage. We also were able to fund a year of The Octavia Project through our VanderMeer Creative corporation and broker a deal with NYRB Classics to reprint David R. Bunch’s brilliant Moderan collection from the 1970s. And, finally, I served as the Trias writer in residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and we had many other adventures too numerous and various and splendid to go into.

But I did want to point out the nonfiction I published this year as I’m very proud of it. I’m very thankful to Sophie Gilbert at the Atlantic online, Caroline Kellogg at the Los Angeles Times, Justine Jordan at The Guardian, Emily Firetog at The Literary Hub, and everybody at Electric Literature (including Lincoln Michel and Halimah Marcus) for giving me a home to write about cool and interesting stuff. Also thanks to LARB for posting this conversation between me and philosopher Tim Morton.

–M. Suddain’s Hunters & Collectors was one of the best novels of the year and horribly underrated. I wrote about H&C for The Guardian. “On the one hand, it’s a galaxy-spanning space opera with intrigue, adventure and fascinating tech extrapolations. On the other, it’s a hilarious, almost Nabokovian account of a food critic’s gastronomic misadventures as he conducts a tour of restaurants on dozens of far-flung planets. Suddain manages the almost impossible task of balancing cosmic scope with slapstick, intricate wordplay and dialogue at times worthy of PG Wodehouse.”

–Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen was another favorite of mine this year and justly received awards attention and critical acclaim. I wrote about the novel for the Los Angeles Times. “With so light a touch and yet more serious and beautiful and relevant than many a weightier novel, “The Portable Veblen” has the feel of an instant, unlikely classic.”

–D.G. Compton’s  dystopian SF novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe was reissued by New York Review of Books Classics and I wrote a new introduction for it. The Atlantic kindly reprinted the intro online.  “Yet Katherine Mortenhoe remains as relevant today as more obvious classics from the 1970s. This is largely because the novel stands apart from its times, but it is also because it displays an astonishingly easy intimacy and interiority. These are the hardest effects for a novelist to achieve, and all too often novels that critique media take on a metallic patina, a shell-like hardness as a result of this lack of fluidity.”

–Craig Pittman’s “Oh, Florida!”, a lovely compendium of everything strange about this state, prompted me to write a more general article for the Los Angeles Times about what’s worth preserving about our wilderness and our uniqueness. “Then there was the time when, as a kid, my mom asked me to go retrieve a colorful buoy out on some mud flats in the Florida Keys and I sunk into the goo to my waist and had to be hauled out with a rope. And all too recently I opened my car trunk to an eruption of fungi after a thunderstorm and was so unnerved I drove off with my pant leg caught in the door and in the middle of driving started screaming because I thought some animal was in the car with me.”

–I got to view the third season of Black Mirror in advance and write about it at length for The Atlantic. This was some of the most fun I had writing in 2016, especially in suggesting Darth Vader should run a vineyard. But also in just getting to immerse myself in a TV show and analyze it. I’d never written about TV before. “What the best of these episodes share is a dislocation caused by opening up the context, as if experiencing a telephoto lens that keeps widening our perspective far beyond expectation. With an eerie precision, our sense of the context and characters changes because the scriptwriters keep pushing inexorably outward, often past the point where a lesser show would end.”

–Visiting The Octavia Project over the summer led to an interview with one of the founders about the value of diversity and unique voices, published over at Electric Literature. “Named after Octavia Butler, the Octavia Project uses girls’ passion in science fiction, fantasy, fan-fiction, and gaming to teach them skills in science, technology, art, and writing, equipping them with skills to dream and build new futures for themselves and their communities.”

–Wanting to do some kind of tribute to the wonderful lit mag Black Clock, now deceased, I found myself also caught up in a mystery of bureaucracy and archiving when it turned out the online manifestation had been taken down and the physical back issues pulped. I wrote about BC and the situation for the Literary Hub. I also interviewed editor Bruce Bauman and Lit Hub posted my short story from BC’s last issue. 

–I retired a lecture this year, about scenes, based on part of my writing guide Wonderbook. Electric Literature was kind enough to post a long, edited version of that lecture, with diagrams, and it went on to become the fifth most popular article they published in 2016. Here is the Hand of Possibilities from that lecture…art by Jeremy Zerfoss.

Views From the Trias House: An Introduction to the Fiction of Amelia Gray


Amelia Gray author of fantastic fiction and essays such as Gunshot and Museum of Weird does a reading as a part of the Trias series

This post is one of several about my experiences in the Finger Lakes District in upstate New York while serving as the Trias writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva).

Hobart and William Smith was lucky to have Amelia Gray as a guest as part of the 2016-2017 Trias Reading Series, which I’m curating. Gray gave one of the best readings I’ve ever seen and also spoke frankly to the students in my class about  variety of writing-related issues. Below you’ll find the transcript of my introduction to the event, which is also an introduction to the work of Amelia Gray. The next guest in the series will be Ottessa Moshfegh in the spring. – Jeff V.

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I first encountered Amelia Gray’s fiction when I saw her collection Gutshot in the Yale University bookstore—at the front counter, as a staff recommendation. Despite this, the cashier tried to dissuade me from buying the book.

He asked me as I checked out, “Are you sure? Are you sure you want that? It’s really weird. Really weird.”

I thought about that for about half a second and said, “Yes. Yes. I want that. I want like five or six or seven copies of that.” Because I was pretty sure with that kind of endorsement I was getting the good stuff. The pure, undiluted stuff. No filler. Not cut with excuses or prevarication or pre-fab fabulation.

And I was right.

Amelia Gray is the real deal—an absurdist by nature who ranges from stories like “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover” that blow up our expectations of what a short story can be while having interesting things to say about both the body and relationships…to sly dark tales like “The Year of the Snake” that mythologize science and can be taken for the delights on the surface or for deeper things lurking beneath.

The disturbing “House Heart” could be read as a deconstruction of the Gothic ghost story, but saying that is inadequate and throws too much of a bone to those who like a story to “mean” something: the story gets under the skin, resists being analyzed in the sense that the weird rituals at its core seem familiar to modern life and yet alien. We cannot quite place the story on any map and by this we know, although Gray also engages in renovations, that this is innovation.

I would also humbly position her fiction, from my readings, as a triangulation of not just the absurd, but the surreal and the weird—because the world is absurd and surreal and weird. With each of those sensibilities existing in different proportions depending on the story.

As well as a psychological element, as if she’s tapped into something in the subconscious that creates an immediate reaction in the reader. I’m reminded strongly of another iconoclastic talent, the surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington, whose own dark tales combine these elements and were, when she wrote them, very unconventional—striking a chord with readers while existing outside of the mainstream.

Have I said yet that Gray’s fiction, like Carrington’s, is often is sly and funny in a sideways sense—once you become normalized to the unsettling images and the unusual, unique details that—wherever you are lucky enough to find them—are always, always a gift to the reader.

Alongside that absurdist sense of humor, inhabiting all of Gray’s fiction, is the proverbial restless curiosity and a quest, never self-conscious, to find ways to subvert reader expectations, to give the reader not what they expected but what they secretly needed. A bit of a jolt to the system.

And that is at least one reason why I love Gray’s work—because of the charged images at the core of so many of these stories, the images that  linger in the mind and, connected to character, make even the dying man in the title story, “Gutshot,” sympathetic or humane or oddly relatable. That make a giant snake smashing through a town and dividing it into North Snake and South Snake have no need of rational explanation. That make a person living in the airducts of a house so riveting and horrifying at the same time.

And how despite being a curmudgeonly, jaded reader of the uncanny and the surreal and the absurd, I’m thankful that there are writers lke Gray who still manage to surprise me, to make me uneasy…to wake me up.

No wonder then that Gray’s fiction has been compared to the work of David Lynch—the ultimate compliment because it’s another way of saying “we don’t know where amongst the constellations to place this writer.”

No wonder that her fiction has been praised from coast to coast, by both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times—while appearing in some of this country’s most prestigious magazines, including The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Tin House. No wonder that Gutshot recently won the $10,000 Young Lions Prize from the New York Public Library.

I’m delighted to ask you to please join me in welcoming Amelia Gray.

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Views from the Trias House: Readings by Amelia Gray, Dexter Palmer, and Jeff VanderMeer


I’ve been blessed as part of serving as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence–blessed to curate a reading series in addition to all of the other wonderful opportunities. This fall, I kicked things off talking about the Southern Reach trilogy and sharing some of the inspiration for the novels (as well as reading). Then we had Dexter Palmer come in and read from Version Control, his great time travel novel from Vintage. And just this week, Amelia Gray came in and gave a corker of a reading to end the fall series of Trias readings. Both Dexter and Amelia dropped by my class to talk to the students and stayed long enough to have a sense of the area.

Expert on the Grotesque Nancy Hightower and photographer Kyle Cassidy also spoke to my class this semester, along with a Skype call by Julia Elliott. Those visits have been recorded so I can post transcripts shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy the video from all three fall events.

In the spring, the series continues with Ottessa Moshfegh, a recent finalist for the Man-Booker Prize. That promises to be another scintillating event. My deep and heartfelt thanks to Professor Melanie Hamilton, who runs the Trias program, and to Susan Gage, who is instrumental in making sure these events are a success.

You can find all of my posts about the writing residency experience here.

 

Views from the Trias House: Looking Back on the First Two Months


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(At the Trias reception, talking to the provost, Dr. Titilayo Ufomata (l) and Dr. Meghan Brown (r), a HWS biologist.)

I must admit to being forever grateful to Hobart and William Smith Colleges in general and Provost Titilayo Ufomata and Professor Melanie Hamilton in particular for offering me the Trias Residency for 2016-2017. It has already been a life-changing experience and a major catalyst for energizing both my fiction and nonfiction. Ann and I have only been here eight weeks, but we already feel very connected to the Finger Lakes District and the college. Everyone we have met on faculty has been wonderful, and we’ve had great, substantive conversations about any number of topics from the literary to the scientific.

We’ve also enjoyed the comforts of the residency house, which include some great wildlife and bird viewing. One night, just for example, I walked outside to see a possum, then a raccoon, some deer, an and skunk! We’ve also had any number of woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other birds visit the front and backyard and had some fun observing always entertaining marmots. Clearly parties are going on outside of the Trias House that we’re not being invited to!

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(Dexter Palmer’s class visit.)

In these two months, we’ve also done a lot! What, specifically? The following is just a partial list. As ever, much of this is a team effort. Ann and I work together and consult on a daily basis, and so anything I am able to accomplish while here is in fact due in part to Ann’s help and her counsel.

  • Taught the first half of a class taking the principles set out in Wonderbook about organic and mechanical ways to teach creative writing, including “mimicry” and “secrets” modules. This also included having the students rewrite the same Nabokov story from their unique point of view and provide an in-depth critique of the results, in preparation for the in-class critique sessions of their original stories in November-December.
  • Brought in Dexter Palmer to talk to my students and give a reading, while prepping for later visits by Amelia Gray, and Ottessa Moshfegh for the Trias Reading Series.
  • Gave a reading myself as part of the Trias series.
  • Hosted photographer Kyle Cassidy, who provided students with visual ideas for writing exercises and their fiction.
  • Brought biologist Gwynne Lim into class to talk about my novel Annihilation and Ursula K. Le Guin’s eco-story “Vaster Than Empires…”
  • Skyped with Julia Elliott about her fiction and the Southern Gothic.
  • Attended a fascinating faculty lecture on the impact of removing a dam outside of Seattle.
  • Gave a faculty lecture on Global Warming & Storytelling, based on my book in progress.
  • Talked to students at HWS via a class visit to an English class studying Annihilation and another to an environmental sciences class (with Ann)
  • Participated in saw whet owl banding near Ithaca.
  • Went out on the HWS research vessel to observe HWS faculty and students studying freshwater shrimp.
  • Gave blood as part of the HWS blood drive.

dscn4798(Comparing Tutuola and Metcalf for class discussion during our Month of Mimicry)

In the spirit of Peter Trias’ generous funding of the Trias residency, our little contribution to that vision has been to donate a projector and screen to the Trias classroom and put a portion of my salary aside to buy books for my students that aren’t on the syllabus but of potential interest, ranging from my career guide Booklife to the great graphic novel Safari Holiday and works by Tove Jansson.

In terms of the writing that the residency is there to support, I’ve had a very fertile period of being creative in these two months. I’ve written the following:

  • A 30,000 novella entitled “The Journals of Doctor Mormeck” (about half of it finished here at the residency house).
  • A short-short titled “Marmot Mountain” for an anthology.
  • 20,000 words on a new novel about an alt-history world where A. Crowley rules a Franco-Germanic empire with the reanimated head of Napoleon as his sidekick.
  • Four nonfiction articles for various publications including LitHub and the Atlantic’s web site.
  • A chapter of my nonfiction book on global warming and storytelling.

Coming up, there’s a lot on the agenda for the last seven weeks of the semester.

  • The second half of my class, including guest visits, a month of freedom, and turning in their portfolios.
  • Continued work on my new novel.
  • Amelia Gray’s visit to HWS for a class visit and public reading.
  • Class and college visits by special guest Nancy Hightower, an expert on the grotesque in literature and art.
  • A trip with some of my students to the Toronto International Book Festival, where I’ll be participating on programming and the students will have unique opportunities to sit down with agents, editors, and authors like Emma Donoghue.
  • Observation of songbird banding on the shores of Lake Ontario.
  • At least two days of helping out with raptor surveying at the Montezuma state park.
  • Visits with additional environmental science classes.
  • Participating on a panel about ecology and global warming.
  • Working with the environmental sciences department to create, for the spring semester, an interdisciplinary series of creative writing and nonfiction exercises related to developing a deep understanding of landscape and place.
  • Prep-work for mentoring three or four students in the spring and coming back on a couple of trips to host Moshfegh’s reading and some other activities.

In addition, we’ve had the opportunity to hike at about a dozen state and national parks in the area and visited many, many fascinating towns to familiarize ourselves with the area. We even had the opportunity to experience a grape festival. Here are a few photographs from the experience thus far.

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Views from the Trias House: Introducing Dexter Palmer’s Version Control


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(All photos by the  HWS staff photographer)

This post is one of several about my experiences in the Finger Lakes District in upstate New York while serving as the Trias writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva).

Dexter Palmer read from Version Control, his latest novel, as part of the Trias Reading Series at HWS on October 6. This was my introduction, which focuses on Version Control, which I believe is one of the best novels of 2016.

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Good evening. Welcome to the second installment of the 2016-2017 Trias reading series, which I am so lucky to get to curate. Thanks very much to Melanie Hamilton and everyone at Hobart and William Smith for their support and many kindnesses. And, of course, thanks to Peter Trias.

Tonight we have a marvelous writer reading from his new novel from Vintage—followed by a Q&A and a signing session.

Our guest tonight, Dexter Palmer, holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he completed his dissertation on the novels of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon (and where he also staged the first academic conference ever held at an Ivy League university on the subject of video games).

I first “met” Dexter Palmer when the New York Times assigned me his first book The Dream of Perpetual Motion for review. I loved the novel, which was sophisticated, smart, so well-written, and very different in how it mixed retrofuturism with nods to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Wizard of Oz. That novel appeared on several year’s best lists and was one of Kirkus’s Books of the Year.

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Views From the Trias House: Aboard the HWS Research Vessel, Searching for Shrimp


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(The view from the deck of The William Scandling, headed out onto Lake Seneca, on the hunt for tiny freshwater shrimp.)

This post is one of several about my experiences in the Finger Lakes District in upstate New York while serving as the Trias writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva).

One of the unique opportunities Ann and I have had this semester is to accompany biologists on a night expedition aboard The William Scandling, the Hobart and William Smith Colleges research vessel. The mission? To collect from Seneca Lake deep water freshwater shrimp that rise toward the surface at night, and test them for, among other things, mercury levels.

Biologist Dr. Meghan Brown was kind enough to invite us along, joking in an email that freshwater shrimp would not cause as much of a problem for me as the fake freshwater squid I’d created in a story several years ago (reaction to which had included vitriol from a cephalopod expert).

Brown teaches at HWS, serves as the chair of the biology department, and her areas of emphasis include biological limnology. Accompanying Brown were post-doctoral research scientist Dr. Roxanne Razavi, from the Finger Lakes Institute, and HWS honors student Kayleigh Buffington; the expedition served to help Buffington in her studies. Dave Brown piloted The William Scandling with Anthony Madia as the crew member. This was just one of several expeditions Buffington was making for her honors research.

We thought The William Scandling a very impressive ship and found the process of seeking out and gathering shrimp samples to be fascinating. Mostly, we just observed, trying to stay out of the way of Brown, Razavi, and Buffington, who had the process down to a precise set of tasks carried out with well-practiced ease.

First, Dave Brown, with Madia’s help, sent the collection tube or net down over one hundred feet and then brought it up slowly, the mesh and shape of the net designed to specifically gather critters as tiny as the shrimp or smaller, and nothing else. Then Buffington, Brown, and Razavi would collect the gathered water in plastic containers and bring it into the cabin to examine the water and sift through it. The expedition needed to bring back a sample of at least 60 shrimp to test for mercury levels.

As Razavi said in an interview when she joined the Finger Lakes Institute, “The mercury cycle is very complex. Mercury is naturally occurring in the environment, but it is also emitted into the environment from human sources. [Since] there are a lot of gaps on what we know about mercury in the Finger Lakes,” the goal is to uncover the local concentrations of mercury, as “this is a really important region for fisheries, agriculture, and tourism.” (Back in 2014, at a prior job, Razavi was described as a “river detective” uncovering clues about pollution in the St. Lawrence River.)

The net device was sent down again and again, each time coming up with a few shrimp or none, and the tension mounted, something I hadn’t expected. Would the team gather enough shrimp before needing to head back in?! I must say, Ann and I were on the edge of our seats waiting to find out. But, finally, Buffington had her sample and then the ship headed back to shore, stopping only to gather another sample, of invasive mussels.

It was a great night–to have our first extended view of the lake from the water be at night and in the context of getting to watch as Brown, Razavi, and Buffington go expertly through each step–making sure not to contaminate samples–and also getting to talk to them about the ecology of the lake.

Seneca Lake definitely has pollution, due in part to agricultural and wastewater runoff, but Brown told us that, considering everything, the lake continues to function pretty well and be full of life. She also told us about a trip to a lake in Guatemala where their experience with the Finger Lakes was useful in analyzing pollution issues. Brown was kind enough to show us some of the plankton brought up with the shrimp, and to explain the process of carefully documenting the vital statistics of the captured shrimp as well as analysis of the water they were found in.

Along the way, we also learned some fascinating things about earthworm conferences, marmots, and invasive species. In fact, just last year, a grant allowed Dr. Brown to trap and study the bloody red shrimp, an invasive species fairly new to the Finger Lakes District.

Below the cut you can find photos and more information. Some photos in this blog post taken by Roxanne Razavi. Due to the requirement not to use flash so as not to disturb the shrimp, these photos are, of course, somewhat grainy.

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Views From the Trias House: Banding Saw-Whet Owls Near Ithaca


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(Banding in progress; later, I held this owl gently but firmly around the chest and the legs before placing her on a branch to adjust and then fly off.)

This post is one of several forthcoming about experiences in the Finger Lakes District in upstate New York as the Trias writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva).

My experience observing the banding of saw-whet owls near the house of biologist John Confer outside of Ithaca, New York, had a little bit of everything really: unexpected discovery, the police, and, of course, owls. Since the Finger Lakes District is rich territory for birders and my fiction often includes ecological themes—my first journals as a kid growing up in Fiji didn’t contain personal entries but instead bird sightings–it seemed like potentially a unique experience and one close to my heart. And I accepted the invite not so much to learn how to band owls as to get a broader sense of bird migration studies and a better sense of the area. What I find fascinating about upstate New York, too, is the way in which everything is so much more self-contained than North Florida because the distances aren’t as vast and yet there’s a great variety of landscapes and micro-climates.

I’ve always liked owls, and enjoyed observing barred owls, screech owls, and great horned owls on hikes around Tallahassee. I once even came across an image so weird I didn’t know what I was looking at at first…until it resolved into the form of a tortoise…and the great horned owl on its back, pecking away at the tortoise’s soft bits. All of this owl observation culminating in a great horned owl having a pretty large role in my novel Acceptance.

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