The conference has three main draws:

1. The many panels, where four or five writers team up to give a short lecture on a particular topic. Click the link to see really how many there are. I’m especially looking forward to seeing Cathy Day speak about the teaching of novel writing, on Thursday lunch.

2. The bookfair. Here, writing programmes, literary magazines, independent publishers, strange book-related businesses spread their wares. You wander the aisles chatting to vendors about their goods, buy a suitcase’s worth of discounted magazines, or spot your hero sitting at her publisher’s table, eating a slice of cake. I saw Mary Gaitskell eating a slice of cake last year, and I ran up and gushed. She was kind.

3. Readings. Both in and outside the conference, established and not so established writers give readings and interviews. Last year I saw Gary Shteyngart and Amy Hempel give a joint reading, and the year before went to a bookshop reading by the amazing Robin Black.

Three tips for remaining sane:

1. Bring snacks. The conference’s food is so expensive even Romney would protest.

2. Take a weekend-long break from ambition and self-pity. AWP sold 9,500 tickets this year. That means that after you eliminate agents and publishers (say, 100 tickets), high school field trips (say, 1,000), magazine editors and employees (1,ooo), and crazy Margaret Atwood stalkers (c. 500), that still leaves 7,100 people milling nearby who want to be writers. Is there really room for seven thousand more Hemingways? A little voice will whisper, “It’s you or them. Kill them all.” Ignore this voice, smile, and sip a little more of your five dollar mineral water.

3. Take breaks. Get fresh air regularly, leave panels as soon as questions begin (the answers are rarely worth the twenty-minutes of downtime you gain before the next hour’s panels start), and see something of the city that isn’t AWP. Chicago sounds excellent for that. I am looking to explore a little wildly.

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The beginnings of a drinking game (I will add more rules as they come to me. Suggest more in the comments, and I will add them.) Carry a flask of something strong, and drink when:

1. You ask a literary magazine, “What kind of stories would you say you are looking for?” and they reply, dully, vacantly, “We like all kinds of stories.”

2. You ask a tiny independent press, who makes beautiful tiny books, “So, how do you promote these books? How do you market them?” and they merely blink a few times in response, wide-eyed and silent, like the final flaps of a dying butterfly’s wings.

3. You spot someone respected and important in the booth for a writing programme you have always been interested in, yet cannot speak to him because a young man is hogging him, droning on in a vacuous urge to impress, or in a failed attempt to obscure the essential vacuum within. “Yeah, I just love a community, and, like, since I stopped my undergrad, it’s just been so hard to write, so I’m really glad I could tell you about my earlier teacher, who always told me…”

Drink. Three for now. More to come.

Best wishes.

–

Daniel

Something definitely feels off. Since Christmas I have only felt truly creative in brief spurts, and I am left wondering when this indolence will end. 

It contains these feelings:
A difficulty to concentrate for long. 
A fascination with receiving email. 
A memory of a great momentum felt during November and December, a together-ness of much simultaneous action, a sensation now lost. 
Of having reached a plateau, and unsure where the next path up is to be found. 

Obviously, there are good reasons for all these. PhD programmes begin reporting back in February, and I am probably more nervous than I know. And much of my output back at the end of 2011 may have come through a pushing away of concerns that now must be answered, especially as my practical life is imminently disintegrating. 

I think of Keats, and his indolence ode, the rejoicing in it. And I am resting, savouring the city, the winter sun. Still, I am curious how long this phase will last. 

Best wishes to you all.

Daniel

I arrived on Friday knowing almost no one, and I felt a little awkward in the crowd of tables, especially as returning participants were greeting each other all around me. I had never been to a writing conference before; the closest thing I had experienced was the (giant) annual AWP conference, which has always left me bewildered and self-doubting. Fortunately, Peter and Amanda, the Getaway’s organisers, have created a space that is powerfully welcoming, and I got to know more and more people each day I was at the Seaview hotel, a process that began almost as soon as Friday night orientation began. We all headed around the ballroom clutching a playing card, looking for partners, and I was lucky that a couple of the scholarship judges recognised my name-badge, and introduced me to their circle.

I met many people quickly, talked, drank, watched the disco from a distance. I shared a room with a remarkable poet, Rocky, who carried around a toy monkey, and sometimes wore a jester’s hat.

Saturday morning I woke too late for yoga, but in time for breakfast, and then went to my class with Richard Weems. The ten of us in the class had a writing prompt (show two people trying to achieve a tangible goal, the frustrations of which reveal something deeper about their relationship). At ten a.m. we were released to write, and I tap-tap-typed a short story during the two and a half hours we were given. Then we met in the afternoon to share and discuss each piece. Class ended, there was a little time free, then the author of Boardwalk Empire gave a speech on researching and publishing his book, the source of the now famous HBO series. I had heard vague stories that once the book had been published, Martin Scorsese had simply read it, called, and the rights had been bought. This was revealed as a pleasant fantasy: Nelson Johnson spent twenty years researching and writing the book, then struggled over and over to get it published, and then, once it was published, laboured again and again to interest Hollywood in Nucky Johnson’s story, which made up the book’s middle chapters. The truth was not surprising. So much of this is perspiration.

I went out with new friends for dinner and drank much wine. The following morning I missed yoga again. The prompt for Sunday was to write a story using only imperatives, instructing the reader in something, as well as to include a recipe and recommend two acts that you (the writer) find morally abhorrent. Classmates produced some great pieces: “How to Become Invisible,” or “How to Make Love to a Werewolf.” Mine was “How to Pass among Mortals.” I read it at the late night open mic.

On Sunday evening, the four scholarship winners were presented with their awards (I have already posted mine back to my parents, as a tiny gesture of thanks for all their support), and after that ceremony lots of people wanted to talk to me and offer congratulations. The Winter Getaway is a very encouraging place, where people unaffectedly say nice things. In a corridor on Monday morning, one older gentleman told me congratulations for the scholarship, and asked how long I had been writing. I said eight years. He nodded, then said,

“For me, I have a wife, children, a home. I’m happy. I hope you can get those things too.”

I was reminded of Yeats’s old dilemma:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

I hoped that the stranger and not Yeats would be correct.

After the scholarship presentations, the poet Stephen Dunn got up to read. If you haven’t heard Dunn’s poetry, you seize any chance you get. He is the real thing. He manages to write poems about everyday life in New Jersey (he was and is a teacher at Stockton College) in seemingly simple free verse, which yet contain enormously powerful insights and arguments. I was on the verge of crying out a request for the poem “Here and Now,” but he soon read it anyway, the poem he called “a better love song” to his wife Barbara. Downstairs in the hotel, there was an exhibit dedicated to Dunn, showing his drafting process of several poems, including this one, and I had already seen Dunn’s handwriting re-work this poem, paring down the final lines until there was nothing excess. The whole poem is here: here is the second half, each verse growing in certainty and power:

…Electricity may start things,
but if they’re to last
I’ve come to understand
a steady, low-voltage hum

of affection
must be arrived at. How else to offset
the occasional slide
into neglect and ill temper?
I learned, in time, to let heaven
go its mythy way, to never again

be a supplicant
of any single idea. For you and me
it’s here and now from here on in.
Nothing can save us, nor do we wish
to be saved.

Let night come
with its austere grandeur,
ancient superstitions and fears.
It can do us no harm.
We’ll put some music on,
open the curtains, let things darken
as they will.

Hmmm. Do you ever have one of those mornings where you wake both extremely hungry and aware that you have nothing in the house suitable for breakfast? That’s me right now. I will go attempt to survive.

Best wishes again,

Daniel

Why You Should Be Nice to Foreigners (part two)

When I moved to Germany, I encountered two problems: the first was the bureaucracy, which was complicated but well ordered; and the second was my psychopathic housemate. The first problem I overcame in a matter of weeks, simply by hanging around at various bureaucratic offices and allowing myself to be pushed back and forth until somebody who could speak English had time to speak to me. The second problem was a little more complicated, and required me to tip-toe around the apartment for three months before secretly moving all my stuff to a friend’s place and running away, foregoing the €500 ($670) deposit and changing my phone number.

The next four years were rocky and difficult, but greatly rewarding. I had moved to Berlin as a theatre set designer, and after three months of working full-time, being highly praised for my work and yet receiving no money, I realised it was time for a change of job. I became an English teacher. In Berlin, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of English teachers. Most of them stay for a few months and move on to another city, and few of them are qualified to teach English. I was among the category of the unqualified. Nevertheless, the most important quality required of an English teacher in Berlin is to be able to hold an hour-and-a-half long conversation with the same person week after week, and that was something I could do.

Working as an English teacher, I spent twenty hours each week talking to people from all over the world, learning about their cultures and their attitudes and their beliefs, and I came to understand that foreigners and immigrants are among the most important groups of people in the world.

What I noticed about the various people I met was that they all held the same set of core values: they all wanted to live in comfort and safety and they all wanted their children to have better lives than they did. These values cut through all other values, whether that person was pro-American or anti-American, whether that person was a capitalist or a socialist, whether that person was a conservative or a liberal, whether that person was open-minded or whether that person hated immigrants.

Another thing I noticed is that people have two aspects to their selves. There is the personal aspect, which displays a great deal of empathy towards other humans, and the societal aspect, which is ruthless and callous. Consider this scenario: you are face-to-face with a man on Death Row who killed a child and is about to be executed. He pleads for his life and you see from his pleas that he is repentant for what he did. The personal side of you will most likely empathise with him, to an extent. You will probably not grant him his freedom, but you might grant him his life. The societal side of you is colder. The law is the law and it must be upheld. If you do not execute him, other killers may take advantage of your softness.

Returning to the Afrikaners – when they were aloof toward my parents, it was only a societal response, not a personal one. In that context, the response was understandable. Societies outlast individuals, and the British society that committed the atrocities against the Boers is the same society that my parents come from. The personal response never got a chance to come out, because when dealing with something unfamiliar, it’s safer to deal with it from a cold perspective.

In my English classes, I often initiated discussions like the Death Row Killer, and what I learnt was that people were generally ruthless in their views until I was able to give them a personal perspective (perhaps the killer was their son or daughter, for example). Then they softened up and saw the dual standards by which they lived. I’m not saying that people are hypocritical, though many are. I’m saying that we all live our lives by two sets of standards, and if we are to improve ourselves, we need to be able to learn which set of standards is appropriate for which circumstance. Blaming a civil engineer and his wife for an eighty year old massacre is the wrong response. Similarly, accepting an invading army into your home on the basis that they are nice people once you get to know them is equally wrong.

Most people never see their own dual standards, but living around foreigners and immigrants and interacting with them on a day-to-day basis gives people a better chance. Immigrants are often vilified in the media by politicians (probably because they have few voting rights and are not a significant threat to the politicians’ careers). They brand immigrants as lazy and uneducated, uncultured and dishonest, and their sole purpose in life is to come to your country and take as much of its resources as possible. Many people believe what they are told, and without being forced to interact with people who are not their own, there is little hope of changing their minds.

When you are a foreigner, you don’t see things the same way as the locals. While the locals might see you as a person come to exploit them, as a foreigner, you see the country as a place of opportunity, a place where you can make more of yourself than if you had stayed at home. You don’t see the locals as suckers to be exploited, and you don’t bad mouth the country you are staying in. You work hard, because you have to, otherwise you get kicked out of the country, and you do your best to learn the local culture and language. Of course, not all foreigners do that, but most of the ones I’ve met do.

I can tell you that learning a new culture is difficult. I spent four years learning German and trying to adopt the German way of life, and I discovered that there were some aspects that I liked, and some that I didn’t. I like how Germans treat people with respect, but I don’t like how they refuse to talk to strangers. I also learnt that while my German friends fully accept me, the German society will never see me as anything but a foreigner as long as I live. In fact, only recently has the German society started to accept second generation immigrants as German. Being born in Germany and growing up in the German society did not always mean you could claim to be German if your parents came from somewhere else.

Now I live in Poland. I have not had much experience yet with the Polish culture and the Polish way of life, but I have spoken to several Poles who, when they discovered I used to live in Germany, expressed their distaste for Germans and their country. Their opinions largely come from the Second World War and their grandparents, who, admittedly, the Germans did their best to wipe off the face of the earth. Those opinions come from the societal aspect of a person, and only reflect half of a healthy human mind. To properly nurture the personal aspect would require contact with a German, and then another, and another until a broad range of Germans have been sampled.

It’s not enough to meet a person from another culture once, whether your experience is good or bad. One person does not and cannot represent his or her entire culture. Once, when I was speaking with a man in a hostel, we started talking about the Australians who were also staying there. He mentioned that he didn’t mind Australians, but he hated New Zealanders. Surprised, I asked him why. “Because they’re assholes,” he said. I asked him how he knew that and he replied, “I once had a roommate who was from New Zealand, and he was an asshole.”

There are many things in Poland similar to what I have experienced before, and many things that are different. Polish bureaucracy makes German bureaucracy look easy, although the Polish bureaucrats are much friendlier. I like how Poles talk to strangers in the street, and the fact that you don’t speak Polish does not stop them from talking to you, albeit in Polish. I missed that aspect of life when I was in Germany. I don’t like how insane the drivers in Poland are: they are the second worst drivers I have ever seen (the worst being in Serbia, where I witnessed three car crashes in two days). Leaving the apartment means that your probability of living to see the next day is greatly reduced. I don’t like how chaotic life can be here, but at the same time I do. The UK, Ireland and Germany are all very established, especially Germany, where people don’t even jaywalk, but Poland still has a Wild West flavour to it. When you step out of the front door, you have the feeling that anything could happen.

There is now a large number of Poles in Northern Ireland (we call them “Polacks”), and hopefully they can show the people of Northern Ireland that, while different cultures think and act differently, those cultures are no less valid than the homegrown culture. But it’s too early to tell. Of course, the Poles, just like everybody else, travel with their own bigotry and prejudices, and perhaps the people of Northern Ireland can help them out. Being nice to foreigners is necessary because the exposure to foreign cultures highlights the flaws and strengths in our own culture. Being nice to foreigners is not a selfless act. Interacting with people who are not our own is initially difficult and frustrating and a little frightening. Then again everything that is worthwhile is initially difficult and frustrating and a little frightening. But if we continue to interact with people who are not our own, it becomes easier, we get better at it, and we grow as people. A Polish girl and I took the time to be nice to each other, and now we are in love and we live together. We have differences that sometimes frustrate us: I don’t understand why she has to do things her way when my way is obviously better, and she doesn’t understand why I have to do things my way, although it’s obviously better. But there are differences in every relationship, not just ours. I don’t know how long our relationship will last, but I believe our decision to embrace foreign cultures has made us more sensitive to each others’ needs, and I think that gives us a better chance than most. And I do know that we wouldn’t be together now if we hadn’t taken a risk and made that which was foreign a part of our own lives.

–

You can talk to Will in the comments below, or visit his blog, here. Let me know if you would like to guest write on this blog, too.

Best wishes.

Part two is here.

Best wishes to you all.

–

Why you should be nice to foreigners

I am suffering from first-degree culture shock. I just moved countries and the change has hit me hard. Four years ago I left the UK for Germany, and three weeks ago, I left Germany for Poland. I moved to Berlin in Germany to escape the depressing stagnation of my home country, and I moved to Wrocław in Poland to be with a girl. I am originally from Northern Ireland, a country that makes up one-fourth of the United Kingdom, but I spent eight years of my childhood in South Africa.

My father was a civil engineer, and in 1981 he received a job offer to oversee the construction of a power station in South Africa; he took the whole family with him. I was exposed to many exciting and interesting things, such as a dog – my dog – fighting a black mamba in the garden, or a python so large it occupied the entire back of the pickup truck of the man who shot it, or a crocodile farm where the crocodiles watched me from the other side of the fence, willing me to make a wrong move. I saw the arid savannah plains of the Northern Transvaal and the imposing Drakensberg Mountains, the subtropical Valley of a Thousand Hills and the humid surfing capital, Durban. The effects of Apartheid, however, I saw little of – my parents sheltered me from it. Nevertheless, Apartheid was so institutionalised that even a seven-year-old boy was able to see it sometimes.

I remember one incident: I was running down a street ahead of my dad and I wasn’t looking and I ran headlong into a black man. He turned around and apologised to me and to my father before quickly moving away. I was confused. The incident was obviously my fault, so why did he apologise to me? That was my first experience of bigotry. I wasn’t bigoted and neither was he, nor was my father, but it was in the air, in the culture, in the roles we played. My family left South Africa when I was eleven, and while I have many memories of my time there, my world views had not formed fully.

I spent my teenage years in Northern Ireland, where people were divided by their religion. A point to note: although people were divided by their religion, the conflict in Northern Ireland had nothing to do with religion. It was simply a convenient way to categorise people. The conflict was about politics and money – half the country wanted to unite with the Republic of Ireland and the other half wanted to remain a part of the United Kingdom, while the paramilitary organisations that sprang up to fight for these wishes discovered that they could make enormous sums of money by prolonging the conflict. As a teenager in Northern Ireland, knowing if somebody was Protestant or Catholic was important. I was Protestant and my best friend was Catholic, but he kept it quiet and I never mentioned it, because we lived in a Protestant town.

Even though I had a Catholic best friend and parents who were openly critical of bigotry, I still developed mildly bigoted beliefs. When I was a teenager in Northern Ireland, there were not many foreigners. There were some Chinese people (we called them “Chinkies”) and some Indians (we called them “Pakis”), but there were no black people (although if there had been, we would have called them “Darkies”).

Today in Northern Ireland there are still few foreigners, and in Northern Ireland, the problems of Northern Ireland still overshadow all others. The Euro may be about to collapse, China may be about to start World War III, the world’s oil may be about to run out, but more important than any of that: I need to know if you are a Protestant or a Catholic. You’re a Jew? Fine, but are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?

Without any influence from the outside, a society becomes insular to the point of rejecting the outside. My family was in South Africa to do a job, as were many others, but we rarely socialised outside of the expat circle. We kept ourselves to ourselves, the Afrikaners kept themselves to themselves, and the blacks kept themselves to themselves. My mum told me that on the occasions she tried to associate with Afrikaners, they were “cold and prickly. They were still fighting the Boer Wars,” she said.

She understood their motives, after what the British did to them during the Boer Wars: the Afrikaners sought independence and the British fought back by killing as many of the men as possible. They placed the women and children into concentration camps where many of them died, and burnt their farms to the ground so that the men who survived had nothing to return to, a policy known as “scorched earth.” It seems illogical that my parents should be blamed for an atrocity that happened almost fifty years before they were born, and yet the blame is justified, but only partly.

Despite returning to Northern Ireland before entering my teens, the experience of a different culture remained with me and made me stand out from my peers. I never fully settled in Northern Ireland and from an early age I wanted to leave. For various reasons, I didn’t get away until the age of 26, when I went backpacking around Europe. I changed my nationality to suit – occasionally I was British, but most of the time I was Irish (there are some advantages to coming from a country with border conflicts). I travelled at a time when many former Eastern-block countries were becoming members. It was an exciting time, and people were hopeful for the future.

The most memorable lesson I learnt while travelling was that everybody hates their neighbours. I spent some time with a Hungarian student in Budapest, and had to listen to a series of slandering remarks about the Serbs, whom he despised. When I was in Belgrade in Serbia, I told some Serbs about the angry Hungarian, and they commented that it was typical of a Hungarian – apparently all the Hungarians hate the Serbs, and all the Serbs hate the Hungarians. In Scandinavia, the Finns and the Swedes don’t much like each other, while the Poles and the Germans are the best of enemies. The Germans and the French are barely on speaking terms, and the English can’t stand the French, nor the French the English. Surprisingly, the Germans really like the English, for some reason. They always have, even when they were at war. Happily, everybody was nice to me – everybody seems to love the Irish, and the myth that Irish people can drink endless amounts of alcohol haunted my liver wherever I went.

The more I travelled, the more I discovered that everybody possessed the same low opinion of everybody else, and I didn’t understand why. If the Serbs are all lying cheats who steal everything from the Hungarians, how can the Hungarians simultaneously be lying cheats who steal everything from the Serbs? Who has all the stolen stuff? To my shock, nobody knew a thing about the Northern Ireland conflict, a topic which had dominated my life for fifteen years, and their polite disinterest forced me to sum up the entire conflict in the time it takes to drink three shots of the local spirit, by which point I couldn’t remember what I was talking about.

When I arrived in Berlin, Germany, I found something different. Berlin is a fantastic city. You have to look hard to find somebody who is actually from Berlin. Even the Germans in the city are invariably from another part of Germany. But Berlin too has its problems and its bigotry. It was here that I learnt why foreigners are so important to a society.

–

Click here for part two.

I read recently that the end of the year is simply a convention, and December 31st merely a day certain Roman bureaucrats picked. Nevertheless, this feels like the end of something, and I feel myself lying fallow in the bare field of year-end’s. Hopefully, new shoots are growing underground. But I am just allowing this quiet, relatively uncreative time to happen, doing little writing exercises in books, spending time with friends, and playing games.

Fortunately, WordPress sent me my annual report today, so I am posting the start of it here. This blog had 31,000 views this year. The majority of readers came from the US, Taiwan, and the UK. Thank you to every eye that saw and index finger that clicked.

best wishes,

Daniel

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 31,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I feel particularly grateful to my friend Jonathan Deane, an excellent writer himself, who advised me through the story’s final draft.

Narrative Magazine’s Fall Fiction Contest

And congratulations to the winners (Nathan Poole, Amy Parker, Gabriel Tallent) and my fellow finalers.

Best wishes,

Daniel

I’m taking things easy these days. Seeing a few friends, playing a little computer games, reading, getting my hair cut, writing emails to those distant. It’s been a tough few months. But now, my classes are done, the grades are in (I am no longer a teacher), I have completed five PhD applications, and I am pausing in my story writing. Taking rubbish bags downstairs today, the air outside smelled faintly of nearby log fires. The nights are sharp and cold, and people are smiling because it’s almost Christmas.

I got two small pieces of good news on Friday. One is not yet official, so I can’t report it yet, but the one I can mention is my GRE test. The GRE Test in Literature is required by some PhD programmes—it doesn’t determine admission, but a good score is probably useful, and a very bad one a problem. The test itself ranges from Old English to African American literature, three hours of multiple choice, and the company that runs it, ETS, takes about six weeks to produce the scores once each test is done. I had been very busy all semester, rushed around doing many things, and I didn’t have any time to prepare. The day before the test, I read through the practice exam that ETS provided, checked my answers, felt pretty confident, but once I was up in New York, the test itself was harder than I expected. I have no feeling or training for Old English, only a little for Middle English, and don’t know as much as I should about Alice Walker. As any of the provided sample tests show, ETS seems to have not heard of much post-1920s fiction: don’t expect many questions on Raymond Carver or Graham Greene. I finished the exam, did a rough calc of my answers (you get one point for every correct answer, and minus a quarter point for every wrong), and guessed I was somewhere in the 80 something percentile.

My score appeared online yesterday, and I had scored 730 out of 800, putting me into the 99th percentile. It’s a nice little surprise. I obviously don’t deserve the score, and at first I looked at it as a bit of luck, a gamble that I took during a busy time that worked out. But then I watched a rather sombre TED lecture about the relationship between the present and future self (how the present self is often bad at imagining how the future self will be affected by decisions made in the present), and I felt only great gratitude for my younger self. I remember in Taiwan, four or five years ago, just working away, reading poetry anthologies, histories of literary criticism, philosophies—with no other goal than that I had come to believe a person was incomplete without at least some of this knowledge. I remember writing bad sonnets over and over while I waited for my next business English lesson to begin, just to get the hang of iambic pentameter. Reading a pocket edition of Paradise Lost. All this study produced very little at the time, and in some ways I was quite unhappy. I’m so grateful I kept going.

Best wishes for your past, present and future Christmases.

1. Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh.

Someone on Amazon said that this collection of short stories proves that great writing is still happening today, and, three quarters of the way through, I have to agree. Percy’s stories are great fun to read—dark, tense, disturbing, with characters we might prefer to care about less. These Oregon men struggle to understand their own lives and those of the people around them, and their attempts to bring order to their world usually requires a violence that we understand at the same time as we flinch. The stories are also very well written. Percy is a master sentence crafter, an expert describer of all kinds of trades and crafts, and speaks with great authority as he takes the reader through a wrecking storm, a lava cave, a taxidermy lab.

Two favourites of mine include “The Caves of Oregon,” where a young couple whose relationship has been damaged by a recent miscarriage live over the mouth of a cave, a thick metal door in their house leading down into a network of unexplored tunnels, from which strange things sometimes emerge, and a second story, which I won’t name as not to risk hurting the reveals, where the reader begins by pitying and loving the protagonist, then fears and loathes him, and then finally hopes a mob will beat him to death with large blunt objects (or some equally unpleasant fate). Brilliant storytelling.

2. I am Genghis Cum, by Violet LeVoit.

This short story collection is even less suitable as a Christmas present. Violet is a colleague of mine in the Rutgers MFA, but I had never taken a class with her, and so had never encountered her work until she read at one of our student readings. She is an amazing performer, a strange heroic fire suddenly animating her face and eyes. Her stories are also stunning on the page, and explore all sorts of horrors of the body. The prose is fast and cruel, beating down all taboos. Fast food workers die in agony when their bodies start spontaneously mimicking the chemicals in the food they serve; one man wants to populate the universe by donating sperm to every bank in America, only to discover a rival; a woman sitting at a kitchen table one morning wonders about the dullness of her life–only she may have been murdered in an alley some years before. Clones have sex and babies are turned into… into… I can’t say it! Go read. Don’t eat anything while you do so.

3. Rory’s Story Cubes.

These story cubes are a lot of fun for writers and storytellers and children. They are nine dice with pictures on each face, and you roll the dice, then combine the nine faces into some sort of story.

So far I’ve used them to create both story prompts and character sketches. I roll the dice, reroll if I get a turtle yet again (I refuse to keep using turtles in my stories), and then try to open a story with what the dice show. I’ve also used them to imagine a character first, to flesh out a protagonist before imagining what kind of story she will face.

Story Cubes at work