Last night in Porto! Signing off for a couple weeks as mom and I finally begin our pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. It’s been such a good time with her the past week in Porto and Fatima, and now we’re ready to hit the road. Can’t wait to get started.

Someone should write a book warning about this. (APPLESEED, 2021)

It was my mom’s idea to take this photo, and then she laughed and laughed and laughed.

Spent last night with my mom and 250,000 other Catholics in Fatima, Portugal. My Rosary is pretty rusty. I couldn’t understand most of what was said. It was still magical to be among so many other people praying for (among other things) world peace.

My episode of the In Your Spare Time podcast is up today! I had the joy of reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent piece about exorcism from November 2010. I must also note that @mollytempleton.com's intro made me CRY, a thing I do not (usually) do. inyoursparetime.libsyn.com/leah-schnelb...

These questions were the plot of maybe half the stories I wrote between 2008 and 2015, including this novel. Nice to see this again, @emath.bsky.social! Thank you!

Off to Portugal and Spain with my mom! The Camino de Santiago’s Portuguese Way awaits. Can’t wait to be on pilgrimage again, this time with my favorite Catholic.

I’m so thrilled to share the news that my new novel PENITENT will be published by @doubledaybooks.bsky.social, with Thomas Gebremedhin editing! Thanks as always to my agent Kirby Kim for his wise advice and for finding my book its best possible home. Coming Spring 2028! I can't wait.

If you use AI to write an email either to me or to my bookstore, we will not be reading your message. It’s getting yeeted into the swamp. If you can’t take the time to do the work yourself, why should we take the time to engage with what you want from us?

Happy pub day to @asuenglish.bsky.social MFA alum Andrew Dana Hudson on his debut novel ABSENCE, out today from @sohopress.bsky.social!

"The most awful thing would be to feel that I'd agree with the things I've already said and written... that would mean that I had stopped thinking." —Susan Sontag “You can keep doing the same thing over and over as long as you have a sense of humor about not having a new idea.” —John Waters

Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free. - David Graeber on prefigurative (as-if)...

I loved this book. Congratulation, @danielkraus.com!

Oh, you know you've been curious. You've seen everyone reading it, teaching from it, but have needed that little prompt to buy. Here it is! $12.48! A steal, with these genius little delights from faves like Jane Hu, Katie Kadue, Brian Glavey, Omari Weekes, and so many more. Go ahead. Buy it. Click.

A stunner of a story by @celtadri.bsky.social! "All at once the entire evening’s menu washed back over me, with similar effect. If only I were to eat the sea, the ice, the summer, the sky, every hour then I would never lose anything I wanted, and the world would never die. Not as long as I lived..."

Grades are posted! So ends one of my favorite academic years in a long time, with great classes and great thesis students. Last year, I didn't teach any courses while I was on partial FMLA leave caring for my dad. I knew I missed it. This year, I felt thankful every single day to be back teaching.

As Spirit Airlines shuts down, I can't help but remember the year I flew Spirit to NYC a dozen times to take a class with Gordon Lish at the Center for Fiction, made possible by bargain airfares and paid for by the advance for the Dungeons & Dragons novel I wrote under a pen name. What a summer!

I'm about a third of the way through @lbmcgrath.bsky.social's MIDDLEMEN, about the history of literary agents, and really enjoying it so far. If nothing else, there's plenty of stuff to text your writer friends in horror/fascination/anger/hope!

One last visit to the desert before I leave Phoenix until mid-June! Surely unrelated: this was the first run/hike of the year where my water got too hot to drink before I finished...

Today's AI scam email, sent through my website, about a book I didn't write: "There are thousands of readers currently wandering the desert of mediocre fiction, starving for exactly this kind of depth, and they haven't found you yet because the algorithms are cruel, unfeeling robots..."

Neither my conscious mind nor my subconscious can ever correctly spell unconscious.

Hard to beat a late night walk around the neighborhood after a weekend away. Bonus points for good weather and good music.

Phoenix/Tempe friends! Come out tomorrow to @changinghands.bsky.social Tempe for the launch of @solarshades.club’s debut novel ABSENCE, a smart speculative thriller I can’t wait for more people to read. It’ll be a good time!

One of my favorite Built to Spill songs is "Randy Describes Eternity," where a seemingly drugged-out Randy shares a vision of a giant metal sphere passing every 1000 years to be swiped by a single feather. What a great, odd image—and today I found it in someone else's memories of 1950s Catholicism.

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be joining the English department of Bowling Green State University (Ohio) as an Associate Professor in their BFA and MFA in creative writing. I'll miss my ONU students and colleagues, but I'm SO excited for this new adventure!

Just got my race photos from last weekend's 21-miler at Whiskey Basin! Always glad to see myself looking happy halfway through a hard run. Loved that Rabbit button-down/Raide belt combo too. I'll definitely race in that again.

This political sign on a neighbor’s house reminds me that I had a dream last night where JD Vance snuck into a hotel room party I was at, then proceeded to turn into a giant frog and piss everyone off. Seems possible!

"I don't see the terror in the world as helping my stories. I see my stories as helping, even if it's just me, to deal with the terror." —Susan Steinberg "People ask me if I drew pictures to escape reality. I didn't. I drew pictures so I could stay." –Lynda Barry

"Do things that carry with them a high probability of failure. Keep failing at them until you're not failing at them anymore." —Kyle Minor "I never want to do the same thing twice. I already know how to do the things I've done." —Anne Carson

Happy paperback day to Erika Swyler’s excellent novel, WE LIVED ON THE HORIZON. Perfect for fans of Le Guin, Iain M Banks, and other writers of smart, moral science fiction.

Some conversation swirling today about how to write even when your first draft will be terrible. This book has a lot of the answers + motivation.

This Is Just To Say I have turned off the AI features that were in the update and which you were probably hoping to monetize Fuck you they were stupid so unnecessary and so annoying

"The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with." —Renata Adler "Much fiction depends on people who never forget. This clinging, this refusal to 'get over it,' is very useful in fiction, however inadvisable it may be in real life." —Joan Silber

Ran a beautiful 33K trail race yesterday in the Prescott mountains with my sister and my partner! Swapped my usual running tee and vest for a button-down race shirt and a belt, leaving our photos looking like I was just dropping my sister off at the race… Everyone did great!

In the post novel doldrums, reading reading reading. It’s not such a bad way to be adrift.

The epigraph to Stefan Muller-Doohm’s ADORNO, as translated by Rodney Livingstone.

Fair Cost & Fabulous - tips for writing winning applications for writers retreats and residencies. With @shipraagarwal.bsky.social @cantomundo.bsky.social & @asuenglish.bsky.social

“Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.” —Joseph Campbell

“The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” —Stanley Kubrick

“Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.” —Colson Whitehead

In the jungles of Papua live a tribe of “cannibals” who live in very tall treehouses. Or, at least, so we’re often told. The truth is considerably more complicated—and more surreal. Read the latest excerpt from my book, in @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/t...

“It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in MOBY-DICK. So you might as well write MOBY-DICK.” —Annie Dillard, THE WRITING LIFE “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." —Herman Melville, to Nathaniel Hawthorne after the publication of MOBY-DICK

I come back, time and again, to @mdbell79.bsky.social's REFUSE TO BE DONE

Y’all! The White Cat Black Dog ebook is currently 1.99 on all platforms. If you buy from bookshop.org, you can pick which indie bookstore you want your money to go to. 🖤🐈🖤

Nick Cave, summoning the kind of urgency I feel every day: “All of our days are numbered. We can not afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it...”

I wonder how many other people listened to this as they reluctantly filed their taxes this year? If you want me to pay my taxes If you want me to pay my taxes You better come over with a crucifix You're gonna have to nail me down

Stepped out the door at 6am to go running and found an unexpectedly perfect rainbow.

"Hard writing makes easy reading." —Wallace Stegner