Lish Yourself
Upcoming: a talk with Kaya Press and a workshop at the Center for Fiction
I’ve been buried the past few weeks in novel-writing, teaching, childcare, and other general life matters, but just a quick note to say, I’ll be leading an in-person writing class at the Center for Fiction—my first there!—on April 26 and 27. The topic is one that's near and dear to me: getting unstuck by editing yourself and generating work from life. We'll be discussing the approaches of such greats as Lydia Davis and Samuel R. Delany, and looking under the hood of Gordon Lish’s stories/infamous edit of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and the Lishian method more generally. And then we will apply it! (Call it Lish Yourself. Or, maybe, Pulling from Life and Lish.) Anyway, please do feel free to share with anyone whom you think might be interested.
Also, while we’re on the topic of editing, next Monday, March 10 at 3 p.m., I’ll be doing a Zoom Q&A with editor Austin Nguyen at Kaya Press for their First Pass: Editing From Beyond the Margins series. We’ll talk about the art of editing fiction and nonfiction, alongside a close look at one of my favorite recent stories that I edited, Francisco González’s O. Henry Prize-winning “Serranos,” originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly. The event is free. Sign-up info is here.
