Bridging the Gap: Cultivating Connections Between Independent Publishers and the Arab World

May 15, 2024 | Interviews

At the 2023 Book Fair in Frankfurt, I met Sherif Bakr, General Manager of the Egyptian publishing house Al Arabi. Bakr is a frequent speaker and attendee of the fair. He is also a fierce believer in stories and travels the world not only to find hidden gems but to...

May Newsletter – The Joy of Community

Apr 26, 2024 | Newsletters

Welcome, please click on the link below for the May Newsletter. May Newsletter

Literary Translation: In Conversation with Poet and Translator Kasper Salonen Part 2

Mar 11, 2024 | Craft, Interviews, Stories & Poetry

This is Part 2 of my conversation with Kasper Salonen whose poetic and translation influences include Arto Melleri, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Zach de la Rocha, Eminem, Federico García Lorca, Aaro Hellaakoski, Ted Hughes, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, Allen...

Literary Translation: In Conversation with Poet and Translator Kasper Salonen Part 1

Feb 12, 2024 | Craft, Interviews

This season, I had the privilege and pleasure to be a reader for the upcoming CLMP’s Firecracker Awards again. I read many translated works from emerging and celebrated writers alike. As a bilingual reader (German & English) I appreciate the hard work that goes...

Our Healing Scars

Dec 26, 2023 | Uncategorized

Dear Writers and Friends, For many the end of the calendar year marks a moment of reflection, brimming with optimism and fresh beginnings. Personally, 2023 has underscored the significance of navigating challenges and attending to emotional healing. The healing...

Developing and Complicating Characters – Sarah Stone, DEEPENING FICTION

Dec 8, 2023 | Craft

When we work through the draft of our stories we often notice that our initial “list of traits” of character sketches is evolving and changing as we go. This prompted me to take a closer look at Sarah Stone’s chapter on character development in DEEPENING FICTION....

Drafting Stories: Allowing Chaos into Our Writing

Nov 29, 2023 | Craft

One of my mentors often quotes Einstein when lecturing about story structure. Einstein said, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” We writers must then move beyond creating arbitrary lists and traits of characters and allow our...

Dreaming and Stream-of-Consciousness in Literature

Nov 15, 2023 | Uncategorized

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner writes (p. 36): “[…] the organized and intelligent fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind.” We dream in archetypes and images. Our brain...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Interiority

Nov 6, 2023 | Uncategorized

Let’s examine interiority as a creative tool focusing on the internal writer experience and also visit interiority as a craft tool (as in the external reader experience) shown in literary examples. When exploring interiority as a creative tool, the focus ought...

Frankfurt Book Fair 2023

Oct 17, 2023 | Uncategorized

I arrived in Frankfurt and the town is buzzing with pre-book fair events. I’d like to share one of them here. On Monday, 75 chairs were placed on Paulsplatz. The idea was to discover 75 stories behind the Frankfurter Buchmesse. It didn’t take me very long...