October 2017 News: The Author Has Not Consumed Any Pumpkin, Yet “Pumpkin” Remains on Perpetually Rotating List of Top 100 Words in English Language

Kusama pumpkins are the most seductive pumpkins.

Despite, well, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, I’m in a predominantly merry mood these days. Why? I will tell you: I’ve eschewed all things pumpkin, have instead been eating a lot of roasted sweet potatoes with ghee and cinnamon, and I have plans for the entirety of January and they do not involve living in (my otherwise beloved) NYC.

I’ll be a visiting instructor at Middlebury College, teaching a winter term course, a collaboration with my dear friend Erin Davis, an artist, filmmaker, radio producer, and educator. Audio Fiction: From Page to Podcast will get sixteen writing students together to write and workshop flash fiction for the first half of the semester, who will then pair up with Erin’s class of audio producers. Together they’ll spend the rest of the semester producing studio recordings of these stories.

I always love teaching creative writing workshops, but I’m especially excited about the collaborative nature of this course. Writers of prose and poetry are usually generating work in solitude; as a writer I understand this to be the beautiful and beastly nature of the craft, but as someone who was also once a performer, I genuinely miss those opportunities to form creative partnerships and collectivities. They have the power to strengthen and broaden individual student artists’ sensibilities at a crucial time in their development.

I hope to chronicle the collaboration in this blog. And Erin and I are working on our own project, an adaptation of my story Jitters, which may eventually make its debut here. Much is afoot!