Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for December is Cozy Books, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode Terena Elizabeth Bell and I discuss:

• How she merged images and text and other ways she experimented in her stories.
• Her advice for managing your mental health when writing about difficult topics.
• What it means to write what you see and how she applied it to her writing.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Terena Elizabeth Bell

Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Her debut short story collection, Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit), publishes Holiday 2022. Short stories, poetry, and journalism work have appeared in The Atlantic, Playboy, MysteryTribune, Santa Monica Review, Saturday Evening Post, and more than 100 similar publications throughout the US, the UK, Ireland, and Spain. Short fiction has won grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

She is a 2021 NYFA City Artists Corps winner, a 2018 Arlene Eisenberg Award winner, a 2018 Azbee Award of Excellence winner, and Centre College’s 2014 Distinguished Young Alumna of the Year. Lead editor of the Writing Through the Classics series of books on fiction craft, she has taught creative writing independently and through the New York Society Library, Woodlawn Children’s Home, and Bowling Green State University.

From 2005 to 2015, Bell served as CEO of an international translation company and, in 2012, was appointed to President Barack Obama’s White House Business Council by US Representative John Yarmuth. She holds a BA in English from Centre College and an MA in French from the University of Louisville. Originally from Sinking Fork, Kentucky, she lives in Manhattan, where her landlord once was Philip Roth.

You can find her on her website or follow her on Twitter, TikTok, buymeacoffee.com, and medium.com.

Tell Me What You See

Tell Me What You See is a collection of ten experimental short stories about the January 6th invasion on the US Capitol, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, the increase in Alzheimer’s cases, and other news events from 2020 and 2021. 

Written in both word and image, pieces from the collection have been called “​​inventive and topical and fresh, emotional, chaotic, and important” by The McNeese Review, “timely, relevant, and interesting” by The MIssouri Review, and “cool” by The Baffler. Title story “Tell Me What You See” is also a 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts City Artist Corps winner.

If you decide to check out the book, please do so via this Amazon Affiliate link. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 441

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 441: Writing an Experimental Short Story Collection – Interview with Terena Elizabeth Bell appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for August is Middle Grade, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode May-lee Chai and Lori discuss:

• Creating a journey through a short story collection using the placement of stories
• Using short stories to inhabit lives that are different from your own
• How to evoke a specific mood in a collection of short stories

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About May-lee Chai

May-lee Chai is the author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories. Her last story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, won the 2019 American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and recipient of an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards. 

Her short prose has appeared widely, including in Seventeen, New England Review, Longreads, Paris Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Los Angeles Times, Best Small Fictions anthology, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and cited as Notable in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays anthologies. 

You can find her on her website or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories

A short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large.

In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai’s latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality—always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power.

These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai’s stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 425

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 425: Understanding Lives that Are Not Our Own through Short Stories – Interview with May-lee Chai appeared first on DIY MFA.

Charlie Jane is the author of the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. 

Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. 

Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

In this episode Charlie Jane Anders and I discuss:

• What makes something an “idea” versus a “story” and how to tell the difference.
• How to keep short stories contained while making them rich and deep.
• Why she believes endings are hard and what she does to cross the finish line.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Charlie Jane Anders 

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy released in April 2021, along with the short story Even Greater Mistakes and the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

Even Greater Mistakes

In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary.

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”

Never Say You Can’t Survive

From Charlie Jane Anders, the award-winning author of novels such as All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, this is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever read.

The world is on fire.

So tell your story.

Things are scary right now. We’re all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But we’re not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible.

Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links for Even Greater Mistakes and Never Say You Can’t Survive, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 390

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 390: Idea to Premise to Story: Crafting a Dynamic Short Story – Interview with Charlie Jane Anders appeared first on DIY MFA.

J.L. Torres is the author of a novel, The Accidental Native, as well as the short collection The Family Terrorist and Other Stories, a collection of poetry, Boricua Passport, and Migrations, a short story collection that won the inaugural Tomás Rivera Book Prize. 

He has published stories and poems in numerous journals and magazines including The North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Eckleburg Review, Puerto del Sol, Las Americas Review, and the anthology Growing Up Latino. 

Born in Puerto Rico, raised in the South Bronx, he currently lives in Plattsburgh, New York. In addition to the Ph.D., he also holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. 

He co-founded the Saranac Review and served as its Editor for many years. On a more personal note has no known hobbies, has never been in prison or any gangs, has never had quirky and funky jobs and is notoriously inept with tools.

In this episode J.L. Torres and I discuss:

• Writing for two audiences and how world building plays a major role in that process.
• What factors he considers when selecting the order of stories for a collection.
• His definition of “voice” and why it is so important in keeping readers engaged.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About J.L. Torres

J.L. Torres is the author of a novel, The Accidental Native; The Family Terrorist and Other Stories; the collection of poetry, Boricua Passport, and Migrations, the winner of the inaugural Tomás Rivera Book Prize. He has published stories and poems in numerous journals and magazines including The North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Eckleburg Review, Puerto del Sol, Las Americas Review, and the anthology Growing Up Latino. 

Born in Puerto Rico, raised in the South Bronx, he lives in Plattsburgh, New York. Besides the Ph.D., he holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. He co-founded the Saranac Review and served as its Editor for many years. He has no known hobbies, has never been in prison or any gangs, has never had quirky and funky jobs, and is notoriously inept with tools.

You can find J.L. on his website or follow him on Twitter.

Migrations 

A ‘sucio’ goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned. Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip hop. Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament. These are a few of the characters in J.L. Torres’s second story collection, Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize.

These stories take us inside the lives of self-exiles, unhomed, and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 389

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 389: A Master Class on Short Fiction, Voice, and Opening Lines – Interview with J.L. Torres appeared first on DIY MFA.

Khanh is the author of Flesh and The Demon Who Peddled Longing. 

He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. 

He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, and The C&R Press Fiction Prize. 

His new novel, Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner

In this episode Khanh Ha and I discuss:

• How he writes death scenes in a way that is comfortable for him and powerful for the reader.
• The difference between style and voice and how writers can make both unique.
• Why writers need to stay faithful to their character when creating the POV of the narrative.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Khanh Ha

Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh and The Demon Who Peddled Longing. He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, and The C&R Press Fiction Prize. His new novel, Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner.

A Mother’s Tale

A tale of salvaging one’s soul from received and inherited war-related trauma. Within the titular beautiful story of a mother’s love for her son is the cruelty and senselessness of the Vietnam War, the poignant human connection, and a haunting narrative whose setting and atmosphere appear at times otherworldly through their landscape and inhabitants. Captured in the vivid descriptions of Vietnam’s country and culture are a host of characters, tortured and maimed and generous and still empathetic despite many obstacles, including a culture wrecked by losses. Somewhere in this chaos readers will find a tender link between the present-day survivors and those already gone. Rich and yet buoyant with a vision-like quality, this collection shares a common theme of love and loneliness, longing and compassion, where beauty is discovered in the moments of brutality, and agony is felt in ecstasy.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 382

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 382: Character, Setting, and Cinematic Storytelling in Short Stories – Interview with Khanh Ha appeared first on DIY MFA.

Alexander is the author of the collections Universal Love and Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a best book of the year by NPR, Google, and Electric Literature. His fiction and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing.

He is the founder and director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University. Today we will be talking about his latest story collection: Universal Love.

In this episode Alexander and I discuss:

• How he balanced hope and cynicism in stories set in the not too distant future.
• His process for building a short story collection and choosing what was included.
• Why you should embrace the mess of early drafts and take plenty of risks.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About the Alexander

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the collections Universal Love and Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a best book of the year by NPR, Google, and Electric Literature. His fiction and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the founder and director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University. 

You can find Alexander on his website or follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Universal Love

A hypnotic collection of speculative fiction about compassion, love, and human resilience in the technological hyper-age, from Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World. 

Universal Love welcomes readers to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another. In these gripping stories, a young boy tries to understand what keeps his father tethered to the drowned city they call home. A daughter gets to know her dead mother’s hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. And, at a time when unpleasant memories can be erased, a man undergoes electronic surgery to have his depression, and his past, forever removed.

In an age when technology offers the easiest cures for loneliness, the characters within these stories must wrestle with what it means to stay human in an increasingly cybernetic future, and how love can endure even the most alluring upgrades.

In the vein of Weinstein’s critically-acclaimed first collection, Universal Love is a visionary book, written with one foot in the real world and one stepping bravely into the future.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 366

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 366: The Art and Craft of a Short Story Collection – Interview with Alexander Weinstein appeared first on DIY MFA.

Sara Schaff is the author of two short story collections The Invention of Love and Say Something Nice About Me. She is a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in fiction and a finalist for the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award for short fiction. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, Yale Review Online, The Belladonna, Michigan Quarterly Review, LitHub, and others. 

A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Michigan, Sara has taught at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, and St. Lawrence University, as well as in China, Colombia, and Northern Ireland, where she also studied storytelling. She lives in the North Country and is an assistant professor of English at the SUNY Plattsburgh.

In this episode Sara and I discuss:

• How approaching her characters emotions more authentically created a significant change in her writing style.
• What a writer can do to best bring a reader into the story, and help a reader fully get to know their characters.
• Why feedback from other writers isn’t always helpful if it relies too much on suggestions for fixes and harsh criticisms, and not enough on building community.

Plus, their #1 tip for writers.

About the Author

Sara Schaff is the author of the story collections The Invention of Love (Split Lip Press 2020) and Say Something Nice About Me (Augury Books 2016), a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in fiction and a 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist for short fiction. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, Yale Review Online, The Belladonna, Michigan Quarterly Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. 

A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Michigan, Sara has taught at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, and St. Lawrence University, as well as in China, Colombia, and Northern Ireland, where she also studied storytelling. Sara lives in the North Country of New York State with her husband, the poet Benjamin Landry, and their daughter. She is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

You can find out more about Sara on her website. You can also follow her on Goodreads, Instagram and Twitter.

The Invention of Love

The stories in The Invention of Love are about, among other things, women taking control of their lives, even as they fall apart. What is love, if not an invention—not just a human instinct but an artful construction? The women who people The Invention of Love, Sara Schaff’s second story collection, long to conceive of themselves  as artists, as lovers, as good sisters and daughters—while contending  with financial insecurity and the reality of twenty-first century womanhood. A college student finds her voice as an artist through a tiny lie. A woman grieves her mother’s death by shopping for houses she can’t afford and will never live in. Against the backdrop of the 2016  election, a copywriter contends with misogyny in the workplace by using that very misogyny against her incompetent male boss. Nostalgic for the women they were or might have been—or still might yet become—their stories illuminate the moments where everything changes—even when what  changes is how we must see our futures.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 333

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 333: Unpacking the Short Story Workshop – Interview with Sara Schaff appeared first on DIY MFA.

Mark is an author and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Michener-Copernicus Fellow, and holds a PhD from the University of Denver. He was also the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Cornell College’s Center for the Literary Arts from 2012-2014.

His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, and Mid-American Review.

Mark’s debut is a short story collection titled Aerialists, in which classic circus figures become ordinary misfits seeking grandeur in a lonely world. In this collection, Mark examines familiar tropes—like the strongman, the elephant keeper, the clowns—and reinterprets these myths by placing them in everyday contemporary life.

So listen in as Mark and I chat about this amazing book and how to gain a deeper understanding of a story by falling into its world over and over again. 

In this episode Mark and I discuss:

• The intimacy of a short story.
• Creating a unique reading experience in your writing.
• How to use the theme of your book as a marketing tool the right way.
• Advice on how to approach short stories of literary fiction as a reader.
• How to use language and imagery to anchor readers in your story.

Plus, Mark’s #1 tip for writers.

About Mark Mayer

Mark Mayer is a Colorado author currently living in France with his wife and two rabbits. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Michener-Copernicus Fellow, and holds a PhD from the University of Denver. From 2012 to 2014, Mark lived at Cornell College’s Center for the Literary Arts as the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer-in-Residence. 

His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, and Mid-American Review.

Mark’s debut short story collection Aerialists, which takes a look at classic circus figures as ordinary misfits in the world, is now available.

To connect with mark check out his website at www.markgmayer.com.

Aerialists 

Aerialists, the Michener-Copernicus winning debut from Mark Mayer, is a fiercely inventive collection of nine stories in which classic circus figures become ordinary misfits seeking grandeur in a lonely world. 

The circus has always been an assortment of American exaggerations—the bold, the beautiful, the freakish, the huge. In this impressive collection, Mayer reinterprets these myths and locates them in everyday contemporary life, finding reincarnations or inversions of familiar tropes such as the strongman, the elephant keeper, and the clowns. 

Under the luminous tent of Mayer’s prose, we meet an unforgettable caravan of deftly drawn characters: A heartsick teenager finds a new mentor in a tough-talking female bodybuilder. A navy recruit grapples with the impending loss of his childhood by building an exact replica of his neighborhood in code. A wilderness expert seduces his love interest with the promise of showing her an elusive mountain lion. A peach farmer, alone in a former boomtown, conducts a burial for an elephant.

Throughout, Mayer renders his characters’ attempted acts of daring and feats of strength with humor, generosity, and uncommon grace. 

As Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back, observes, “Mark Mayer has built a circus of the normal, has somehow infiltrated the ordinary to reveal the freak inside…Cynicism and doubt and loss [are] writ so small, then deftly magnified, blown up by tenderness.”

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 260

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 260: Reading and Re-Reading Like a Writer — Interview with Mark Mayer appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I am delighted to have Yang Huang on the show!

Yang is an author and former engineer. She grew up in China’s Jiangsu province where she  participated in the 1989 student uprisings, and moved to the U.S. to attend Boston College.

Her debut novel, Living Treasures, won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal in fiction, and her essays and short stories have appeared in several notable magazines and journals including The Margins, Asian Pacific American Journal, and Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine just to name a few.

Her latest book, My Old Faithful, is a collection of interlinked short stories centered around the five members of one totally ordinary yet thrillingly singular Chinese family.

So listen in as Yang and I chat about this amazing story collection, and how and why you should always write dangerously.

In this episode Yang and I discuss:

• The benefits of writing in your non-native language.
• Interlinked short story collections vs. multiple P.O.V. novels.
• How to immerse yourself in your character’s world, why you should.
• Why diverse readers need diverse writers.
• Risking it all, pushing your writing (and your readers) to the edge.

Plus, Yang’s #1 tip for writers.

About Yang Huang

Yang Huang grew up in China’s Jiangsu province and participated in the 1989 student uprisings. Her debut novel, Living Treasures, won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal in fiction, and her essays and short stories have appeared in The Margins, Eleven Eleven, Asian Pacific American Journal, the Evansville Review, Futures, Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, and Nuvein. Her latest work of fiction, a short story collection centered around a Chinese family titled My Old Faithful, is now available.

Yang now lives and writes in the Bay Area where she also works for the University of California, Berkeley.

To connect with Yang check out her website at www.yanghuang.com.

My Old Faithful

My Old Faithful is a tender collection of interconnected stories that introduces readers to a totally ordinary yet thrillingly singular Chinese family. The writing is remarkable in its sense of place and fidelity to lived human experience.

The ten short stories, which take place in China and the US over three decades, depict what Huang calls the “grass people” of China—middle-class citizens with little political clout who struggle to make their voices heard. In particular she focuses on one close-knit family, offering narratives from the mother, the father, the son and the daughters. They merge to paint a textured portrait of family life, full of pain, surprises, and subtle acts of courage.

With quiet humor and sharp insights, My Old Faithful shows both the drama of familial intimacy and the ups and downs of the everyday, all playing out against the backdrop of tremendous social change. Huang writes of a father who spanks his son out of love, a brother who betrays his sister, and a young woman who dares bring a brown man home to her conservative parents. There’s an aging wife who shows kindness to a young prostitute caught soliciting her husband and a woman returning to China after many years to find her country changed in ways both expected and startling.

Huang is a former engineer who grew up in Jiangsu province in China and moved to the US to attend Boston College. Her formative experiences in the democracy movement and the 1989 student uprising taught her that “one can strive to live with dignity and honor in an unjust society.” Her fiction carries in it this undercurrent of everyday human bravery.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 217

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 217: Write Dangerously — Interview with Yang Huang appeared first on DIY MFA.

RB Frank is witty, versatile, and packs a punch in a limited number of words. Purely out of curiosity, after becoming a true fan of her work, I looked up her author website a little over a year ago and discovered that she had also self-published a collection of short horror stories, Bite Size Reads. It was no surprise to me to discover the book is brilliantly executed.

Read on to learn what pulls RB Frank toward short-form writing, why she chose to self-publish her collection of stories, and her tips on how to get your own stories out into the world.

You are such a gifted writer! What are some of the aspects of short fiction that appeal to you?

I have to say the most appealing thing is the immediacy. There isn’t a lot of buildup so the reader is thrown into the story. To wrap up a story in a few hundred words instead of 70,000 gives the reader a faster sense of accomplishment.

There are times when you want a longer story, to languish by a pool and delve into another world. And then there are times when you say I can only read three pages before I fall asleep tonight.

I’m a fan of your collection of short stories, Bite Size Reads. What factors did you consider when you decided to self-publish the book?

The biggest factor was the freedom to produce the book the way I wanted it. There was a specific format I had in mind, where I grouped the stories by the amount of time it would take a reader to get through them.

I also knew I would have total control over the content, and that within a matter of days I could begin selling the collection, as opposed to waiting a year and a half (or more) to see it finished.

You recently released the book with a new cover. What was the deciding factor to move forward on that?

I had several comments from readers, wishing the cover was a little creepier! One particular story (“The Orchard”) always seemed to come up in conversation, so I took that as guidance for the redesign.

Once I made the decision to move forward with the new cover based on reader feedback, it was done within just a few days. That’s another reason having self-published the collection has worked in my favor.

Did you work with a cover designer for this project? If so, what was that process like for you?

For the original cover, I did work with a cover designer. However, I’ve learned a lot since then and was able to design the second cover myself, according to my new vision.

Did you work with a developmental editor and/or copy editor on Bite Size Reads?

The short answer is no, but I should have! I’ve gone in and made edits over time to get the book where it is today.

It’s absolutely true that you do not see your own mistakes, and errors get passed you. A copy editor would have saved me a lot of heartache.

What publishing and sales platforms have you used for the collection, and what has the experience been like for you?

To print the book I used Create Space, which is the publishing arm of Amazon. The site is incredibly user-friendly and the customer service is wonderful. Someone is always available to help.

What’s so amazing about Amazon is that once you are done with the book, in 24 hours it is up for sale. It also gives you the option to expand distribution for worldwide sales. The book has sold in at least 10 other countries. It’s so much fun when I go to look at the sales report and I see people all over the world buying and reading it.

I also have it up on KDP which is Kindle Direct Publishing. There’s a learning curve with eBooks, especially if you want to do things like link your table of contents to certain areas in the book. But YouTube is a Godsend! You can find a tutorial for virtually anything, and that is exactly what I did. Once I had it properly formatted, KDP offered a pretty simple process and has been a great resource for me.

What (if anything) would you do differently with your next collection?

The only thing I would do differently is to plan on working with a quality copy editor.

One thing I would not change is the formatting of the collection. I’ve gotten great feedback from my readers that they enjoy having the stories sorted by the length of time it will take them to read each one.

I know you maintain an author website and are active on social media. What marketing efforts have proven to be the most fruitful for you and your creative work?

Instagram has worked really well for me. I have a good core group of followers who I’ve built a relationship with.

Word of mouth from people I know and others who I don’t know has proven to be incredibly helpful as well. As an indie author, building that reputation is everything.

I’m not great at tooting my own horn and selling, so I’ve tried to focus on building relationships and letting readers see who I am.

What are some of the resources (blogs, books, classes etc.) that have been helpful to you as an author of short-form work?

My favorite resource is On Writing by Steven King. My copy is dog-eared, highlighted and underlined. I once took out a notebook and rewrote chapters of the book just to help myself absorb it on a deeper level.

On Twitter, I follow a lot of writing accounts and agents. Agent posts are almost mini master classes on querying, grabbing the attention of your reader, and what makes a great first page. Twitter is both a networking platform and a learning resource for me.

One of the websites that helped me when I first began writing short fiction is called Indies Unlimited. It’s a fantastic resource. I think I participated in their flash fiction challenges for nearly two years to hone the craft.

What advice would you give a writer who is looking to self-publish a collection of short fiction for the first time?

Have an author platform (a website and social media account(s)) already in place. Start long before you intend to publish. Then when you do publish it’s not like you’re just starting out, your home base is already in place.

Tell us about the next project we can expect from RB Frank!

I was an early childhood teacher for a long time, and my first love is picture books. Right now, I’m concentrating on sending out about eight manuscripts to publishers. I’m still writing short fiction when something really strikes me, but for the moment picture books are taking the front seat.

Writing them seems to be coming a lot easier right now, and when I look at the arc of my craft over the last several years I feel that the short and flash fiction has prepared me for picture books. Most picture books are less than 500 words. Every word counts, every nuance, and every sentence. So, my writing has become much tighter, and I attribute that to having honed short fiction.

RB writes in between letting the dogs out and letting the dogs in (That’s very real). You can find her on Instagram @writingoutloud, Twitter @writingoutloud2, FB @RBFrankAuthor. She runs The Fiercesome Writer blog through her website.

Elise Holland is the editor of 2 Elizabeths, a literary magazine focused on poetry and short fiction, with an emphasis on romance and women’s fiction. Her work has been published in Writer’s Digest and has appeared on Jane Friedman’s blog. Find Elise online at 2Elizabeths.com.

The post Interview with RB Frank appeared first on DIY MFA.