Author: Siel

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The Southern Review, Summer 2018 — August giveaway

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Lauren in Los Angeles! ***

This month’s giveaway is a little different! Instead of a novel, I’m giving away a copy of the latest issue of The Southern Review — a fantastic literary journal that just happens to have a short story of mine in it.

It’s called “Alone or Someone Else,” and is about a girl who gets pregnant after a one-night stand with an action film star. Here is what one person on Twitter said about it:

If you were at the Hot Dish reading in Echo Park earlier this month, you heard me read the beginning of the story. This is what my poet friend Lauren tweeted after the reading.

Thanks Lauren! But you don’t even have to buy my book to read this story; you can just hope to win! All my current email subscribers will be automatically entered to win the copy of the journal. Subscribe now if you’re not yet getting my occasional newsletters.

For a second chance to win, comment on this post below, recommending a favorite short story you think I should read. The giveaway closes August 31, 2018 at 11:59 pm PST. US addresses only.

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I have new stories in The Southern Review and Confrontation

I’m excited and honored to have a short story each in the Summer 2018 issues of The Southern Review and Confrontation — two of the literary journals I most admire!

“Alone or Someone Else” in The Southern Review is about a young woman who gets pregnant after a one night stand with an action film star. Here’s a short excerpt:

Even after I was showing, I kept working at the lingerie shop, the trashy one in Westwood. All my coworkers were UCLA students a half decade my junior. They were nice to me. Carly told me not to worry, they’d never fire me while that Nasty Gal lawsuit was still news. Lana confided that her mom had raised her kids alone by going back to stripping: “And we turned out just fine!” Between Lana and Carly, I always had someone to hold my hair while I puked. “It’ll be hard sometimes but totally doable,” Lana would say, rubbing my back.

Is your interest piqued? Get 25 percent off this issue or a subscription by using the code FRIEND543 at The Southern Review’s store.

“Hands” in Confrontation is about a guy who, well, doesn’t like his hands — an insecurity that ends up having deep repercussions on his life. Here’s a short excerpt:

The first memory of your shame, though you didn’t realize it as such at the time, is of your mother. She looked old even then, in her forties, sitting in her nightdress next to you half-tucked into bed, massaging a medicinal lotion into your hands. It was a nightly ritual you were used to, something your seven-year-old self assumed all mothers did with their sons, although the sensations of this particular night are the first ones you remember because there was a twitchiness in her eyes. This made you uneasy, enough so that when your father also came in the room, holding your baby sister Annie, and stood leaning against your desk, you realized you’d almost been expecting this.

Pick up a copy of the issue at Confrontation!

Both stories are part of a longer collection I’m working on called Defects — though honestly, I’m not actively working on it, since I’m trying to focus on the novel I’m also writing. It’s so hard to find time for all the projects I want to pursue —

I hope you enjoy these stories —

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Fallbrook Writers’ Conference: Free one-day event in San Diego County

Finally, a writing conference even starving writers can afford!

Make a day trip to North San Diego County this fall for the Fallbrook Writer’s Conference, and you’ll get to attend craft presentations, learn about the business aspects of writing, pitch your book to an agent, and have lunch with an author — all for free.

Falbrook Writer’s Conference
Sunday, September 16, 2018, 9 am to 4:30 pm
Fallbrook Library, 124 S. Mission Rd., Fallbrook, Calif.

I’m really looking forward to this event because I’ll be one of the presenting and lunching writers — along with Deanne Stillman, Sara Marchant, Laura McNeal, Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin, Suzy Fincham-Gray, and Joye Johnson.

Plus, a handful of agents will be at the event  — as will the intrepid organizer, Kit-Bacon Gressitt.

Check out the full schedule here (PDF). Registration’s open until September 15, but if you’d like to go, get your free ticket now — The intimate conference is capped at 100 attendees.

Hope to see you in Fallbrook —

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Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong — July giveaway

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Juli in Los Angeles! ***

Goodbye, Vitamin is one of those novels that sound super depressing when you read the back cover — but then ends up being funny and full of joy and love when you start turning the pages!

Which is to say — I realize the premise of Goodbye, Vitamin sounds bleak. Ruth, a 30-year-old who just got dumped by her fiance and feels lost and sad, moves back in with her parents in Los Angeles — partly to help her father who has Alzheimer’s, partly just to escape her life.

There’s wry humor, though, even in the melancholy moments. To help her dad cope with no longer being able to continue his job as a professor, Ruth conspires with one of his former students to organize a fake class. Through mischief, hilarious subversion, and a hell of a lot of maneuvering, and the pair manage to make the charade work — until they get busted.

In the end this novel is about family and connection — what keeps people together, how we’re able to forgive, why we make sacrifices for each other, what makes it all worth it.

Goodbye, Vitamin just came out in paperback — and thanks to Picador, I’m giving away a copy to one of my readers! All current email subscribers will be automatically entered to win the copy. Subscribe now if you’re not yet getting my occasional newsletters.

For a second chance to win, comment on this post below, naming your favorite vitamin. The giveaway closes July 31, 2018 at 11:59 pm PST. US addresses only.

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Thanks to Lunch Ticket for interviewing me about Cake Time

The MFA community at Antioch University Los Angeles has its own online literary journal called Lunch Ticket, and the Summer/Fall 2018 issue features an interview with me about Cake Time and the writing life. Here’s an excerpt:

KK: In Cake Time, readers follow an unnamed narrator as she dives into one bad relationship after another. The anonymity of the narrator and her experiences in dating gives her an “everywoman” feeling, like she could be any one of us. What drew you to center the experience of dating?

SJ: I can’t remember which book of Andre Breton’s I’m thinking of here, but in one of them, he pictures all his ex-lovers sitting in a row, across from a row of his former selves. Or at least that’s how I remember what he wrote. In any case I think in many ways our memories of past relationships are really memories of our past selves, selves that did and said things or acted and reacted in ways that can seem bizarre and illogical and confounding to our present selves. And romantic relationships—most of which tend to have a relatively clear beginning and an end (vs. friendships or familial relationships that go on for long periods of time with lots of permutations), and are serial in nature (most people have multiple friends but usually just one romantic partner at a time)—can be an interesting way of looking at the phases of our lives, the ways we and our wants and desires and motivations have changed or haven’t.

That said I’m not sure what I just said is what I was really thinking about when I was writing Cake Time. Even now, I don’t really think of the stories as being about a series of relationships—I think rather of phases of a girl/woman’s life. There are feelings and emotions that are very specific to certain moments in life—the feelings you have as a teenage girl are pretty different from the ones you have as a woman in her thirties, etc.—and I wanted to distill some of those feelings and emotions in discrete moments for Cake Time‘s protagonist.

Read the whole interview over at Lunch Ticket! And thanks to Kori Kessler, co-associate managing editor of Lunch Ticket, for the generous interview. Hope you’re enjoying your travels in Europe!

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Liska Jacobs on writing, breathing, and drinking in hotels

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Liska Jacobs used to work as an archivist at The Getty. Now she writes novels — her first one, Catalina, starring a woman who works at MOMA.

Does doing one kind of beautiful work make you miss the other? I asked Liska that and other questions in this interview. Read on to hear her thoughts on the dualities of Los Angeles, the pleasures of anonymous drinking in hotels, and the value of breathing.

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Siel: Why Catalina? What is it about that place that made you decide you must title a novel after it?

Liska: I wanted the meat of the novel to take place on an island so that I could really force everything to a crisis — but Catalina specifically because it’s a perfect compact version of Los Angeles. It has the same duality where on the one side it’s an artificial playground (Hollywood/Avalon), and the other is wild landscape (Santa Monica Mountains/ Los Angeles National Forest/ Two Harbors). Elsa, my heroine, has the same struggle going on within her — actually, her whole group of friends are outwardly feigning certain personas, while inwardly seething from past wounds and insecurities.

I love how a chunk of the story happens at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel. There are so many hotels I’d like to stay in in the LA area — but I don’t because, you know, I live here. What is the hotel stay you’ve enjoyed the most, and did that stay involve writing?

Thank you! I love the anonymity of drinking in hotels. There’s just something about them, maybe it’s the people passing through, or just the pleasure of sitting in a place that’s made to evoke a certain style or time. It’s like being on a set. The Miramar always makes me think of 1920s Santa Monica, of early seaside splendor and the flapper era.

One of my favorite hotels is the Hotel De Russie in Rome. I’ll probably never be able to afford to stay there, but I can sure as hell spend an entire evening drinking in their courtyard. They have a separate cocktail list just for gin and tonics! And at night you can hear the cicadas in the Villa Borghese Gardens.

On the Otherppl podcast, you talked about your former life working as an archivist at The Getty. Elsa was an assistant at the MOMA. Do you ever miss your museum career — being surrounded every day by beautiful objects?

This is such a great question. I do miss it. Not just the vaults, which were brimming with so many interesting things—from early editions of Shakespeare, to Mapplethorpe prints, to Kirchner’s sketchbook and Matisse drawings — but the small things too. I miss having coffee with a group of people I grew to love working with. And I miss seeing the city covered in fog and feeling like we had the sky to ourselves, and the deer that came down or the hawks that nested one year on the roof of the GRI. It’s a sad sort of missing though, the kind that comes with age.

If you were to go through the entire first book process again, from acceptance to publication, is there anything you might do differently?

I’d try to breath a lot more. I know that sounds silly, but there was so much hurry up and wait—that looking back, I feel like I willed a couple years by too quickly. I was so impatient to be here that I didn’t stop to enjoy the process. Mostly because at the time it didn’t feel like one. It felt like a mad sprint and if I let up for a minute, I’d blink, and it would have all been a dream.

What are you working on now?
Currently, I’m agonizing over the second draft of another novel for MCD/ FSG Originals. It’s much darker than Catalina, if you can believe it! This one takes place in Rome and Puglia. I like to think of it as a fever dream about womanhood, death, and sex. Hopefully, it will be out late next year.

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Enter to win a copy of Liska Jacobs’  Catalina by signing up for my newsletter. Already joined up? Then you’re already entered. Good luck!