My #SlowTravel from Germany🇩🇪 to PNG🇵🇬 for fieldwork research has started.I plan to travel 39,000km on land and sea rather than✈️ to reduce my carbon footprint. My trip will reduce CO2 by 6,7tons compared to✈️-albeit still emitting 2,7tons. Here you can follow daily updates. 1/🧵

Okay, I'm on Substack at Faking Shapely Fiction. Please consider subscribing for my craft essays and other writing about writing. My first three pieces are now up, with many more to come. If you like what you see, please share widely! A Story I Love open.substack.com/pub/fakingshap…

Potatoes, vodka, and how to make your fiction feel like real life. It works! And it's pretty fun. My newest on my Substack, Faking Shapely Fiction: Metaphysical Description and the P:V Ratio open.substack.com/pub/fakingshap…

Want to get to truth in fiction? Do what Alice Munro does: let your characters reach clarity via a series of uncertainties. You won't know what's at the end of the sentence until it comes. Neither will your reader. Alice Munro's Qualification Engine. open.substack.com/pub/fakingshap…

People have and use things. Your characters can have and use things too! A simple way to mark time, indicate character, and drive action. It's more fun than you're used to having, plus it'll make you feel like a genu-wine writer. Smaller Than a Bread Box open.substack.com/pub/fakingshap…

Kesha Ajọsẹ-Fisher’s NO GOD LIKE THE MOTHER “follows characters in transition, through tribulation and hope.” Fiction from Forest Avenue Press for #BlackHistoryMonth: bookshop.org/a/500/97819424…

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“Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their reasons.” I wrote about the recent controversy at Guernica Magazine for The Atlantic theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

"The incident at Guernica reveals the extent to which elite American literary outlets may now be beholden to the narrowest polemical and moralistic approaches to literature." - the great Phil Klay theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

Exclusive: The article Guernica retracted, and the translator who tried to tread the line of empathy. From the Edges of a Broken World by Joanna Chen in the Washington @Monthly. washingtonmonthly.com/2024/03/18/fro…

My favorite nonfiction collection of the year, Magic Realism, by El Norte Recuerda, and my favorite short story collection of the year, Ghostroots by @PemiAguda. Just stellar, amazing work.

SOIL A photo story about Black Farmers in the Mississippi Delta that’s aims to deconstruct the negative stereotypes that are attached to farming while black. I’m honored that I am able to work with and create images that accurately represents the people of the Mississippi Delta.

"Under Dans, the project has assembled a database of more than 10,000 names...ready to deploy into federal agencies should he win the 2024 election. Project 2025 has delivered a toolkit to create a second Trump administration that would be decidedly more MAGA than the first."

NEW from me in Vanity Fair vanityfair.com/news/story/jon…

Hannah Arendt: "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."