Hello friends!

There’s been a large gap between the last newsletter and now (sorry!). I had a lot going on earlier this year that kept me from updating and meant I put whatever newsletter-writing energy I had left into WYRMHOLE, but now I’m back, and I’m hoping to do more regular updates.

Life update that I’m now an Assistant Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine. If you like reading voice-y, pop culture-infused work that hits hard, check us out!

This is extremely overdue. Early this year, I was starting to feel like I had plateaued as a short fiction writer and was looking for inspiration, which is what spurred me to apply. I was lucky enough that life circumstances aligned and gave me the time and space to go to Clarion Writer’s Workshop in San Diego this past summer. Before I went, I dug up all the blog posts I could find by people who did, so I want to pay it forward and talk about it a little. Disclaimer: in some speculative fiction circles, Clarion/Odyssey/Taos/Viable Paradise are held up as these magical things that will make or break your career, which they are not. Clarion is six weeks to focus on writing away from the real world and hanging out with cool people who also write and are big spec fic nerds, though, which I think is awesome and amazing but is not some magical golden key to publishing success.

I had personally accepted I’d probably never have the time to do a 6 week workshop until everything aligned this year and I did, and you absolutely do not need to do one of these big workshops to be ‘successful,’ whatever that means to you. I already was selling short fiction to pro genre zines and knew a good number of spec writers before I went to Clarion. My academic background is not in English or creative writing, either. Community can be found in a lot of places, not just Clarion. In fact, Twitter/Bluesky, Codex, and hanging out with other SFF writers in real life were more helpful for me for making connections.

I actually feel like I learned the most about what works and what doesn’t in short fiction through slush reading. If you have a free hour or two a week, I highly recommend the experience. (Magazines looking for readers will usually put out calls on Bluesky or Instagram, if you’re reading this and curious about these opportunities.)

What is Clarion like?

In a nutshell, College 2.0. I went to an academically intense school with a lot of driven people, and it reminded me a lot of that experience. I was worried I’d get burned out from the expectation to turn in one new short story a week, but something about being in that environment makes it a lot easier to write. We were in workshop every morning for 4 hours. This is a lot of time spent in a room with the same people, especially since I dislike spending more than an hour a day in meetings in a corporate environment.

Every week, there would be a different instructor, except for Weeks 5 and 6, which had a pair of instructors. Different instructors would use different workshop formats, depending on preference. The flaws of the Milford workshopping method came through after a few of the instructors used it, and this article by SL Huang is great if you’re not familiar with Milford or other workshop methods used in speculative fiction workshops. Thankfully, Milford was not the only method used.

I was in a short fiction writing slump when I went to Clarion, and having the room to experiment every week helped me. But now that it’s been a few months since, I’m back in my slump, though this may be because I spent a couple months catching up with up with real life after spending 6 weeks cloistered in a dorm in San Diego.

Would you recommend Clarion?

If you’re looking to meet cool people, learn from them, bounce off increasingly unhinged ideas, and have the time, yes. There are a number of scholarships available for folks for whom financial barriers are an issue, and people have successfully crowdfunded in the past.

The biggest barrier keeping more people from workshops like Clarion is time. Most people simply don’t have 6 weeks free. Viable Paradise, which is only one week long, is a better option for someone looking to spend in-person time at a SFF workshop who has a job they can’t easily disappear for over a month from.

Other updates!

• I will be a panelist on a panel the Boston WNBA (Women’s National Book Association, not to be confused with that other WNBA) is hosting on Literary Speculative fiction over Zoom on November 17th. It’s free, and you can sign up here!

• I have a new story in Lightspeed this month that will be unpaywalled on 11/20! I’m very excited to share “How to Build a Homecoming Queen: A Guide by a Bad Asian Girl” with everyone!