For years I’ve taught a class called “Style in Prose” at the university level. A guilty pleasure, truly. To hear beautiful sentences each week… to see my students glow after making a beautiful sentence of their own—so lovely!
Then I wrote a book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, published by Fiction Advocate, and the book became a Small Press Distribution bestseller. Creative writing professors emailed me to say, “Love this! I’m using it to teach!”; “I recommend it to all my writing students!” A student emailed me the other day and wrote, “Taking your class has turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a writer. For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of control, like I am garnering tools that will help me enhance my understanding of well-written prose and make me a better writer.”
My passion (nerdiness) runs deep. I put together another book, Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal, published by Fiction Advocate.
All of that playing with sentences turned into a novel, Afterword, which will be published by Clash Books in May, 2023. My novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. My first novel, The Painting, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and named a Best Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. My short story collection, In this Ravishing World, which won the W.H. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature, will be published in 2024.
When you subscribe, you’ll receive a stunning sentence from a published work once a week (maybe twice if I can’t stand the wait). I’ll show you what the author is doing, so you can write a stunning sentence of your own.
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