Award-winning author and purveyor of story-building, renovation, and design
As an author, an artist, an editor, a writing teacher, and a content creator, everything I do boils down to storytelling.
My talents lie in discerning what’s at the heart of even the most complex characters and narratives and figuring out how to most effectively transmit that story.
My first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and my short stories have been included in Best New American Voices, short-listed in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards, and earned me fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Publication: “Personal Protective Equipment” in Switchyard Magazine
“I’ve always told students that fiction was the ultimate way of making the familiar strange, but now I know better: It’s fire.”
Thank you, Switchyard Magazine, for including my essay in this staggeringly beautiful new issue. It’s an honor to stare down the barrel of personal doom in the company of such great writers and artists! https://www.switchyardmag.com/issue-5/protective-equipment
- Kalyn Fay Barnoski
- Dana Levin
- Jon Cherry
- Ada Limón
- Esther Rose Honig
- Megan Savage
- Kỳ-Phong Paul Trần
- Tarfia Faizullah
- Erin Belieu
- Bryce Covert
- Adrian Matejka
- Paisley Rekdal
- Ruxandra Guidi
- Beth Nguyen
- Mary Anne Andrei
- Ted Genoways
Honors: Essay Recognition
I’m so happy to discover that my essay “Personal Protective Equipment” from Switchyard Magazine was included in the Memoir Monday Round-Up, “a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web” curated by Sari Botton. Happy to be included with so many great writers! You can subscribe to Memoir Land at https://substack.com/@memoirland Thanks, @switchyardtulsa, @tgenoways, @maryanne_andrei, @saribotton!
Honors: Artist Residency In Sweden
With a lifelong interest in both photography and book arts, I began integrating images and form-play into my written work to explore the most effective means for telling a particular story. I’ve always been inclined to work with fragments and the cumulative effects of assembling them.
Granted a residency in Bjorko, Sweden for a month of writing and book arts in the company of several other wildfire survivors. You can view the Zoom open studio tour at https://bjorkokonstnod.se/luciddreams @losangeleswildfiresurvivors @bkn.bjorko.konstnod #makinstuffinsweden #bookarts
Publication: “Left on Harriet” in Places Journal
Belatedly barking about my short essay and pics that appeared in the extremely cool journal Places, along with work by Myriam Gurba, Moriah Ulinskas, and Carolyn Castaño. More than 100 days since the Eaton Fire, and though they’ve started clearing properties, much of the mess of it persists on the ground and on my daily to-do list. https://placesjournal.org/article/photographs-from-altadena-after-the-eaton-fire
Lit Fest in the Dena
Happy to be a part of Lit Fest in the Dena! The famous Altadena mortuary that was previously the site of Lit Fest survived the Eaton Fire, but it has been the staging area for the Army Corps of Engineers so this year’s events take place in Pasadena. So there we were, the writing community rising from the ashes.
Publication: “Vanishing Point: A Möbius Atlas” in McSweeney’s Quarterly.
My text/image essay, “Vanishing Point: A Möbius Atlas”, appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Issue 51.
When integrating images, it’s important to me that the visual aspects of the work aren’t secondary; rather, if I’m going to integrate visual element, I want them to be as necessary to conveying narrative as the text itself.
Process: Form + Function
I wrote an essay about the years the dog and I spent driving back and forth across the country and called it Vanishing Point: A Mobius Atlas because there was never an end; we just kept going on this endless loop.
Even after the piece appeared in McSweeney’s, I still kept imagining it in the form of a handmade accordion that fastens into an actual möbius strip, the form echoing the essay’s elliptical content.
Relying on Scotch tape, refrigerator magnets, and Kinko’s coupons, I jury-rigged the essay into book form, though I’d love to have this professionally printed. Looking into how to best do this.
Publication: “Writing Afterimage: Show Versus Tell and the Multimedia Narrative” in Los Angeles Review of Books
My essay on the the form and function of multimedia narratives.
Publication: “Map Inset: Kansas – A Video Essay” + accompanying craft essay in Electric Literature
A video essay? A photo essay in video form? A lyric essay in filmstrip form? Whichever way, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.
Publication: “The Cupcake Factory” in American Short Fiction + Audio
ASF published my short story “The Cupcake Factory” — along with author interview and a recording of me reading it.
Merrill Feitell 