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.
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
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!
“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
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
Writers’ Program Faculty Reading + Publication Party at the Skirball Center. Wednesday 6/7/2023 at 7pm. FREE but you have to register for the event here:
Shhh!: 20 Artists on Changes in Culture & Democracy, Pasadena Hastings Branch Library
Includes my handmade book, Concepts in Science: A Beginning Vocabulary for the Science of a Mid-Life Crisis
Woody O’ Toole Untitled 44”x 16”x10
PRESS RELEASE
“Shhh!”
September 9-September 30, 2018
Opening September 9th, 1:30-4:30 PM
All of our political, social and cultural institutions are under pressure to change, to be replaced, or to disappear. Libraries are no exception. Budgets are being cut. Hi-tech corporations would like to privatize them. Hard cover books are slowly but surely being replaced with ebooks.
Librarians, once the secular high priests and priestesses who treated books as sacred, have been demoted and forced to throw books in their dumpsters.
For the month of September on display at the Pasadena Hastings Branch Library, the JJU collective has curated over 30 artists, some internationally known, who will explore the consequences of books as being obsolete, reduced to base material, no different than clay.
Merrill Feitell 