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.
Updates
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 was published in Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).
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 