It’s still January, and so not too late, in my book, to wish you all a happy New Year. For those of you in San Francisco Bay Area, my first event of the year is coming up this Saturday, February 3. Come to the Main branch of the SF public library at 2 pm.
I will be reading an excerpt from my novel-in-progress set in Leningrad in the year 1990. This event called “A Sense of Place” is organized by my friend Beverly Parayno, whose collection of stories WILDFLOWERS it was my pleasure to blurb. I’ll be reading alongside Beverly herself, Toni Mirosevich, and Norman Zelaya. I’m delighted to meet these acclaimed writers in person and to hear their stories of the Bay Area and beyond.
In the past few months, I have published two stories. One, a brand new fiction “Make Peace with the Cake” — about an ex-Soviet immigrant parent coping with the post-COVID, war-time social tensions and her own anxieties — appears in the Museum of Americana, a magazine that has generously published 1, 2, 3 of my earlier stories.
Another piece, “Sweet Dreams,” is an older story that remains important to me for personal, creative, and political reasons. It was first published circa 2010 in an issue of Mad Hatters’ Review and has now been brought back online by the Bulb Culture Collective, a magazine that gives home to stories that first appeared in now defunct online magazines. What a noble quest! I certainly have more work to send their way.
Last but not least, the service that I have been using to send out my newsletter (TinyLetter) is being discontinued, so I’m attempting to use my website provider (WordPress) for these emails. Those of you who are already subscribing to my website may have already seen some of this information. Please let me know if you encounter any other technical issues.
“Having reached the age of 55, my mother has decided to try out retirement. She won’t stop working—there are no opportunities for advancement in that—but she’s decided to branch out and sign up for an advanced English class after work. Her older sister is taking the same class, and my mother can’t let her sister surpass her at anything. This week, their teacher assigned them a few song lyrics to translate. My mother, determined to be an A-student, messages me for help. . . .”
It’s an older piece that was first published in Mad Hatters’ Review 12: Back from the USSR, edited by Alex Cigale and Mariya Gusev. I remain deeply grateful to the editors for taking my piece and for assembling that folio that introduced me to many fellow ex-Soviet authors I have been following ever since.
Bulb Culture Collective is a wonderful venue that gives a second life to the previously published stories and poems from online magazines that do not longer exist. I love seeing this story back online.
I’m grateful to my friends at the Museum of Americana for publishing my story, “Make Peace with the Cake” in their Food Court section. Huge thanks to Lauren Alwan for editing!
Our Leo was six or seven weeks old when we received advice from fellow Russians, as we came to call ourselves after twenty years in the US. They had two kids in elementary school and when they shared their parenting philosophy, Sioma and I listened.
“We don’t do kids birthday parties,” they said.
Birthday parties were a giant waste of time, they said. Treated as mandatory by middle-class Bay Area parents, no matter the racial or ethnic background, these utrenniki were all alike: a bouncy house at a playground, pizza, cake. One couldn’t drop the children off but had to hang out and talk to the adults. If you couldn’t sustain a conversation about baseball scores or local politics, forget it. “Remember how it was back home?” the dad asked.
How does one celebrate finishing a draft of a novel? Here’s my plan: I’m organizing an event with a few writers I deeply admire and whose books share some of the sensibilities that dictated my own. Transplants all, we write about the places that were important — perhaps, foundational — to us, churning memories into new stories. Please join me on August 6 for this ONLINE reading and conversation. Register on EVENTBRITE to receive the Zoom link.
Tamim Ansary’s SINKING THE ARK is set in Portland, Oregon in 1973, “Before it became Portlandia.” Barbara Barrow’s AN UNCLEAN PLACE is anchored to the campus of an experimental middle school in Atlanta, Georgia in 1992. In HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED, Tania Malik captures Dubai during the weeks and months of uncertainty as Saddam Hussein’s army invades Kuwait in 1990, and the world awaits US response. Alicia Rouverol’s debut DRY RIVER is set in California’s suburban Mill Valley during the housing market bust of 2008. Moderator Olga Zilberbourg’s work-in-progress, DON’T SHUT THE DOOR is set in 1990 in Leningrad, USSR, just before it falls apart.
Please support writers and literature by buying books:
Tamim Ansary is the author of The Invention of Yesterday, Destiny Disrupted, Games without Rules, West of Kabul, East of New York, among other books. For ten years he wrote a monthly column for Encarta.com, and has published essays and commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Edutopia, Parade, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Bill Moyers, PBS The News Hour, Al Jazeera, and NPR. Born in Afghanistan in 1948, he moved to the U.S. in 1964. He lives in San Francisco.
Barbara Barrow (she/her) is the author of AN UNCLEAN PLACE (Lanternfish, 2023) and THE QUELLING (Lanternfish, 2018), which was selected as a Gold Winner for Literary Fiction in the Foreword Indies Awards. Her short stories have appeared in FAULTLINE, SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW, CIMARRON REVIEW, and elsewhere, and she also publishes literary criticism in environmental humanities, women, gender, and sexuality, and nineteenth-century literature. Originally from Atlanta, GA, she has lived in New York, Germany, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and now Lund, Sweden, where she teaches literature and writing and lives with her husband, daughter, and pets.
Tania Malik is the author of the novels HOPE YOU ARE SATISFIED (May 2023, Unnamed Press) as well as THREE BARGAINS (W.W Norton) which received a Publishers Weekly Starred review and a Booklist Starred review. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Off-assignment, Lit Hub, Salon.com, Calyx Journal, Baltimore Review, and other publications. She lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area. More at www.taniamalik.com.
Alicia J Rouverol (she/her) is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Salford and is the author DRY RIVER (Bridge House Publishing, 2023) and co-author of ‘I WAS CONTENT AND NOT CONTENT’: THE STORY OF LINDA LORD AND THE CLOSING OF PENOBSCOT POULTRY (SIU Press, 2000), favourably reviewed in the New York Times and nominated for the OHA Book Award. Her stories, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in THE MANCHESTER REVIEW, THE INDEPENDENT, and STREETCAKE, among other journals. A 2008 recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation writing grant, she received her Creative Writing MA and PhD from University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing (2013; 2017). In 2019 she was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the John Rylands Library to develop a short story collection themed on place and migration, recently accepted by Bridge House Publishing. DRY RIVER is her first novel.
Olga Zilberbourg‘s first English-language book, a collection of short and flash fiction, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, was published by WTAW Press in 2019. It explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also explores themes of bisexuality and parenthood. It received warm reviews from a number of publications and was named a finalist in the 2019 Foreword INDIES Book Award. Zilberbourg’s fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Bare Life Review, Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She has published four collections of stories in Russia.
San Francisco Bay Area friends! Come help me celebrate the publication of my friend Richard May’s new collection of stories, BECAUSE OF ROSES. I got to talking to Rick at a Litquake event one year, when we attended an event focused on literature in translation. I’m so impressed with the geographic and cultural range of his fiction. He writes unabashedly about love that can spark between men at every stage of life, across language barriers, ideological divides, and in the face of grief and fear. It helps that love has chance, leprechauns, and roses on its side. I delight in the magic of these stories, their kindness, and the joyful appreciation of the male bodies.
APRIL 23, 2:30 PM
MANNY’s (3092 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103)
Rick has hosted several reading series in San Francisco, and he’s a great entertainer — I expect this to be a lot of fun with some surprises!
I’m very happy to have a longer story of mine published in the new issue of The Bare Life Review, a magazine for immigrant and refugee writers. Issue number 4 (they are published annually) has a particular focus on climate change. I’m deeply grateful to Maria Kuznetsova for her insightful edits that helped this story to become more dynamic.
The buzzer rings. The baby must’ve felt the quake in my body. He loses the nipple and screams. I’d passed out for a few minutes, but I’m certainly awake now, and I too want to scream. Did the baby’s diaper leak on my stomach just now, or is it sweat and breastmilk pooling between us?
The air ventilation system broke in my building a few days ago. It’s June in Brooklyn, and the heat is unbearable. I nursed Anton on the couch in the living room, and my breasts are covered in liquid. He’s tired, unhappy. It feels like the two of us are bearing the brunt of the global warming, and there’s nowhere to run.
I’m delighted to have a short story of mine, “Doctor Sveta,” in the current issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. Here’s the opening,
Doctor Sveta was twenty six years old when the Navy commissariat summoned her to Leningrad and put her on a cargo ship among a motley crew of agronomists, agricultural engineers, livestock breeders, and tractor drivers, none of whom knew where the ship was headed or how long the journey might take. Her fellow passengers looked as confused at finding themselves confined to a seafaring vehicle as Doctor Sveta felt. No tractors accompanied them; not a cow, not even a single chicken. The agronomists and tractor drivers were healthy young men and a few women, two of them visibly pregnant. Doctor Sveta had been trained as a surgeon in Leningrad; she assumed it was in this capacity she’d been recalled from her post at a hospital in Minsk, Belarus. Besides the ship’s medic, there were no doctors aboard and not even a basic medical facility. Doctor Sveta worried she’d have to embrace a crash course in obstetrics.
Half a century later, as she tells me this story, Doctor Sveta . . .
This is a print magazine. To read the story, please buy the issue.
Here’s an experimental short, recently published in a brand new magazine. Welcome, New Reader Review! Download the copy of the magazine with my story here. (My story begins on page 204).
Martian Federation’s General Consulate in San Francisco: FAQ for Citizens
I. General Questions.
1.1. What is a consular district? I currently reside in Utah. May I seek assistance from the consulate in San Francisco?
1.2. Why am I unable to reach the consulate by phone?
II. Passport of the Martian Federation.
2.1. Must I apply for my passport in person? May I apply for my Martian passport by
mail?
2.2. How long does it take to receive my Martian passport?
2.3. What are the advantages of carrying a biometric passport?
2.4. I have bad handwriting. May I apply for my Martian passport electronically?
2.8. My name has been poorly translated to Martian. What do I do?
2.6. I don’t have a Martian passport. May I enter Mars with my American passport?
2.7. I was born on Mars but have lived in Utah my entire life. I don’t know the Martianlanguage. May I fill out the application for my Martian passport in English?
IV. Registration of Legal Documents.
4.1. Will the consulate register a marriage between an American and a Martian?
4.4. My groom has a very demanding job and is very busy. We are unable to come in
person to the consulate in San Francisco to register our marriage. What do we do?
I recommend Gunnhild Øyehaug’s short story collection Knots, out from FSG this summer.
It felt foreordained to open this short story collection by the Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug and find IKEA on the first page, as in: “…park the car outside IKEA.” IKEA, now based in the Netherlands, originated in Sweden, but to many foreigners, it personifies Scandinavia—pleasant and unthreatening. “Blah, how boring,” was my first thought. Then, trying to stave off disappointment at being welcomed by the all-too-familiar global brand, I told myself, “Well, I guess IKEA did start somewhere nearby. Perhaps, Scandinavians have a particular attachment to clean lines.” (Nervous laughter.) I know that stereotyping is a form of blindness; in practice, my desire for novelty trips me up and leads to overly broad generalizations. Like a tourist, I had to remind myself to check my expectations at the airport.
Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Norway begins, indeed, with the comfortably familiar. . . .
Catherine McNamara is a uniquely gifted writer, able to translate her amazing travel and life experiences into thought-provoking fiction. I’ve read some of Catherine’s work, and I’m delighted to welcome her upcoming book, The Cartography of Others. It’s being crowdfunded by a UK-based press, Unbound. This promises to be a super cool campaign with some awesome pledges — how about an opera date in Verona?
The Cartography of Others is a collection of twenty stories that take place from fumy Accra to the Italian Dolomites, from suburban Sydney to high-rise Hong Kong. Lives are mapped, unpicked, crafted, overturned. Each story inhabits a location that becomes as vital as the characters themselves, men and women who are often far from home, immersed in unfamiliar cultures, estranged from those they hold dear. Love is panicked, worn, tested.
lighted to have a short story of mine, “Doctor Sveta,” in the current issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. Here’s the opening,
Here’s an experimental short, recently published in a brand new magazine. Welcome, New Reader Review! Download the copy of the magazine with my story 
Olga Zilberbourg 