Writing Certificate

• Wendy Adair's second mystery in the Brentwood Women Mystery Series, Deadly...as a Walk in the Park, was published in September. The series involves three generations of Houston women who, with their friends and best fur buddies, solve mysteries they believe the police can't. Victoria Brentwood's neighbor is killed in a hit and run, echoing the death of her husband two decades earlier. They'll take on money launderers, gamblers, liars and lawyers before bringing the villain to justice. Adair is a 2020 graduate of our Novel Writing Certificate.
   
• Diane Byington's latest novel, Louise and Vincent, is a finalist for the Goethe Book Award for Historical Fiction.
   
• Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin had three poems published in The Iowa Review, and wrote in to share this with her instructor, Shann Ray: "You may or may not remember these poems but I got started on them while taking your class. I can't thank you enough for being an inspirational teacher."
   
• Christine Fulton was accepted to all four MFA programs she applied to: Pacific University, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Warren Wilson College, and New England College. Becky Jennings and Mark Brunst, two other students of Shann Ray's, will both be attending the MFA program at Pacific University. 
   
• Brian Christopher Giddens had his first published story reprinted in Sequestrum, along with his first ever author interview!
   
• Tracey Lange is publishing her third novel since completing the Novel Writing Certificate, What Happened to the McCrays? A Novel. 
   
• Kevin Loughlin had an op-ed published in The Vineyard Gazette and a piece of short fiction published in the journal The RavensPerch.
   
• Julie Min's novel Shanghailanders was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024. It was also a New York Times Editors' Choice.
   
• Simi Monheit's debut novel, The Goldie Standard, was chosen as one of the top 100 Indie Books of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews.
   
• Elaine Ray had this radio essay accepted by KQED.
   
• Elizabeth Tucker is the author of the newly released novel, The Pale Flesh of Wood. Please check out the essay about her process below, which Tucker generously shared with us for this issue.
   
• Jacquie Walters published her debut novel, Dearest. 
   
• Jessie Weaver welcomed Lie Until It's True, the sequel to her first novel, about a year ago. The Italian translation, Mento Fine Alla Fine, is about to hit shelves in Italy. So excited for this book to reach Italian audiences!

Instructor Writing News

Holly Brady

Dave King

Joshua Mohr published Saint the Terrifying, the first in his Viking Punk Trilogy (all three books due to come out this year). Please enjoy the feature that he shared below about creating an album of music to better understand his protagonist.

Shann Ray

Malena Watrous

Feature: Essays from Joshua Mohr and Elizabeth A. Tucker

This quarter, we are pleased to feature essays written by our instructor, Joshua Mohr, and one of our former Novel Writing Certificate students, Elizabeth A. Tucker.
 

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Earnestness of Exploration

Joshua Mohr

I'm just putting the finishing touches on the most ambitious art of my career: a trilogy of novels being published in one calendar year. Yes, 3 books, 1 year. I'm so tired!

The main character sings in a band called Slummy. I've written music my whole life, so in order to get to know my protagonist with the proper level of intimacy, I scribbled some songs from Saint's perspective. These are his riffs, his lyrics. So I sing and play guitar in a real fake band. If that makes any sense...  

When I told my publisher about the music, he asked to hear it. By the next week, I had an indie record deal to record Saint's album. The label even pressed vinyl. Being a professional musician is one of my childhood dreams and to have gotten a deal in my late forties is so wonderfully stunning and unexpected. These lives of ours are so strange, right? 

My favorite part of the story is the earnestness of exploration. I wasn't trying to share Slummy's music with anyone, let alone get a record deal. I only cared about hearing the songs that floated around Saint's heart. I had to hear them in order to do my job right as the novelist. How can I write about music that I've never heard?

Like me, Saint has a dark sense of humor, so his record is called THE WRONG SIDE. Whichever side you're listening to, it's the wrong one.

The best detail to come out of my collaboration with Saint: I've had the most fun I've ever had as an author. I've been living in his trilogy of stories, 1,000 pages of Viking Noir madness, writing with a smile on my face. I don't know about you, but when I follow the fun on the page, it rarely leads me astray. 

So I'll keep following my fun on the page, if you keep following yours. My sense is that's what keeps our imaginations nimble, limber, and wild.
 

Inspiration for The Pale Flesh of Wood

Elizabeth A. Tucker
 
Set amongst the fault-prone landscape of Northern California, The Pale Flesh of Wood explores the rippling effects of trauma after WWII veteran Charles Hawkins walks out back one November night and hangs himself from the old oak tree of his childhood home using the rope of his daughter's tire swing and how three generations of the Hawkins' family over the span of decades must learn to forgive and carry on.
 

 

Often, I am asked about the inspiration for this book. Sometimes, I hear a slight trepidation in the voice of the person asking how I came to write a book given the weightiness of the subject matter. Or I see a glimmer of care and concern in their questioning eyes, as if they want to know, but also, maybe, don't want to know if the story was born out of personal family history. The answer is no. I did not have a father or grandfather who served in World War II, nor do I have personal family history layered in mental illness and the trauma of suicide. The fact is I didn't even have knowledge that I'd be tackling this subject matter when I first sat down to draft the book. What I did have was a willingness to explore unfamiliar, even if emotionally difficult. A willingness to learn. A willingness to open my heart and imagination to the raw complexities of the human condition. A desire to create a compelling narrative that extended beyond the old adage (and constrictions) of "write what you know" but to write something emotionally authentic—to write into how I think I would feel. And perhaps most importantly, I had a willingness and deep desire to be sensitive—to go back and revise again and again if I didn't handle the subject matter quite right, if I didn't treat the narrative with the care and honesty the subject matter deserves.
 
So, as I sat down on day one of NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month challenge) and opened my computer, there before me was the proverbial blank page. Having no clue I was about to dip my toe into something as emotionally complex as mental illness/suicidal ideation and the rippling effects of trauma and survivor's guilt, I drew upon a prompt of my creative writing professor at San Francisco State University ("I don’t remember why I remember this but…"), a prompt that summoned a memory of when my grandmother looked at my knees and suggested I go sit outside with my lunch because she thought I was too dirty to be inside. My grandmother was an utterly delightful woman, but she was quite formal and her house extremely tidy. I recall being slightly hurt by what she suggested, but more than that—intrigued. Dirty? What did she mean? As I sat on the back porch as a little girl, I eyed the dry white film on my knees. I remember licking my finger, swiping my kneecap, and voila, the film vanished. Thrilled, I got up to tell my grandmother the good news, "I wasn't dirty, I just had dry skin."
 
I honestly can't remember anything after that but decided to riff off that memory as I wrote the book's original first chapter, "Fault Lines," where I had ten-year old Lyla being told to go sit on the back porch because she was too dirty. As I drew the fictional landscape of the Hawkins' family backyard: the fenceline, the lawn, the patio furniture, the hills near and far, what caught my eye was an enormous oak tree standing just beyond the gray, sun-beaten fence. Lyla sat there and stared at the tree and began eyeing it like a criminal. As I developed the scene, I wondered why that tree? What was she looking at exactly? What happened out there? And the moment I realized why the tree carried such emotional weight, I wrote fast and furious, from the heart, as I mined the storyline. And the rest is history. I completed the first draft in thirty days, because that is what you do with NaNoWriMo, but it took the next decade to refine, reexamine, and the tell this family's story, relying on my mentors who are masterful authors. Individually and collectively, they helped me find the shape, the structure, the sound, and tune into the right emotional frequency of the storyline, including an important sensitivity read/edit by an author who underwent a similar traumatic experience as Lyla, the main character who stands at the epicenter of The Pale Flesh of Wood alongside the three-hundred year old oak tree that bore witness to a slice of California's history and this family's unique struggles.
 
I hope my readers find The Pale Flesh of Wood both an important story in the processing of trauma—especially given the rise in mental health statistics in our country—and adds to that important conversation.