Today’s Featured Writefest Speaker is Michael J. Deluca, an editor with Reckoning, a pro-paying, non-profit journal of creative writing on environmental justice. He also co-operates Weightless Books, an indie ebook retailer, with Gavin Grant. In addition, he designs books and ebooks and writes short fiction.

Reckoning specializes in "creative writing on environmental justice". What brought you to focus that subject?
Environmentalism has been a cause dear to me basically forever, but it's only relatively recently that I realized how deeply the causes of climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss intersect with racism, colonialism, white supremacy, the legacy of slavery, misogyny, patriarchy, oligarchy, etc, etc. It's Reckoning's policy and mine to resist oversimplifying of the incredibly complex, but really, these causes and outcomes are all interconnected. Realizing that, and wanting badly to feel like I was doing everything I could to be the change, is what led me to Reckoning. Fundamental to all these problems is the question of what kind of stories we tell and who gets to tell them.

What drives your personal interest in literature that is cross-cultural, under-represented, or courageous?
I want to learn, to identify my blind spots and see humanity and the earth from every other perspective that will teach me something about my own, which is all of them. Actively seeking and finding and providing a platform to marginalized voices is my personal solution to the contemporary social media and mass media echo chamber. 

How have you seen Reckoning grow over the past few years?
I used to do everything myself; now we've got a small, tight-knit, dedicated editorial staff, including guest editors Danika Dinsmore and Arkady Martine for Reckoning 4. I get to listen more and have the editorial last word less, which was exactly what I wanted: for Reckoning to become something more than I could have imagined for it alone.

How often do you publish works by writers who have never been published before?
I think only a handful, but we've published many more writers early in their careers. In Reckoning 3, Mansuda Arora and Osahon Ize-Iyamu are really unique and promising new voices. 

What advice would you give to new writers just starting to write their first short story? 
If I may recycle some canned content that answers this question as best I've managed (this is not an easy question):

“Advice for new writers: write about environmental justice, submit, get rejected, revise, learn, read, look unflinchingly upon humanity and the earth, participate, write more, repeat, get accepted, join us, change us, teach us, keep writing, change humanity, change the earth”

Today’s Featured Writefest Speaker is Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, a curator with the Art and Words Show in Fort Worth. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in over 50 publications such as Lightspeed, Fairy Tale Review, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror as well as in six languages. She was the featured author at LeVar Burton's Dallas LeVar Reads event. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award, placed second for Selected Shorts’ Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and won the Grand Prize in the SyFy Channel's Battle the Beast contest; SyFy made and released an animated short of her short story "Party Tricks." The Art & Words Show has been featured in Poets & Writers.
 
Does your writing process for short stories differ from writing poetry, or is it similar? 
It's totally different. I am a very casual poet, so I usually only write poetry when the mood strikes. Whereas with fiction, where I've chosen to concentrate the bulk of my attention, I try to write every day and plan projects in advance. I also heavily revise fiction, where I don't do so with poetry. With poems, I'm writing more for myself than with the idea that I will share them. I only share the stuff that comes out near-finished. With fiction, the idea is always that I'm writing a first draft and will return to it again and again before sending it out into the world. 

How did the idea for the Art and Words Show come about? 
​I needed a project for an assignment in my MFA, and I wanted to do something collaborative, that involved artists of another medium. My mom owns an art gallery in Fort Worth, so I thought that would be perfect. I'd seen similar shows done with just poetry, and I wanted to expand it to flash fiction and nonfiction, and I also wanted to include speculative fiction. In fact, I ended up focusing on speculative fiction. 

Can you talk about a memorable collaboration from a past Art and Words Show? 
There have been so many! Stacy Tompkins' responses spring to mind. I'll talk specifically about Stacy's response to Houston writer Layla Al-Bedawi's "To Escape the Witch's House," which appears online here in Liminal Stories. Stacy created a sculpture with handmade dolls and strangely textured bodily fluids. It was the most tactile art I've seen in the show yet, and it was so creepy and cool to see how deeply she'd combed Layla's story. 

Today we're excited to feature another one of our workshop instructors, author Thomas McNeely! A native of Houston, Texas, Thomas has received fellowships for his writing from the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, and the Dobie Paisano Program at the University of Texas at Austin.  He has taught fiction writing at Stanford University, Emerson College, The University of New Hampshire, Inprint Houston, and Writespace.  His short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Epoch, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories and New Stories from the South; his stories have been short-listed for the O. Henry, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize.  Ghost Horse, his first novel, received the Gival Press Novel Award, was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.  He currently teaches at Emerson College, Boston, and the Stanford Online Writing Workshop, and is at work on a collection of linked stories set in Houston.

What book/story/poem have you read recently that you’re really excited about?
Love Me Back, by Dallas author Merritt Tierce, left me speechless; I've also enjoyed the novels Body and Bread, by San Antonio's Nan Cuba, and Mayhem, by Austin-based Elizabeth Harris.  The poetry collection Nightbloom and Cenote, by Houston's own Leslie Contreras Schwartz, is a powerful collection.

How did you first enter the publishing industry?
I don't really consider myself part of the publishing industry.  I teach fiction at the Stanford Online Writing Studio and literature and critical theory in the Emerson College Honors Program, and write and publish short stories.  My stories have recently appeared in Epoch and Crazyhorse magazines.

How do you replenish your creative well?
Teaching actually feeds my creative process, because I get to engage with the possibilities that stories offer, which is limitless.

What would you tell your younger (15-year-old) self?
Read more, get out of your own head, and put your work out in front of an audience.  When I was 15, I was in a punk rock band in Houston, and one of my regrets is not playing a show at the Lawndale Arts Annex, which was within walking distance of where I grew up.  I also only went to see one show there, The Meat Puppets, which was a riot masquerading as a show, which is what rock and roll should be.  I wish that I had spent more time at the Cabaret Voltaire, the legendary all-ages club downtown.

What advice would you give to new writers just starting to write their first book? 
Write about something that other people will be interested in reading.

Want to hear more from Thomas McNeely at Writefest? His schedule will be posted on our website soon, and he's also teaching our Literary Fiction workshop this year - spaces are going fast, so get your soon!

Today we are excited to feature one of our Writefest Keynote Speakers, Phong Nguyen!

He is the author of a novel, The Adventures of Joe Harper, and two short story collections: Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History and Memory Sickness. He is currently the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri.

What is the best advice you can give to someone who is looking to write their first book?
I'm going to give two answers to this question:

A) Read widely. Saul Bellow said that "A writer is a reader moved to emulation." It will not only make you a better and more versatile writer, but it will furnish you with new ideas and give you a sense of what works and what doesn't in the context of literature. Reading regularly is also a good cure for writer's block. If you read enough, sooner or later you will find that you have something to say. 

​B) Follow your curiosity. Sometimes new writers feel a sense of urgency, that they must write a book and publish it right away. But often one's writing is better served by simply exploring, not rushing things, but allowing yourself to pursue whatever it is you are passionate about at the moment. Allowing the act of writing to become an act of discovery will not only make the act of writing more fulfilling, but the resulting book will then be more apt to surprise you (and your readers).

Want to hear more from Phong Nguyen at Writefest? He'll be speaking Saturday morning at the festival, and his detailed schedule will be posted on our website soon.

Today’s Featured Writefest Speaker is Chloe N. Clark, an editor with Cotton Xenomorph.
Her work appears in Apex, Booth, Glass, Little Fiction, Uncanny, and more. Her chapbook The Science of Unvanishing Objects is out from Finishing Line Press and her debut full length collection, Your Strange Fortune, will be out Summer 2019. She also teaches at Iowa State University and writes for Nerds of a Feather.

What has been the biggest challenge in your writing career so far?
The biggest challenge is just realizing that as much as I love writing and get joy from it, it is also a tremendous amount of work. That not only includes the time it tacks, but also the emotional and mental toll it can have on one. I have to be very cognizant of reminding myself that I can't write everything and often that is very hard.

​How have your literary inspirations influenced your work?
In so many ways. The books of my childhood fueled my will to write and the joy it gives me, the books I read today are the ones that keep me going--whether it's the way that Colson Whitehead fuses speculative elements into his work in a way that makes them feel more real or the way that Ada Limon crafts a poem that manages to break my heart and fix it all in one line.

What project are you working on that you are excited for people to read?
​I have two that I'm very excited about. I'm currently working on a novel about space exploration and the human cost of our desire to go beyond what we know. I am also currently sending a poetry manuscript out on submission about the way that we experience bodies--physical human bodies but also bodies of land, cultural bodies, and bodies of knowledge.

Want to hear more from Chloe N. Clark at Writefest? Her schedule will be posted on our website soon!

Today’s Featured Writefest Speaker is Kathryn Kulpa, the author of Girls on Film, a flash fiction collection, and Pleasant Drugs, a short story collection. She serves as flash fiction editor at Cleaver magazine and has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College. Her work appears in Smokelong Quarterly, 100 Word Story, Pidgeonholes, and many other journals and anthologies. 

What are some common traps aspiring writers fall into when seeking to get published?
Speaking from my own experience as an eager teen writer trying to get published, I think two common problems are, first, trying to publish before you, or your work, is ready, and second, sending work out haphazardly without taking the time to research your market. For example, when I was 15, I wrote a story about a World War I pilot falling in love with a French woman--not that I knew anything more about World War I pilots than what I'd read in Snoopy and the Red Baron comics!--and sent it to the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Ladies' Home Journal--because those were the only magazines I knew that published stories! I later worked as an editor for Merlyn's Pen, a magazine that published only teen writers, and that encouraged teens to write about their own lives and concerns. I wished I had known about it when I was that lonely, small-town 15-year-old trying to "be a writer" with no idea of what that even meant. 

But for new writers of any age, I think it's important to take some classes and/or find a helpful peer workshop group so you can get feedback on your work before you focus on trying to publish it. It's also vital to do your research magazines, literary journals, and book publishers before you submit to them to find out what kind of work they are publishing. 

What is the most important aspect of an author-editor relationship?
As a writer who has published in many journals, I have benefited from some specific and insightful suggestions from editors that led me to revise a story and make it stronger.  As an editor for an online journal, I try to give that same kind of directed, specific feedback. In other words, rather than saying "the ending doesn't work," a comment like "I think introducing a new character at the end is the wrong note; I'd rather see the focus return to the protagonist and her sister, to bring the story full circle" gives the writer something concrete to work with. Editors don't often have the time to make these kinds of suggestions, so when they do, know that your story made a deep impression on them. 

What has been your favorite project to work on?
I enjoyed putting together the stories for my chapbook Girls on Film, because it gave me a chance to look at my work and see how similar themes worked themselves out in different stories. 

Want to hear more from Kathryn Kulpa at Writefest? Her schedule will be posted on our website soon, and she's also teaching our Flash Fiction workshop this year - spaces are going fast, so get your soon!

Today’s featured Writefest speaker is Kate Martin Williams, writer, editor and co-owner of Bloomsday Literary. She attended the University of Tennessee and earned a Master of Arts degree in English with a creative writing emphasis from the University of Tennessee. She holds a master’s degree in teaching from Rice University, and in a former life, she chilled her writerly bones on an ice rink as a competitive (but decidedly non-combative) figure skater and coach. Her writing life has led her to bear witness to the stories of activists, survivors, visionaries, and the everyday people who make a difference by living engaged lives. She lives in Houston with three ridiculously lovely children, ridiculously supportive husband, and their dog, Abigail, who’s just plain ridiculous.

Williams had a conversation with Writespace about her editorial approach at Bloomsday.

What do you look for when choosing works for publication?
 Bloomsday is seeking to work with writers of diverse ethnic backgrounds, with voices that are distinct, unique, and unafraid. We look especially to publish people of color whose work has not historically been given the same opportunities to rise to the surface in a crowded literary landscape. We are accepting novels, short story collections, creative nonfiction, and poetry. The mission of Bloomsday is two-fold: we strive to publish voices that have and continue to be underrepresented in traditional publishing, and also create community within our city by sharing stories, striving to reach wider audiences. So when we evaluate new work, we’re thinking about how this story-telling will stitch us together, will shed some light on the human experience. In short we are not scared of MORE. More voices, more light, more stories, not LESS. 

How do you replenish your creative well?
I get really encouraged (and this sounds weird) when I hear people in the “old guard" publishing world saying the same old thing about the same writers, pretending they’re doing something different. We have lots of work to do to turn publishing towards new voices, but there’s room for people who have a focused eye to shepherd good work to a hungry audience. The more they drone on about old stuff, the more it pushes us to seek out what’s happening on the razor’s edge, carving out our place. When I get to hang with people who are pursuing new ways to communicate, different modes of expression, pushing art to be more and more human in ways that reach new audiences, I feel like I could do this all day and every day. We are a team of three people. One of our partners, Phuc Luu, calls this work that feeds the soul. We’re too surrounded by really amazing creators to be uninspired.
 
How has your writing experience influenced you as an editor/publisher? 
Jessica Cole (co-founding editor on the Bloomsday team) and I went to graduate school together, and wrote novels on our laptops back-to-back. We cut our teeth writing together (we even have a novel we’re co-authoring together). We come to the table as writers first, writers who work in collaboration. We treat our authors in the same way we want to be treated by our editors. We build relationships grounded in trust and mutual respect from which the work emerges more strongly honed by the collaboration. If the process isn’t that, then why collaborate with an editor at all? We’ve had the benefit of good editing from good friends who respect the work for what it is trying to be. That’s how we approach our authors’ work. 

What would you tell your younger (15-year-old) self?
BE SKEPTICAL OF THE SYLLABUS. Read more people of color, more women, more works in translation. Figure out who made the list, figure out who they left out, then go make your own list. I spent too much time reading what people told me to. 

What’s one thing you want people to remember about Bloomsday?
I think there are many, many lovely cities in this country. Cities I love. But what Houston has that no other city has is a wellspring of culture that makes us a place brimming with Voice. We know that we’re the most diverse of the large cities in the US, but not a lot of other folks do. (Can I tell you how many times Angelenos/as try to tell me they are the most diverse?) Bloomsday wants to be a part of letting the rest of the world in on this little secret. By publishing great voices, from this town, but also from abroad, we are saying that listening (and caring about) these disparate voices is to our benefit as a people—as humans—who have to figure out how to love together. 

Want to hear more from Kate Martin Williams at Writefest? Her schedule will be posted on our website soon. She will also be taking pitches during our pitch sessions! 

Today’s featured Writefest speaker is J. Bruce Fuller, a poet and acquisitions editor at Texas Review Press. He is a Louisiana native. His chapbooks include The Dissenter's Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared at The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature, among others. 

Fuller has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Stanford University, where he was a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. He received his MFA from McNeese and his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He currently teaches at Sam Houston State University where he is Acquisitions Editor at Texas Review Press. 

How has being a poet influenced you as an editor? 
It helps me to remember that there is an artist, a real person, and their work, at stake. Publishing can be a very business-oriented atmosphere, and when I am working on a project it helps that I know what it feels like to be on both sides of the table. I consider myself to be a writer-friendly editor, because I am a writer too, and that is how I want to be treated.
 
Poetry too, prepares us to engage with heightened language and metaphorical language, so even when evaluating fiction, nonfiction, or scholarly prose, I am always looking for the work that is operating in the realm of heightened language. 
 
What would you tell your younger self? 
That list is too long to go into here, but I remember as a 17-year-old, thinking that I wanted to be a poet, and I would say to myself repeatedly, “1998 is going to be a big year for me…” 

Looking back, I laugh because it was so ridiculous in a way. I thought I was ready to have a book out, and that I was ready for all that comes along with that. I was a kid, sure, but what I didn’t realize was that it would take another 20 years of working, studying, and disappointment to achieve just a fraction of what I used to daydream about as a teenager. I’m afraid if I told my younger self these things I would have been too discouraged to continue. So I probably wouldn’t tell him anything. 

What keeps you inspired to write day after day?
 A professor once told me that it is easy to be a poet before you’re 30. I was 31 at the time. This idea struck me because I had read many of the statistics of how many people quit writing post-MFA and at the time I had just finished my MFA, so I was concerned that I would fall into the same problem. It is understandable why this happens, and there are many factors, but often it boils down to life getting in the way. Because I had been warned of this I have tried to remain vigilant about my writing time. Between work and kids and daily life I often have to force myself to take the time to just sit and work on my writing. There’s no magic pill you can take; you just have to make writing a priority, however that works for you. I was lucky to have many good role models.
 
Setting aside the time to write is not always enough, and when poems are not coming easily I often read. Reading always works for me because it is so inspiring to read great work and it makes me want to join that conversation and make my poems just as good. I love seeing what my colleagues are doing, and even if no poems come to me, and hour or two reading great poems is time well spent.

Want to hear more from J. Bruce Fuller at Writefest? His schedule will be posted on our website soon. He will also be taking pitches during our pitch sessions!

We are proud to have Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton, the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, as a keynote speaker at Writefest 19. 

This mother, wife, educator, seven-time National Poetry Slam Competitor and Head Coach of the Houston VIP Poetry Slam Team was ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World. Her genre-bending poetry has engendered unconventional collaborations with groups as disparate as the Rockets and the Houston Ballet. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and the TEDx circuit. An opera for which she wrote the libretto premieres at the Houston Grand Opera in the spring of 2020. 

As founding member and executive director of VIP Arts Houston, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy and the arts in underserved populations, she seeks to build more bridges that amplify the voices of artists in and around the nation. Her pen name, D.E.E.P., originated in middle school and is an acronym for Determined to Excel in Everything Possible.

Her next collection of poems, Newsworthy – published by Bloomsday Literary – is set to release Saturday, April 20. To celebrate, a special event is scheduled at 6:30 p.m. at the Wilhemina Cullen Robertson Auditorium at the University of Houston, Downtown.

Deborah graciously agreed to a Writespace interview and provided a glimpse into her creative process and dynamic mind.

What's the best part of being the Poet Laureate for the City of Houston?
Just being with people. The Poet Laureate position has given me access to so many types of people and places that I wouldn't have ever met or visited before. I recently got to travel to Leipzig, Germany to read and work in translation. I remember walking the streets and thinking "How did I get here?" Over the course of my term, I have asked myself that in wonder quite often.

How has Houston influenced your writing?
Houston has taught me resiliency. Prior to moving here, my writing was a very selfish thing. I wrote to be listened to. I think Houston has sharpened my ears and taught me that so many things around me are ringing worth stories. Even before Harvey, when I was a young adult settling into myself, Houston was a testing ground for my character and strength. I think that has shaped my writing in all kinds of ways.

What would you tell your younger (15-year-old) self?
Take more risks. I often regret more of what I didn't do than what I have done. I think that and, being a writer can be a real thing, even for you. In Black and Brown communities, we rarely affirm that being an artist or a creative is valuable before it is successful. I would remind myself that there has to be a first in everything and that I am talented enough to be that. I think I am still reminding myself of that.

What pushed you into poetry?
My high school English teacher, Mrs. McCurry pushed me into writing. I mean, I was already writing stories. She pushed me into poetry. I remember writing response poems for A Midsummer's Night Dream. She made me believe any of it was worth it. She actually introduced me to poetry slam too, from there, I couldn't get enough of it. I owe her more than she will ever know.

What keeps you inspired to write day after day, year after year? 
Prior to this year, I wouldn't have known how to answer this. Now, I have had to put self-care practices in place. 

I try to get somewhere quiet at least once a week. This could be sitting at a park or just stealing 5 minutes in a closet when my kids are distracted. A little bit goes a long way. I have also recently taken up gardening. My grandmother loved her garden. There is something about tilling the earth and reaping a harvest of something that you planted that is highly gratifying.

What is Newsworthy about?
I think it is about a lot of things. On the surface, racism, police abuse, the news. But on a deeper level, it is about fear and how it creeps in until it is normal. It is about how it squats until you forget who owns the house. It is about the people who suffer the living with it and the anger that makes love to it in the daytime. I hope that all of that is examined. Not just how a people could watch and ingest, but how our society has made racial targeting a newsworthy event that all partake in.

Want to hear more from Deborah Mouton at Writefest? Her schedule will be posted on the Writefest website soon. And don't miss the Newsworthy book launch on April 20th!