Siel Ju's Blog, page 6

I’m excited and honored to have a short story each in the Summer 2018 issues of The Southern Review and Confrontation — two of the literary journals I most admire!

“Alone or Someone Else” in The Southern Review is about a young woman who gets pregnant after a one night stand with an action film star. Here’s a short excerpt:

Even after I was showing, I kept working at the lingerie shop, the trashy one in Westwood. All my coworkers were UCLA students a half decade my junior. They were nice to...

Finally, a writing conference even starving writers can afford!

Make a day trip to North San Diego County this fall for the Fallbrook Writer’s Conference, and you’ll get to attend craft presentations, learn about the business aspects of writing, pitch your book to an agent, and have lunch with an author — all for free.

Falbrook Writer’s Conference
Sunday, September 16, 2018, 9 am to 4:30 pm
Fallbrook Library, 124 S. Mission Rd., Fallbrook, Calif.

I’m really looking forward to this event becau...

Goodbye, Vitamin is one of those novels that sound super depressing when you read the back cover — but then ends up being funny and full of joy and love when you start turning the pages!

Which is to say — I realize the premise of Goodbye, Vitamin sounds bleak. Ruth, a 30-year-old who just got dumped by her fiance and feels lost and sad, moves back in with her parents in Los Angeles — partly to help her father who has Alzheimer’s, partly just to escape her life.

There’s wry humor, though, eve...

The MFA community at Antioch University Los Angeles has its own online literary journal called Lunch Ticket, and the Summer/Fall 2018 issue features an interview with me about Cake Time and the writing life. Here’s an excerpt:

KK: In Cake Time, readers follow an unnamed narrator as she dives into one bad relationship after another. The anonymity of the narrator and her experiences in dating gives her an “everywoman” feeling, like she could be any one of us. What drew you to center the experi...

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Liska Jacobs used to work as an archivist at The Getty. Now she writes novels — her first one, Catalina, starring a woman who works at MOMA.

Does doing one kind of beautiful work make you miss the other? I asked Liska that and other questions in this interview. Read on to hear her thoughts on the dualities of Los Angeles, the pleasures of anonymous drinking in hotels, and the value of breathing.

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Siel:  Why Catalina? What i...

Riverside City College has its own print annual literary journal called Muse, and the Spring 2018 issue features an interview with me about Cake Time and the writing life. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: You run a blog where you interview authors each month and do book giveaways. What is the most important piece of advice you would give someone who is looking to start a similar, literary-based blog? How do you offset the hidden costs involved in this work?

A: I would say start small, and be consistent...

You know those times when you feel like you’ve totally fucked your life up — so you may as well fuck it up more? Give in to that impulse vicariously by reading Catalina.

Catalina stars Elsa, a thirty-something woman who leaves SoCal for NYC, has an affair with her boss at MoMA, and gets “downsized.” To recover from all that, she decides to return to LA for a weekend trip to Catalina with college friends — a group that includes her ex husband, his new girlfriend, a predatory and entitled rich...

I have a fantasy about joining a coworking space. In this fantasy, I suddenly become a super-prolific fiction writer of the Joyce Carol Oates variety. This is because I’m no longer wasting precious minutes waiting for slow wifi or looking for a place to plug in my laptop or rationalizing why I really deserve a chocolate croissant.

Which is to say — I waste a lot of time when I work at coffee shops. Despite that, I’ve been reluctant to join a coworking space. My feeling is that if I’m going t...

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Give your friends pseudonyms. That’s one piece of simple, concrete, and practical advice Chloe Caldwell gives to budding personal essay writers.

It makes sense, given the intimacy and detail of Chloe’s poignant and hilarious work. I love her collection I’ll Tell You in Person — and got to pick her brain this month about essay writing, teaching, working with indie presses, and a lot more.

Read on for more great essay writing a...

What happens when you write a book of personal essays? A lot, apparently, according to Chloe Caldwell, who writes this about her first essay collection, Legs Get Led Astray: “I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I not published that essay collection, because almost all of my best friends, and everyone I’ve slept with since then, I met through that book.”

I haven’t read that book yet, but I read the above quote in Chloe’s most recent essay collection, I’ll Tell You In Person, which...