Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments by Jackson Bliss

I imagine conversations they might have or should have. I think about my characters a lot like they're friends of mine.

I'll know when they're ready.įor Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?Īll the time. For me, so much of writing is feeling, thinking, researching, flirting with ideas, and building new homes with language. I also give myself permission to not write.

I give myself permission to revise, cut, and delete text whenever I’m not feeling creative or ready to write, which is still a form of writing no matter what people say. What authors do you read when you aren’t writing? I find inspiration in play, specifically the experimentation of form, genre, and voice, which is why I always work on multiple manuscripts at the same time so I’ll always have a bunch of projects I can jump into, which helps demystify the singular artifact.

I find inspiration in love, imagination, counterfactual narratives, immigrant stories, cultural intersectionality, and the limitations of memory. Follow me on Twitter & IG: inspires you to write? I'm the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and live in LA with my wife and our two fashionably dressed dogs. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, and the Columbia Journal, among others. He lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs.I'm the winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the speculative hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). He has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Fiction International, Pleiades, Hobart, African American Review, Stand (UK), 3:am Magazine, The Good Men Project, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. His short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017).

Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments by Jackson Bliss