Welcoming our 2021 Fall Fellows for Writing Downtown Residency in Las Vegas

We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas: Mylan Gray, Sarah Thankam Mathews, Adrian De Leon, and Sasha Issenberg.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment next to Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.

Our apartment is in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.

Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Mylan gray - August 2021

Mylan Gray is a recent graduate of Stanford University where he studied Playwriting and Black Studies. There, he received the Kennel Jackson Jr. Departmental Award for his Honors thesis play, Buried in Blood: an afro-surrealist conjuring, healing ancestral wounds. He is also a new member of the Tank Theatre’s LIT Council, a playwriting group for Men of Color. In addition to being a playwright he is a screenwriter and short film director.

With a deep reverence for Brazil, and a penchant for spiritual journeying, he draws on the fantastical, magical, and divine to speak healing words of love for 21st century woes. When he is not writing, reading, or watching films, he is in the woods soaking up the songs of birds and listening to the worlds oldest keeper of stories: the trees.

About his project: SPLIX is a dystopian, animated series where a group of POC street teens band together in the outskirts of a private city to defeat corrupt tech magnates waging war on the street organizations in order to sell surveillance equipment and increase militarized policing.

HERITAGE is a short story where a promising young cadet, disenfranchised with her colonial spaceship's journey to conquer the solar system, rebels after her best friend is imprisoned for making musical instruments on a ship where creation is forbidden.

Sarah thankam Mathews - October 2021

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She has been awarded scholarships from the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Asian American Writers Workshop, the Millay Colony, and the Napa Valley Writers Workshop. Her writing has been published in AGNI, the Kenyon Review, and Best American Short Stories 2020. Her novel ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT is forthcoming from Viking in August 2022.

About her project: Sarah will be working on a project set mostly in Oman, about migration and global capitalism, girlhood and becoming.

Adrian de leon - november 2021

Adrian De Leon is a historian, poet, and multimedia educator from Manila by way of Scarborough, Ontario. He is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he teaches Asian American Studies. Adrian is the co-editor of FEEL WAYS: A Scarborough Anthology (March 2021), and the author of two poetry collections: Rouge (2018) and barangay: an offshore poem (October 2021). His writing can be found in Catapult, Joyland, The Puritan, and The Margins (Asian American Writers' Workshop). Adrian is the co-host and co-writer of the PBS miniseries, A People's History of Asian America (2021).

About his project: I will be working on my first creative nonfiction book, RADIANT: Love Letters from a City on the Brink. This is a collection of epistolary essays written from the diverse and tumultuous town of Scarborough, Ontario (Canada), within the blast radius of the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, and built atop radiation hazards such as a major power line throughway and nuclear waste dumps. RADIANT imagines what it means to love intimately and lead full lives while writing from a place of ruins and premature death.

Sasha issenberg - December 2021

Sasha Issenberg is the author of four books, most recently The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage, which The New York Times designated an Editors' Choice selection and O: The Oprah Magazine called ""part Grisham-esque legal thriller, part Sorkin-esque political drama, and part Maddow-esque historical yarn."" His earlier books cover topics from the global sushi business to medical tourism and the science of political campaigns. He is the Washington correspondent for Monocle and teaches in the political science department at UCLA.

About his project: narrative history of the largest election-crime dragnet in American history, which took place in Terre Haute, Indiana, just over a century ago.

Hogarth Editorial Director Alexis Washam on Standing Out in the Publishing World

Written by Sarika Karra, Writing Atlas Fellow

Plympton Writing Atlas Fellows recently had the opportunity to speak with Hogarth Editorial Director Alexis Washam. Alexis spoke about the roles and responsibilities of individuals in corporate publishing, what editors typically look for in book manuscripts, and breaking into the publishing industry. Heidi Pitlor, the Editorial Director of Plympton, conducted the Q&A and shared her insight on careers in publishing. With their immense experience and expertise, Heidi and Alexis encouraged Plympton Fellows to think about the ways they can stand out and carve out their own paths.

Alexis began at Viking Penguin as an administrative assistant and later became a founding editor of Hogarth, an imprint at Penguin Random House which emphasizes new literary voices and a global perspective. She has edited books by several notable authors with Hogarth, some of whom have gone on to win or be nominated for honors like the National Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Women's Prize for Fiction. The process of acquiring books and getting them successfully to publication is an arduous one that requires tenacity, Alexis noted. 

When Alexis reads manuscripts, she typically looks for pieces with strong voices and writing that feels like it could only have been done by one person. With some pieces, Alexis said, it can seem like the author lacked an original idea and tried to mimic other successful authors’ style of writing. She warned that it can be difficult to maintain an individual voice in a large crowd often driven by trends in reading and literature.  

She also tends to stay away from pieces that have very showy, lyrical writing, and prefers unadorned, straightforward prose. Manuscripts also have to feel complete; in this day and age, it can be difficult to convince a publisher to take on a manuscript that isn't already highly anticipated and in very good shape, especially at a large publishing house.

When Alexis started as an assistant, she realized that many international writers were overlooked by other editors. By combing through catalogues of international publishers who were selling rights to their books, she made a case for books that were highly acclaimed or had sold many copies in their home countries. Alexis started off with an Australian title, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, and published it for US audiences with Penguin. She received more international submissions from then on. This method gave Alexis a bit of an edge as she developed her own niche in publishing and went after interesting titles that weren’t huge hits overseas. She learned that some novels translated into English can be successful, even if they hadn’t received much attention in their home countries due to the content of the stories or themes of the book. 

The results of Alexis’ efforts have been rewarding; recently, two of the books she brought forth — short story collections by Mariana Enriquez, an Argentinian literary horror writer and the author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed —  received enough attention to garner a review by Francine Prose in The New York Review of Books.

One big challenge of being in the industry, Alexis said, is the sheer number of books that don't end up working out. It's hard enough to push a book through the acquisition process; it’s even harder to edit a book, support the author for over a year, and then watch it not get the reviews it deserves. An editor simply has to keep moving forward in the hopes that something will work in the market. Absorbing that amount of failure requires persistence and grit.

For those who are interested in a publishing career, Alexis’ best advice is to be tenacious in the job search, go for any and all opportunities, and keep a sharp list of contacts. Social media can be a very useful tool in keeping up with the contemporary conversation around books, and has opened up many opportunities to forge authentic connections. Individuals should be able to hold meaningful discussions about books and share insightful opinions that demonstrate how they can bring a unique perspective to the publishing industry. 

Introducing our 2021 Summer Fellows for Writing Downtown Residency

We’re thrilled to announce the next three fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas: Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Selena Anderson and Juliana Brown Eyes.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment next to Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.

This year’s apartment will be in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.

Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain - June 2021

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He holds a BA in English creative writing from the University of Montana and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa. He was also a James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and more recently a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in volumes 1 and 2 of Off the Path: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers, Montana Quarterly, ESPN.com., The Yellow Medicine Review, and The Atlantic. He's currently at work on a novel. He is an unrecognized citizen of the Blackfeet Nation.

About his project: A novel about blood quantum laws and the way they play out on the ground in Indian Country, between people from the same community.

Selena Anderson - July 2021

Selena Anderson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Oxford American, The Baffler, Bomb, Georgia Review, and Fence. She has received fellowships from the Kimbilio Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Anderson is an assistant professor at San José State University, where she also directs a reading series. She is working on a novel.

About her project: I'll be spending my time in residence to revise a few chapters of a novel and write a new story. The novel Quinella is the tale of a newlywed who as a means of self-preservation, makes a life-sized doll of herself, complete with all her hopes and obsessions. But then she loses the doll. Various people in the town find the doll and reclaim her in ways by inventing new stories to temper the feelings of doom and uncertainty they begin to notice when she’s around. The story is about a slave who casts a spell on her master which day by day slowly turns him to sugar.

Juliana Brown Eyes - August 2021

Juliana Brown Eyes is an Indigenous/Polynesian writer, director, and artist from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Oglala Sioux Tribe, the only tribe to never surrender to the US government.

Juliana has been featured in many publications including the UK’s Marie Claire: Native American Women Fighting to Preserve Their Culture, Huffington Post, BBC, Radio New Zealand and Glamour Magazine for her contributions through film and music in social justice movements like the Standing Rock movement.

For the past few years she’s worked on a variety of film and directing projects. Most recently living in Brazil, writing and directing alongside Katia Lund, Oscar-winning co-director of City of God. Together they created a 6 part docu-series (currently in post-production) on the oil industry and the Trump administration’s extraction of natural resources from Indigenous lands that are supposed to be protected by tribal treaties with the US government.

Capturing ancestral knowledge through an Indigenous lens, Juliana strives to put Indigenous stories at the forefront of pop culture and box office cinemas. Utilizing her innate disposition for community activism and cultural revitalization, Juliana has captured stories from Indigenous cultures around the world traveling the Amazon, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America.

About her project: I will be working on a 6 part episodic series about an Indigenous female vigilante confronting the issues of sex-trafficking and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) tracking.

Demystifying the Publishing Industry with Helen Thomaides

Written by Morgan Canaan, Writing Atlas Fellow

In early February, Plympton Story Atlas Fellows met with Helen Thomaides, Assistant Editor at W.W. Norton and former Plympton Fellow, to learn how aspiring editors and writers might breach the publishing industry’s gate-kept exterior. She detailed her career path and average day at work before graciously answering questions from Fellows.

Helen, who graduated from Stanford in 2017 with a BA in English Literature and Italian Studies, has interned at Folio Literary and New Leaf Literary. For her, it’s a thrill to be able to “read for a living,” but she advised eager Fellows to assess whether they’d be willing to read for work instead of pleasure. While reading for work, editors must gauge a book’s commercial viability alongside personal enjoyment. The market is always in mind.

A book’s value is far less romanticized once it enters the publishing marketplace; a book is worth the money it might make. When asked how to assess a manuscript’s monetary value, Helen pointed to the importance of being well-read. Editors must know the market performance of “comp titles,” contemporary books comparative in style or theme to a new manuscript, which aid in estimating the manuscript’s potential worth.

Once ready to make a bid, Helen explained how a manuscript might be acquired: if the project goes to auction, the setup might be a “best-bids” auction, in which publishing houses are blind to competing houses, or an auction in rounds, in which their competition is visible. Manuscripts which are “polished” and “current to the moment” often receive higher bids, though a lot depends on genre.

When asked if she’d ever advocate for a manuscript she didn’t enjoy but believed could be commercially successful, Helen explained that both personal investment in a story and belief in its marketability must be present. Editors typically spend too much time with a book to dislike it, but more importantly, Helen added, “You have to be enthusiastic about a title or nobody else will be.”

 Helen explained that the main driving force behind the publishing industry is enthusiastic persuasion. After a writer convinces an agent of their work’s merit, the agent must convince the publishing company, the publishing company must convince the booksellers, and the booksellers must convince you, the reader.

But this advocacy often relies on shared taste, which has historically put writers of marginalized backgrounds at a disadvantage. The reality is that most of today’s published books are by white authors. Though recently there has been an increase in literary prizes awarded to writers of color, Helen pointed out that this trend may contribute to the illusion that diversity in authorship is increasing more rapidly than it is, referencing the New York Times article "Just How White Is the Book Industry?”

Beyond the question of how to enter the publishing industry practically— given the limited, underpaid, yet ever-essential internships available only to a privileged few— lies the question of how to enter the publishing industry ethically, given its failures.

But working to repair the publishing industry’s failings requires an understanding of its mechanics. With her vast publishing knowledge, Helen empowered Plympton Fellows to approach the industry with a deeper awareness of its demands and downfalls. As a former Plympton Fellow herself, she encouraged Fellows that the skills they’re honing with Plympton, specifically being able to “distill a book into a few sentences to capture its essence,” are “crucial” for editorial positions. With Helen’s insight alongside inspiration from Plympton’s own creative approach to publishing, Fellows were energized to shape a future publishing industry which is more imaginative, inclusive, and open to change.    

Reflecting on “Three Times my Career Almost Ended” with Author Ken Liu

By Issay Matsumoto, Plympton Writing Atlas Fellow

Last week, Plympton Story Atlas Fellows had the privilege to speak with award-winning author, futurist tech consultant, lawyer, and former software engineer Ken Liu.

Addressing the Fellows building Story Atlas, a catalogue database of short stories accessible to film and TV producers, Ken titled his talk, “Three Times my Career Almost Ended.” It’s a curious title for a talk given by a Hugo Award-winning writer whose work has spanned six original novels and short story collections, dozens of magazine publications, and a handful of award-winning Chinese-to-English translations.

Nevertheless, Ken insisted that his failures are more interesting than his successes.

Ken’s journey started shortly after college, when he first seriously pursued short story publication. After a slew of rejections, Ken began receiving acceptances to major publications. Following this newfound success, he wrote what he thought, at the time, was his greatest piece.

After almost two years of shopping this piece around and receiving rejection after rejection, Ken realized that he had been obsessing over the piece and hadn’t written anything new the entire time. 

His career almost failed for the first time because he had put all of his hopes and dreams into one story, and neglected to do the most important thing a writer could do: sit down and write.

“Almost every writing problem,” Ken advised the Plympton Fellows, “can be fixed by writing something new.”

So Ken did just that. As he continued his career outside of writing as a software engineer, a student at Harvard Law School, and a corporate lawyer, he found time to write during commutes and lunch breaks. 

But when his career began to take off again with major publications and national awards, he found it difficult to break free of the natural “desire to please.” This was the second time his career almost ended.

Ken advised the Fellows to interrogate the ways they have been socialized to please those assessing them, whether they are evaluating them in school or reading their work with a critical eye. Ken stressed that this tendency to please can be problematic in an industry that has been dominated by what he called the “universalist” literary approach. Writers of all backgrounds have been compelled to privilege the stories of middle-class, white, and suburban male characters that they are told are “universal.” Rather, writers from historically marginalized backgrounds must prioritize their own approaches to storytelling, speak to the readers they value, and sometimes even forgo those who will not attempt to understand them in good faith.

Ken explained that for him, storytelling is like building a house that the reader enters. Readers make themselves at home, bringing their own “baggage” and their own ways of making meaning. But, according to Ken, some readers will not understand or like living in the house that the writer constructs, and that is okay: “My house is not always for them.”

In describing the pitfalls of his career, Ken thoroughly debunked the false choices that plague this industry and promote selfishness over collaboration.

According to Ken, one of the most powerful ways writers can challenge these choices as individuals is by understanding the difference between goals and milestones. Too often, writers mistake milestones for goals. Following the insight of writer Tobias Buckell, a goal is something a writer can control: writing a certain number of words or finishing a manuscript. A milestone is something outside of a writer’s control: selling a book, or getting accepted by a magazine.

Writers who cannot understand this crucial difference are not only trapped by critics evaluating their work: lose sight of the basic task and art of writing. Worse yet, they are doomed to be consumed by the dangerous idea that storytelling rewards selfishness and egomania over collaboration.

For Ken, another powerful way to challenge the competitiveness of this industry is by focusing on community building. This realization saved Ken’s career the third time it almost ended.  Instead of enviously scrolling through Twitter, where writers often boasted their accomplishments, Ken took time away from his own writing and began to support other writers’ work. He found it incredibly rewarding to translate stories by Chinese authors for English-speaking audiences and volunteer for writers conferences.Ken found that by building solidarity among writers, sometimes across political borders, he could “make the pie bigger.”

“Why fight like rats over a few crumbs?” Ken asked the Plympton Fellows.

Moreover, supporting other writers helped him rediscover the driving force behind his own writing: making stories more accessible to a wider readership.

Ken’s time with us showed the Plympton Fellows how to make this possible and he was gracious with his advice for aspiring writers and generous in responding to questions. By focusing on collaboration and sharing career knowledge, writers can reject selfishness and insecurity and instead focus on the task of telling the stories we hope to tell.

Introducing our 2021 Winter Fellows for Writing Downtown Residency

We’re thrilled to announce the next four fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas: Dominica Phetteplace, Jane Pek, Kit Yan, Christopher Molnar, and Alex Jennings.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment next to Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.

This year’s apartment will be in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.

Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Dominica Phetteplace - Jan 2021

Dominica Phetteplace writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Asimov's, Zyzzyva, Clarkesworld and Lightspeed. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University.

Jane Pek - FEB 2021

Jane Pek was born and raised in Singapore, and now lives in New York. During the day (and sometimes night) she works as a lawyer at an investment company. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Brooklyn Review, Witness, and Conjunctions. Her debut novel The Verifiers is forthcoming from Vintage in 2022. She enjoys picking up different martial arts without being very good at any of them, reading coming-of-age novels, watching contemporary theatre, and cycling around the city in search of superlative almond croissants.

About her project: I will be revising a draft of my second novel, tentatively titled The Immersionist. The Immersionist is a literary science-fiction/wuxia quest narrative, set in a futuristic Singapore and a history-on-steroids version of medieval China, that explores class, migration and what it means to be human in an era of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and vast economic inequality. There will be swordfighting.

Philiane Phang - March 2021

Philiane Phang is a writer and director based in New York. She was recognized as the recipient of the Film Independent Ammon Foundation Fellowship at the Spirit Awards and awarded IFP’s Inaugural Phosphate Prize for a screenplay with a strong and complex female lead. Her short film, Gubagude Ko, starring Academy Award winner, Mahershala Ali, and developed with the support of American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women is currently airing on HBO. In 2017, Conde Nast and Indigenous Media commissioned her to write and direct a proof of concept for a TV series, The Row. Her feature project, The Space Between, was chosen to participate in Sundance Screenwriters Intensive, Sundance Producing Lab, Film Independent Screenwriting Lab, Film Independent Directing Lab, Berlinale Talents and Co-Production Market, and IFP’s - No Borders Co-Production Market. Philiane graduated from Rutgers University with a Juris Doctorate.

About her project: I am adapting Robert McCammon's short story 'The Deep End' into a feature film. The story follows a grief-stricken father who descends into madness after his son's mysterious death.

Christopher Molnar - April 2021

Chris Molnar is co-founder of the Writer's Block bookstore in Las Vegas. He is also founder and editorial director of Archway Editions, the new literary imprint of powerHouse Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster, that is publishing authors such as Ishmael Reed, Alice Notley and Paul Schrader.

He is a graduate of the Columbia University School of the Arts MFA program in fiction, editor of Unpublishable and the upcoming Archways anthologies (and organizer of their corresponding event series), and his writing has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn and The Shadow, among others.

About his project: My novel, Heaven’s Oblivion, is about the notorious model and stalker Nell Theobald. Perhaps most well known for being mauled by a lion during the 1966 International Automobile Show in New York City, she subsequently used the settlement money to fly around the world following the opera singer Birgit Nilsson. Inspired in part by the obscure novel Of Lena Geyer, which features a mysterious woman in black who always sits in the front row of an opera singer's performances, Theobald went beyond obsession into theft and forgery, sneaking into Nilsson's hotel rooms to steal mementos and letterhead, writing letters to herself as Nilsson using Nilsson’s stationary and with an eerily accurate eye towards her grammatical and linguistic tics.

Alex Jennings - May 2021

Alex Jennings is a teacher, author, and performer living in New Orleans. His writing has appeared in strangehorizons.com, podcastle, The Peauxdunque Review, Obsidian Lit, the Locus-Award-winning Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, as well as numerous anthologies including Stories for Chip, New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and Spicy Slipstream Stories. His debut collection, Here I Come and Other Stories was released by Fight On! Publications in 2012. He was born in Wiesbaden (Germany) and raised in Gaborone (Botswana), Paramaribo (Surinam), and Tunis (Tunisia) as well as the United States. Find out more at alexjennings.net.

About his project: Currently at work on an SF novella, multiple short stories/poetry, and an as-yet-untitled novel project which is under contract with Orbit/Redhook.

This novel is a sort of blaxploitation Pippi Longstocking musical set in New Orleans. The next novel slated is currently called All The Scenes, and it set in an alterrnate 90s Tunisia at the American Cooperative School while war rages elsewhere in the solar system.

Kit Yan

Kit Yan is a Yellow American New York based artist, born in Enping, China, and raised in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Kit is a Vivace Award winner for big ideas in musical theater, a 2020 Musical Theater Factory Makers Fellow, a 2020 Playwright’s Center fellow, 2020 Company One/Pao Arts Fellow, 2020 Lincoln Center Writer in residence, and former Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow and MacDowell Fellow.

Their work has been produced by the American Repertory Theater, the Smithsonian, NAMT, Musical Theater Factory, the New York Musical Festival, Mixed Blood, and Diversionary Theater.

About their project: T(estoserone): a new musical. Interstate: a new musical.

Update: Due to Hawaii Border restrictions during the pandemic, Kit was unable to join us for March 2021, as previously scheduled.

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Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown@plympton.com.

To find out even more, visit http://www.writingdowntown.com

Plympton with Amazon Original Stories Announce Faraway, a Collection of Fairy Tales for the Here and Now

Fairy tales have always been a way to escape into another world, one full of magic and mystery, chance encounters with creatures good and evil, and adventures around every corner. For these unprecedented modern times, Plympton teamed up with Amazon Original Stories to explore how traditional fairy tales would look in the “here and now,” and how the role of myths and legends has transformed our cultural, historical, and literary landscape. What new wisdom could a modern folktale depart upon a contemporary reader? How can the classic morals endemic to fairy tales be conveyed in fresh and different ways? And what would a fairy tale look like today, in a world that seems so futuristic compared to the days of yore?

We contributed three stories to Faraway to examine how fairy tales would look in an experimental modern setting. The collection of five mystical, suspenseful, and fantastical short stories imagines an upside-down world where villains and heroes clash, the past and present collide, and monsters hide in high schools and house parties.

Ken Liu’s story from the collection, titled The Cleaners, has been optioned by Amazon Studios and is currently in development as a television series. Liu’s piece, which is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, will be produced in association with Orlando Bloom’s studio, Amazing Owl, with Bloom executive producing the series. Other names working on the project include Dominic Orlando, writer of The OA and Mindhunter, and producer Adam Karasick, along with Liu himself executive producing.

This is not Liu’s first foray into the television production world. From Deadline, “His short story The Message is being developed as a feature film by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment, while [his short story series] Good Hunting became an episode of Netflix’s animated series Love, Death + Robots and AMC’s Pantheon is adapted from his interconnected series of short stories.”

The Cleaners tells of a near-future world where inanimate objects carry traces of the memories of their previous owners, with treasured or controversial objects carrying intense, even painful memories of their past. Certain people who possess a special power can relive these memories by touching the objects, and some work as cleaners, scrubbing the old memories from objects so that they can become new and untainted. Liu’s story follows a young man working as a cleaner at his family’s business as he undertakes a strange new cleaning project on a mysterious set of items.

Our other two stories in the collection include:

Rainbow Rowell’s The Prince and the Troll, a love story about a normal man who falls for a beautiful yet mysterious troll who lives under a bridge. As he struggles to bring her out of her shell — and out from the mud she’s covered in — they develop a heartwarming connection that challenges their previously-unrelated lifestyles. How can two creatures from such different worlds learn to live side by side? Rowell is the author of the Simon Snow series and the bestselling novel Eleanor & Park. 

Gayle Foreman’s hilarious story The Wickeds, which revisits the mothers of Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel. Foreman is the author of If I Stay, the number-one bestselling novel that was adapted into the 2014 film of the same name. Clever and subversive, this story examines the forgotten lives of the “evil” mothers and “wicked” women that lurk in the background of many classic fairy tales. The three disgraced mothers set out to retell their stories and right the wrongs of history in this funny, feminist tale.

There are two final stories that round out the collection: 

Author of the New York Times number-one bestselling novel Dear Martin, Nic Stone takes on the enduring tale of Hansel and Gretel in his harrowing story Hazel and Gray. When two teenagers get lost in the woods on the way back from their romantic date, they are relieved to stumble upon a house full of people. However, they quickly realize that they are not as safe as they thought when the party inside turns sinister, and monsters from home await them in the dark.

A twisted murder mystery unfolds in the halls of a high school in Soman Chianani’s story The Princess Game. The author of the bestselling series The School for Good and Evil revisits the teenage drama in this frightening tale, where the most popular girls in school keep turning up dead, each killed in the theme of a different classic fairy tale. Two juvenile detectives must go undercover and try to catch the killer...before it’s too late. 

Each story in Faraway is available for purchase in eBook and audiobook format, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members. It is the latest collection of stories Plympton has contributed to in collaboration with Amazon Original Stories. Recent collections include Out of Line, a collection of feminist fiction; Hush, a collection about the end of truth; and Inheritance, a collection about family secrets.

New Location, New Fellows for our 2020 Writing Residency in Las Vegas

We’re resuming our writer’s residency with COVID safety measures in place. This winter, four new Writing Downtown fellows will join us in Las Vegas: Meredith Alloway, Jenn Alandy Trahan, and Zin E. Rocklyn.

Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment near Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore

The next year’s apartment will be in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.

Special thanks again to the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.

Meredith Alloway - November 2020

Meredith Alloway is a Texas native who currently resides in NYC as a filmmaker and journalist. Her short film RIDE, was commissioned by Hulu & Sundance institute and is currently streaming now on Hulu. Her film DEEP TISSUE premiered at SXSW in 2019 and has played festivals such as AFI, Bucheon, and Overlook. It’s currently out streaming now on Future of Film is Female.  As a journalist, she has written interviews and feature pieces for Vanity Fair, Playboy, Filmmaker Magazine, Nylon, Indiewire, Flaunt and was Senior Editor of The Script Lab.  Her feature film HIGH PRIESTESS is currently in development with David S. Goyer’s company, Phantom Four.

Her current project: She's currently writing a horror script.

Jenn Alandy Trahan - December 2020

Jenn Alandy Trahan was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a BA in English and went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in Fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her writing has been supported by the Carlisle Family Scholarship at the Community of Writers, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland. Jenn is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she has taught undergraduate courses in fiction, nonfiction, Filipinx fiction, creative expression, and service-learning through creative writing; she's also taught Writer's Studio workshops on writing about sports, class, and race.

Her current project: A book featuring characters from her short story "They Told Us Not to Say This," published in Harper's in August 2018 and selected for Best American Short Stories 2019, as well as characters from her short story "Les Hommes de Foi," published in the lovely UNM-student-run lit mag, Blue Mesa Review.

Zin E. Rocklyn - January 2021

Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story "Summer Skin" in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax's Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story "Night Sun" was published on Tor.com. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate as well as a 2021 Clarion West candidate. You can find them on Twitter @intelligentwat.

About their project: I will be working on my Dark Fantasy novel which is a riff on Cinderella if she were a Black Queer mercenary who was betrayed by her father.

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Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown@plympton.com.

To find out even more, visit http://www.writingdowntown.com

Plympton and Amazon Original Stories Announce Hush, a Collection of Stories About the End of Truth

The quest for truth has always taken us to places never before imagined—and often, reveals that the line between truth and lie is not so clear as it may have once seemed. In an age in which truth is blurred beyond recognition, in which elaborate plots, schemes, and illusions undermine the integrity and stability of our lives, Plympton was inspired to examine our modern-day “end of truth” and the ongoing struggle to revive it. What secrets are being concealed? Who is to be trusted? How, if at all, are we to uncover the most dangerous of hidden truths?

To help us explore these questions, we asked six award-winning crime writers to dramatize the end of truth. Hush, a collection of six grippingly urgent and timely short stories, shines a light on the darkest corners of society, in whose shadows secrets hide, conspiracies lurk, and deception runs rampant.

The collection was conceived and edited by Johnathan Santlofer. Santlofer is the author of the bestselling and award-winning novels The Death Artist and Anatomy of Fear, and the celebrated memoir The Widower's Notebook. He has edited seven story collections and the New York Times bestselling serial novel Inherit the Dead. His latest novel The Last Mona Lisa will be published in 2021. 

About Hush, Santlofer said “In the age of fake news, the idea of truth seemed to me the perfect subject for stories. What an honor it was to put together this collection and work with these terrific writers, all of whom took my theme of ‘truth’ and used it to create the most fascinating and galvanizing stories.”

The result is a collection of stories that range from the sinister to the spine-tingling, from mystery to thriller, by authors with distinctly different voices and styles but united in their prowess and mastery of suspense.

In “Snowflakes,” Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in Cabin 10 and  Snowflakes, details the harrowing account of a young woman who, threatened by an unknown force and pressed by her father’s paranoia, prepares to fend off a violent infiltration of her once sheltered existence.

Winner of the Anthony Award for Best First Novel and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite explores the ominous side of social media fame with “Treasure,” in which one woman’s quest for online notoriety lands her in the path of a desperate fan—one willing to do anything it takes to get to her.

Laura Lippman, bestselling author of Lady in the Lake and winner of over twenty awards for crime fiction, brings us “Slow Burner,” an unflinching gaze at the disintegration of a marriage and the secrets that threaten to rend it apart.

Author of The Goodbye Man and more than forty other internationally bestselling novels, Jeffrey Deaver takes us back to the days of old-school, mano a mano reporting. “Buried” follows soon to be retired journalist Edward Fitzhugh through a maze of riddles, clues, and lies on his hunt for a serial kidnapper and, ultimately, the final, best story of his career.

“The Gift,” by bestselling author of If I Die Tonight Alison Gaylin, is the disquieting account of an eight-year-old child gone missing. Left with no choice but to consult a mysterious psychic for answers, the desperate parents are forced to question the limits of their trust and the measures—supernatural and otherwise—they’ll take to bring back their daughter.

In the collection’s final story, “Let Her Be,” Lisa Unger, bestselling author of Confessions on the 7:45, tells the story of a suspicious ex-boyfriend seeking to confirm his theory that his former lover isn’t leading the perfect life she portrays on social media—only to find she may not be the only one in danger.

Hush is available for purchase as a Kindle eBook and an Audible audiobook, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members. It is the fourth collection of stories Plympton has conceived, commissioned, and edited in collaboration with Amazon Original Stories. Previous collections include Warmer, a collection of climate fiction; Disorder, a collection of social suspense stories; and Inheritance, a collection about family secrets.

Plympton and Amazon Original Stories Announce Inheritance, a Collection of Family Secrets

Secrets are a family tradition. They are also the stuff of great short stories. We live in a time when we can trace our ancestry through a saliva sample, FaceTime with relatives on the other side of the globe, and create new families of our own making in ways that were once unthinkable. And yet, unspoken desires and dangerous revelations can still threaten our shared lives. With this in mind, we invited five fiction masters to explore the tangled relations that arise from family secrets. They responded with emotionally resonant stories that consider the realities of inheritance and the consequences of hidden histories.

Alice Hoffman, the New York Times bestselling author of The World That We Knew, brings us a haunting story of loyalty, betrayal, and a young woman’s coming-of-age in early 1900s Massachusetts in Everything My Mother Taught Me.

In Can You Feel This? Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio, takes us into the chaos of a maternity ward, where an anxious mother-to-be grapples with memories of tragedy as she balances her child’s needs with her own healing.

The author of The Lion’s Den, Anthony Marra, imagines what happens when a son exposes his father’s transgressions in a tell-all and then slinks back home to see him face-to-face.

Jennifer Haigh’s The Zenith Man explores the chilling speculation surrounding a local couple in a captivating story that could only have come from the writer behind such bestselling book as Heat and Light.

And finally, in The Weddings, Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night, portrays a fortysomething gay man who is confronted with his secret past when he receives a wedding invitation from an old college friend. 

Inheritance is available for purchase as either a Kindle eBook or an Audible audiobook, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members.