Registration is open for the Yale Summer Writers' Conference 2016

Registration opens today for the Yale Writers' Conference. Visiting faculty include Claudia Rankine! Michael Cunningham! Amy Bloom! Edmund White! You can eat lunch with these people! Apply!

View from classroom window, 2015

The Year of Your Novel Starts Tomorrow

1/15 Update: This class is underway! Join us in the second session, March 4 to April 15. Click here for more info.

The Year of Your Novel starts tomorrow, Friday 1/15, at the beautiful Hudson Valley Writers' Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Runs all year in six-week sessions. Fridays one to three p.m. Make this the year you write your book! Join us!

Student Publications!

Check out these new publications by two of my wonderful students: Laura Boswell's nonfiction piece "Swing Shift" in the latest 3Elements Review, and in the Winter issue of Tin House Magazine, "The Leash," a short story by Drew Ciccolo.

New Course: Year of Your Novel at Hudson Valley Writers' Center

1/15/16 Update: This course is underway! Join us for Session II, March 4 to April 15. Click here for more info.

I'm so excited to be teaching 2016's Year of Your Novel course at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center! Consecutive six-week sessions will span the year. You can sign up for all or some, depending on your needs and whims. This is for writers at any stage who are committed to creating a draft of a novel by the end of 2016. More info here: The Year of Your Novel.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian

"Why I Kill": On Having an Idea for an Article and Not Writing It

This is a story about an article I wanted to write, but never did. One titled “Why I Kill.”

When I lived in Vermont, my husband and I went in with some neighbors to raise and slaughter a hundred Thanksgiving turkeys. I had been vegetarian since I was a child, because I loved animals, but now, as an adult, I wanted to find out if humane meat was possible. I planned to write the article after we were done, explaining why I chose to kill the animals I ate.

All my life, when I have thought about meat, I've been very aware that it entails the death of a sentient being. That torn flesh and guts come with this. In that sense, I had always lived intimately with the gory reality of meat, so it didn't seem like such a huge step to become physically involved with it. Also, I'm constitutionally not squeamish; blood has never bothered me. So I knew I could do it. Some meat eaters who were my partners in this venture laughed, saying I'd run crying out of the room at slaughter time. (In reality, when that night came it was not me but one of them—new to farming and apparently new to the idea of all it entails—who couldn't take it and had to leave.)

On many small farms that advertise humane meat, at slaughter time, turkeys are stuffed upside down into "kill cones," with their heads sticking out the bottom, so they're restrained while their throats are slit. This is necessary because otherwise they flap their wings and struggle powerfully as they feel life leaving them. It takes a while. Of particular concern to farmers is that this wing-flapping can leave unsightly bruises on the carcass. 

We didn't have kill cones, and had planned to restrain the turkeys with burlap sacks, but the birds were so strong that the sacks ripped immediately. So it became my job to wrap my arms around their bodies and keep them still as they hung upside down, bleeding out.

In a way I wish I could say that, like the squeamish meat-eater, I felt disgusted, or cried afterwards, thinking about what the birds must have been feeling. But I didn't. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I started. Maybe my crime was worse for that.

It's not that it didn't affect me. At the time, my infant son weighed about as much the turkeys (and, like them, was a few months old), and at night, lying next to him, I woke several times with a jolt, out of half-dreams that I had accidentally put him into the oven instead of a turkey. There was no guilt or sadness for the turkeys attached to these half-dreams, just fear for my son. There was the shock of wrongness too, of having crossed a line, broken a taboo, crossed out of the realm of the okay into some terrible other place.

But I was not in that terrible other place in reality. My son stayed out of the oven. I only killed the creatures who were supposed to be killed.

A few days later, when I got my hair cut, the hairdresser in our tiny rural town asked how it had been, slaughtering all those turkeys. "It really wasn't that bad," I told her. She laughed and said, "Yeah, bet you didn't feel a thing." I had the feeling it was an old, familiar joke to her. We lived among hunters and farmers; her husband hunted, and was teaching their son to do it. I laughed too, recognizing the absurdity, but, as with the oven dreams, not feeling any real sense of guilt or sadness over it. I certainly wasn't asked to feel those things by anyone I met. Most people gave us the sense we'd done something good in the world, had come down on the side of morality: raising the turkeys in big pastures, where they tussled over crab apples, socialized, enjoyed the sun. We all agreed factory farming was bad, and our aim had been to do something different, better and kinder.

I thought afterwards that we had cause to feel good about it. We'd gone through with what we planned. None of the messy business of butchering had even bothered me: plucking feathers, pulling out guts, cutting up body parts. I almost wondered, as I did it, if I were deficient in some way, so little did it disturb me.

But one thing did stay with me. As I played the part of a kill cone, my arms wrapped around those big bodies, holding the powerful wings closed as the warm, gentle birds struggled against death (what's the point of struggling when your throat is slit all the way across and all your blood is pouring down in two jets over your face to the ground? the futility of this struck me), I felt how how very much they did not want to let go of life.

When your body is pressed against another body, it leaves something with you. I felt how their lives were sacred, and we were taking them away.

At the time, it seemed a good thing that I had felt this. To have felt it was to have earned the meat I ate that Thanksgiving--after not eating any meat at all for over 25 years. I had honored the birds by feeling it. By helping to raise them and by experiencing their death along with them.

I didn't become vegan or even vegetarian again immediately after that, although I decided I would only eat animals I myself had raised. I killed several chickens over the next few months. But I lost the desire to write the article. I didn't want to keep killing. Over the next few years, the experience with the turkeys continued to work its way deeper into my soul.

I could kill. I had done it. I could close myself off to the horror of the blood and guts—that part wasn't even hard for me. But I had recognized and felt, next to my body, on my skin, inside myself, in some blunt way, the sacredness of life.

Having felt the birds struggle, I had to recognize that taking a life is a big deal. Dying is a big deal. Yes, even for animals—as we all know if we have been with a beloved dog or cat at their deathbed. It sounds so simple as hardly to be worth saying. And it is. But I knew it then, in a way I hadn't before. Or maybe I was forced to recognize that I had always known it.

I saw that while I was free not to honor that knowledge, free to kill and eat any creature I wanted, as long as they were members of species our culture deems killable and edible, I was also free not to.

What is legal and sanctioned, even by our heroes, our parents, our religious leaders, is not always the same as what is moral. Many of the greatest crimes in history have been legal and socially sanctioned: slavery, the actions of the Nazis, and countless other forms of rape, subjugation, genocide and torture. This is not something that was only true long ago, when people were misguided, or is still true but only for people who are obtuse and different from us. It is true now and here and always. And alongside that rests the truth that we are given the freedom and the responsibility to decide for ourselves what is moral, what widens our circles of mercy and compassion, what nudges our world away from suffering and towards love.

The only way to do this is to look with our own eyes, and feel with our own hearts. If you kill an animal, or even watch a video of one being killed, and feel violence is being done, feel sadness or compassion for the creature being deprived of his or her life—or if you can't even watch because you are afraid you'll feel those things—then listen to that. Honor that. You can. You're free to choose.

Manuscript Consultations

One of my favorite things to do is to work one-on-one with authors. It allows me to build a relationship with the work and see it evolve over time. I'm a close reader who makes lots of margin comments, but I'll help you keep the big picture in mind, too.  More info here. If you're interested, you can use the CONTACT ME button to get in touch right now.

October Classes

Both of these classes are underway! If you're interested in taking one in the future, get in touch! I'll be holding them again in the late fall/early winter. 


Online Workshop

A traditional writing workshop, by email. We'll discuss one author's work each week. You can submit up to 5,000 words of your story or novel. Email discussions will take place each Wednesday, all day, so you can jump in whenever you're able. Limit: 5 participants.

Wednesdays, October 21 through November 18. Cost: $150.


Get Writing

Is there a story or novel you want to work on? Do you need a daily dose of encouragement, structure, and guidance? Try this course!

You'll get short daily assignments by email, which you'll share with the class. The exercises are designed to move you forward on your current writing project, by helping you explore character, stakes, plot and other elements of your narrative.

Each daily assignment will require only about 15 minutes of writing time.

This course is conducted entirely by email, so you can do the assignments whenever you have time, without leaving the house, yet still have a sense of community, accountability and structure.

Class runs from Monday, October 19 to Friday, November 13. Cost: $150.

Best of all, you can try it for the first week for just $20, then pay the balance if you'd like to continue.

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About me: I am an award-winning author, educated at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and I have over twenty years of teaching experience. I'm currently a resident faculty member at the Yale Summer Writers' Conference and an editor at Origins Journal. I have a story in this month's issue of Tin House Magazine. More about me here.

Use the CONTACT ME form on the right to sign up!

Severin Kittelsen, October, 1890