News & Updates

And here’s a nice tidbit from my hometown newspaper:

The poems in “Lake” are candid descriptions of life in a strange culture that’s at once fascinating and alienating. The characters in his poems are reeling in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, uncertain if their new freedoms are better than the certainties of the old regime. (You may read the complete short article here.)

Agents or editors interested in learning more about either or both of the following manuscripts may contact me through the Contact page.

Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air: And Other Stories of Flight is a collection of short stories linked thematically by the recurring idea of flight, in its various definitions and senses.

Stories in this collection have already been published or accepted for publication by journals such as Rosebud, The Pinch, Many Mountains Moving, Controlled Burn, Eureka Literary Magazine, Isotope, and Lake Effect, among others. The first five stories were awarded a Grand Prize in the Santa Fe Writers Project’s Literary Awards Program, and the collection as whole was named a finalist (Top 7) in the New Rivers Press MVP Competition.

“Your characters exhibit a quiet dignity I rarely encounter in life or on the page. As a reader, I appreciated the breathing room.”—Ayun Halliday, writing as final judge of the Santa Fe Writers Project’s 2005 Literary Awards Program

Silk Road Tales is an account of my four years living, working, and traveling throughout Muslim Asia, primarily in Kazakhstan. In letters, journals, and poems, it describes—colorfully but accurately—life in this vast, complex former Soviet state during a tremendous and sometimes difficult transition, as well as my travels along the Great Silk Road from Turkey to China (map).

Portions of this manuscript have already appeared in Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction, Permafrost, and Protestpoems.org, and on the CD-ROM Peace Corps in Central Asia and the U.S. Peace Corps website.
~ Jeff Fearnside