Nadja just won the 2021 Siskiyou Prize for Environmental Literature (judged by Deb Olin Unferth) for her short story collection The Life of a Creature. This is partly why I took Ashland Creek Press’s “Writing for Animals” class last year, where I met the incredibly kind and talented writer Nadja Lubiw-Hazard. While I’ve by no means mastered authentic animal writing in my own work, I’m excited by all of this unexplored potential. I’m fascinated by the inherent tension in expressing animal experiences through the strictly human medium of writing. There’s often a huge disconnect between the reality of animals in the world and the fiction of animals on the page (or the screen), and I believe working to close that gap can yield much more interesting and important work. My go-to material for free-writing tends to be my drama queen cat Ava, my novel is low-key all about what it is to be a bulldog, and I recently had lots of fun doing a deep dive into chickens in pop culture for Sentient Media (heck yes I’ll share the link!). The topic of animals in writing is on my mind a lot.
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