Original Writings

 

I believe that writing is a form of courage, a resistance to what is dead and broken in our culture, a stoking of the fires of what it truly means to be alive, however messy, painful and beautiful it can be. I believe, first and foremost, in authenticity. I don’t believe that you have to write expressly what you know, but I do believe that if you don’t know it, then you better sit down and listen to those who do until you feel it in your own bones and can write about it with respect. In this way, I believe that writing, along with other forms of art, can act as a bridge between groups of people, it can create community and compassion and it can heal.

Curriculae Vitae:

Education:
1996-2000       B.A. English Literature/Creative Writing

2006-2007     Post-graduate work in Psychology

2007

  • Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Workshops Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, Denver, CO.

Literary Works:

Novel:

  • Hello Sparrow: under review by literary agents.

Short Stories:

  • “The First Morning of the World”
  • “The Way it is Around Here”
  • “Way Gone”
  • “Birding”: Under review at Glimmer Train and Tin House, 2009.
  • “Arboretum”: Under review at Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, and the Gettysburg Review, 2009.
  • “Inner Child”: Under review at Prairie Schooner and the Colorado Review, 2009.
  • “Best Female Striptease From Kiev”: Under review at McSweeney’s, 2009.
  • “It Keeps Coming”: published in Lemon Puppy Literary Review (broadened into Hello Sparrow) Issue II, summer 2007.
  • “Burying Lucie” published in Lemon Puppy Literary Review  issue III, Fall 2007.

Book Reviews:

  • Broken by L. Jones: The Bloomsbury Review, September 2009.
  • A Radiant Curve by Luci Tapahonso, the Bloomsbury Review, October 2009.
  • Gila Country Legend by Nancy Coggeshall, the Bloomsbury Review, November 2009.
  • A Glass of Water by Jimmy Santiago Baca, the Bloomsbury Review, November 2009.
  • Selected Poems of Jimmy Santiago Baca, The Bloomsbury Review, November 2009.

Editorial:

2003-2009 Unblinking Eye Editorial, Boulder, CO
Tutoring undergraduate students in creative and expository writing, editing manuscripts, essays, theses, and web copy, both substantive and copy.

2008-2009 The Bloomsbury Review, Denver, CO
Fact checking, copy editing, substantive editing—all published issues September 2008, through November 2009.

2007-2009 LMB Photography and Media, Boulder, CO
Copy editing, substantive editing, writing for publications such as Coal Age, Coal Transporter, Trains Magazine, and Martin Engineering.

2007-2008 Boda Botanicals, Boulder, CO
Creating, writing, editing, and maintaining Boda Wellness Journal.

Works in Progress:

  • 20,000 words into a novel with the working title “Once an Island”.
  • Book of collected short stories, working title “Birding”.

My Novel:

This summer I put the final changes on an 80,000-word novel entitled Hello Sparrow. I have published the first fifty pages in the literary journal Lemon Puppy and am currently sending the manuscript to literary agents.

  • Hello Sparrow is a lyrical novel set in the USSR in 1968 and contemporary northern California. It tells the story of two women leading lives distinctly different in space and time and yet mysteriously linked. Finn is a young woman drifting through her life until she is abandoned by her lover Lev in his childhood house, left to fend for herself while he goes searching for his mother Leda, who may have committed suicide. Finn is also left to deal with Lev’s sister, a bright but crippled woman frozen in the body of a child and Mikhail Weiloch, a neighbor who may know more about Leda’s disappearance than he lets on. Slowly Finn discovers Leda’s tragic history, her participation in the underground printing movement called Samizdat, and her eventual ‘escape’ to a northern Californian town embroiled in leftist politics and theory. As she comes to understand this woman she has never met, Finn begins to unravel her own painful history, becoming unfrozen and eventually unmoored.
  • The novel is a double narrative and while it contains a solid and intriguing plot, is definitively character driven. Thematically it concerns itself primarily with three theoretical nuances. The first is the ability for women to be linked outside of time and space through story. The ability to create Self and relationship through art is a highly present theme as is what happens when our voices are silenced, our stories unable to be told—how that inhibits our own growth as well as the growth of those we love. Secondly, I explore the idea of grief as a ‘negative’ or nonexistent emotion, how it is the absence or vacuum of other states of being. This theme grows into an examination of what other emotions, events, and relationships can act as mirrors by their sheer silence or absence and how important these phenomena are to how we create ourselves and our world, how through a sort of psychic drift, we can find freedom. The third theme of the book subtly plays with this idea of freedom through western politics of the last hundred years. It views anarchism, Marxism, and capitalism through a wholly personal and subjective lens that is sometimes tongue in cheek funny and sometimes heartbreaking. It examines how the grand arc of history and politics capture and shape our small loves and our individual lives.

Along with the influences explored above, I have looked toward nonfiction works for creative inspiration, namely Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Gilbert and Gubar’s essay “The Madwoman in the Attic” and the works of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cisoux. I have also had the good fortune to spend time in Eastern Europe where I spent time picking apricots and listening to the stories of several women who escaped from the former Soviet republic under extreme duress.

In addition, I am in the final editing for a book of short stories, as yet untitled, and four of the stories: “The Arboretum”, “Inner Child”, “Birding”, and “Best Female Striptease from Kiev” are under review at Glimmer Train, Tin House, Ploughshares, and McSweeney’s for publication. In my short fiction, I explore many of the same themes as those in Hello Sparrow, namely women’s stories of political and personal displacement. I like to discover what happens in a world that, to quote Northern Arapaho healer Stanford Addison, “doesn’t do a damn thing you think it’s gonna do”.

Please email me if you would like a sample chapter.
howardjena@gmail.com