Vauhini Vara

“My Love Story” is out in Epoch

vvara — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:13:11 +0000

The new issue of Epoch is out (vol. 58, no. 2), and it contains “My Love Story,” which I started at Stanford and finished at Iowa. You can order a copy at the Epoch website.

Reading at InsideStoryTime: July 16

vvara — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:22:21 +0000

For all my disappointed fans who missed the Dog Eared Books reading: I’m reading at InsideStorytime on Thursday, July 16, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. The headliner is the talented, charming Josh Mohr (Some Things That Meant the World to Me).

My review of The Peep Diaries is up on the Rumpus

vvara — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:53:37 +0000

My review of Hal Niedzviecki’s The Peep Diaries is up on the Rumpus.

Reading at Babble-On: June 25

vvara — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:46:59 +0000

I’ll be reading at 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 25, as part of the Babble-On reading series at Dog Eared Books.

Babble-On
June 25, 8pm
Dog Eared Books 900 Valencia @ 20th St.

presents 3 fab readers for June

Rose Tully
James Warner
Vauhini Vara

James Warner has placed stories in Ninth Letter, Agni Online, Night Train, and elsewhere. He blogs for Identity Theory at Everything Unfinished (http://www.identitytheory.com/jameswarner). His personal website is www.jameswarner.net

Rose Tully is a fiction writer, performer and storyteller, painter and maker of stencils for postal art and message art. Rose also leads creative writing labs for young men involved in the juvenile justice system. She is in the MFA creative writing program at San Francisco State.

Vauhini Vara is studying fiction as a Rona Jaffe Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, on leave from her day job as a technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Black Warrior Review, and Epoch.

Tony made this website

vvara — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:41:36 +0000

The writer Tony Tulathimutte designed this new website for me. Thanks, Tony!

“We’ll Rise Above the Sky” is forthcoming in Glimmer Train

vvara — Sat, 30 May 2009 18:02:37 +0000

My friend Justin Torres and I won first and second place, respectively, in the March 2009 Fiction Open sponsored by Glimmer Train, and our stories, “Surrender Unto Us” and “We’ll Rise Above the Sky,” will appear in coming issues of Glimmer Train. Justin is one of the stars of the Writers’ Workshop: his funny, heartbreaking stories have appeared in Granta, Tin House and elsewhere.

My review of My Abandonment is up on the Rumpus

vvara — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:02:19 +0000

My review of Portland author Peter Rock’s new novel, My Abandonment, has been posted on the Rumpus.

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote about his urge to grab and devour a live woodchuck so he could taste the animal’s “wildness.” It’s an admission that seems to say more, specifically, about Thoreau himself than it does, generally, about man’s relationship to nature—and as such, it’s enthralling. Peter Rock’s My Abandonment, written in the voice of a young girl living secretly in a forest, is at its best in similar moments.

“A Girl is Turning Ten” is out in Black Warrior Review

vvara — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:54:15 +0000

My first published story, “A Girl is Turning Ten,” was a finalist in the annual Black Warrior Review fiction contest and is out in Black Warrior Review 35.2.

The girl stops her kayak and waits. She looks at that spot ahead of her, and the dark form comes up again. It looks like a submerged rock, at first, but then she sees a pair of wet, bulbous eyes over broad nostrils. This is what an alligator looks like, she thinks, and she is afraid. The alligator stares at her. Its eyes and nose look angry. The girl stares back. The alligator slowly ducks its head underwater. Don’t move, she tells herself. That, it seems, is the important thing. Don’t move.