David DeGusta

@davidwrites1.bsky.social

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Writer / fiction / Iowa Writers’ Workshop / MacDowell // Ethiopia / literary translation from Amharic // Previously a paleoanthropologist.
www.davidwrites.net

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Today in odd ambiguities: “fought with.” For example, “she fought with the rebels” might mean she fought alongside the rebels in some clash. But it could mean that she had a dispute with the rebels. All else being equal, I think I’d go with the former, but it’s a little weird.

I had no idea that Julia “the Bubble Lady” Vinograd had an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I knew her as a kindly and poetic presence on Telegraph Avenue, part of the good part of the Berkeley scene and spirit.

Remembering Julia Vinograd in a 96thofOctober.com interview with American poet and publisher, Bruce Isaacson 96thofoctober.com/articles/bru...

Bruce Isaccson Interview - 96th of October96thofoctober.com BI Julia and I were good friends for thirty plus years. I moved to Nevada in 1995, but we spoke on the phone several times a week, she was an…

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"How Iowa Helped a Computer Programmer Become a Breakout Novelist" | Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Ruthvika Rao publishes her debut novel, a love story set in her native India magazine.foriowa.org/story.php?ed...

How Iowa Helped a Computer Programmer Become a Breakout Novelistmagazine.foriowa.org Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Ruthvika Rao publishes her debut novel, a love story set in her native India.

“Each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. ... In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife.” - Vaclav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson

"The Power of the Powerless" - Vaclav Havelhac.bard.edu Hannah Arendt Center News

Klay Thompson has accomplished great things & overcome devastating setbacks. All props. And he can still have a good game, now & then. An awful performance can be followed by a better one. But the trend is clear, Father Time is undefeated, & he should be replaced in the lineup for the greater good.

New on my blog: an admiration of the striking poetry collection “Green for Luck” by Margaret Yapp, published in 2024 by EastOver Press. www.davidwrites.net/blog/2024/6/...

Admired: Margaret Yapp's "Green for Luck" — David DeGustawww.davidwrites.net An appreciation of the poetry collection “Green for Luck” by Margaret Yapp, available here.

Many thanks to the fine folks @cincinnatireview.bsky.social for publishing a little bit of my fiction!

"We eloped the week after the moon landing, the Apollo men back on earth but still quarantined." In this week's miCRo, @davidwrites1.bsky.social takes us back and forth in time and space to tell the story of a marriage:

miCRo: "When We Were Astronauts" by David DeGustawww.cincinnatireview.com David DeGusta foregrounds the mysticism of the personal against the era-defining scientific advancements of the moon landing, using a precisely-rendered long retrospective POV to take us to new and un...

“it feels to me at times that novelists today might be too careful how their books make them look, how they personally come off. It feels like some authors decided to take up a duty to write morally irreproachable novels, which are inherently uninteresting to me.” - Camille Bordas

Camille Bordas on What Stand-Up Comedy Can Teach Writing Workshops About Growing Thicker Skinlithub.com My first introduction to Camille Bordas came through her stories in the New Yorker—perfectly formed marvels, funny, skeptical, self-aware, and humane. I loved them for their seeming lightness: ther…

For weeks, I’ve been checking Zyzzyva’s website each morning to see if they were open for submissions. Somehow it became a habit. And each morning I’d be greeted by that familiar text (“we anticipate opening for submissions in April 2024”). Until this morning- time to submit! @ovillalon.bsky.social

Feel like we were being lazy when we came up with the word “fireplace.” Glad we did the work on “forest” instead of “treeplace.”

Woke up this morning to no new emails. Do I even exist anymore?

Some portion of writing, at least for me, is trying to solve dumb little language problems. Today’s example: a character is unpacking their suitcase and I want to refer to the clothing they are unpacking but it tends to sound like I’m referring to what they’re wearing and/or it gets too wordy.

@mikeingram.bsky.social @tmcallister.bsky.social Uh, bad news you guys … (Kidding, obviously. Looking forward to the new season/format of Book Fight.)

“A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite. The cause of the fire should, to some extent, elude the experts sent to investigate.“ - Michael Cunningham, 2012, in The New Yorker

Happy “Mealtime Is An Hour Early!” Day to all dogs who celebrate. Gotta be one of the best days of the year. Much better than that disastrous day each fall when the kibble is inexcusably late.

He has figured out how to stack two mats for additional comfort. Not joking - this is a thing he does sometimes. For a basset, I feel like this is a Nobel Prize-level discovery.

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Join us in congratulating our 2024 spring-summer Fellowship recipients!

155 Artists Awarded MacDowell Fellowships for Spring and Summer 2024www.macdowell.org MacDowell has awarded the equivalent of more than $2.3 million in fellowships to 155 artists from 30 U.S. states and 14 countries, arriving from as far afield as Chile and India, and Pakistan and Aust...

The NY Times frames the question as “When an Artist Dies, Who Owns Her Story?”, which inclines one to sympathize with the family of the artist. But what about when a billionaire dies? Or a politician? www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/s...

When an Artist Dies, Who Owns Her Story?www.nytimes.com The Cuban artist Ana Mendieta fell from a window of her 34th-floor apartment in 1985. Her family members have been fighting for control of her legacy ever since.

Just spent 30 minutes editing the captions on all my Instagram posts to make their punctuation and capitalization consistent. I feel much better now, not even joking. (Tell me you used to be an editor without saying you used to be an editor.)

When your new basset hound hoodie is inspected by an actual basset hound …

The word you’re looking for here USC is “no.”

Was about to apply for an opportunity for mid career artists and then I realized that they meant mid-career.

In-box coincidence. They seem to be getting along though, as they should - both are great, apply to both! #Breadloaf #Sewanee

-excited for winter trip -puts snow boots in suitcase -puts one (1) outfit in suitcase -suitcase now full -goddamn it

The New York Times sometimes gets grief on here but they captioned the following photo as, “The mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili and her husband, Otari Maisuradze, at home in Tbilisi,” and I am done with them, I tell you, done. @nytimes.com @nytimes.wtf

I don’t mean to impugn Popular Mechanics as a source for pop psychology, but I do wonder if this writer has ever been on deadline. Then again, maybe they’re right. I can see it both ways.

My new year’s resolution to cut back on following the news is perhaps going a little too well. It would help if the New York Times added a mood tracker to their weekly quiz so we could figure out the “happy score” range (6-7?).

More indie bookstores, especially in Florida, would be a great thing, but starting one is hard expensive work. So of course it’s @legroff.bsky.social who is doing it. Help her, and get rewards both karmic and tangible (signed books! manuscript feedback!) at www.indiegogo.com/projects/the...

The Lynx, A Bookstore in Gainesville, FLwww.indiegogo.com A bookstore that bites back.

New Margot Livesey novel! Funny how all it takes is the right four words to make me really happy. And I’m very much looking forward to all the other words in “The Road from Belhaven,” out this February 6th. Scotland, second sight, a terrible mistake? I’m in. bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

The Road from Belhaven a book by Margot Liveseybookshop.org From the New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late-nineteenth-century Scotland "Bewi...

A recent nominee for my NYT Corrections Hall of Fame: “An earlier version of this article transposed words in a quotation by Anton McParland. He said Eugene Peltola Jr. had a sense of humor that ‘lightened the darkest moments,’ not ‘darkened the lightest moments.’"