Hello World!
Good Morning from the Inagural Issue of Chemist Gives A Craft Talk
Hi all from Chemist Gives a Craft Talk, a newsletter about the writing life, writing and of course, dog pictures (and shout out to Bethany Marcel , my first subscriber!). I’m moving over here mostly due to the potential impending doom of twitter, and I’d like to stay in touch with you all for a while. I also had been thinking of doing this for some time, just because my through about the writing craft for gotten too long for twitter as I’ve been working on my essay collection
1. Who am I?
I’m a writer (here’s my website) of prose- fiction and nonfiction but mostly nonfiction at the moment. I won the 2021 PEN/Robert J Dau Prize for Emerging Writers with my debut short story, “Force, Mass, Acceleration”, which was published in The Southern Review (thank you to Sacha Idell and Preety Sidhu for pulling it out of the slush) in the summer of 2020. You can buy the book here if you’re interested. Since then, I’ve been steadily building my writing career with another essay in the Southern Review Spring 2022 Issue and an essay forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review in 2023. I’m at work on a collection of personal essays. My agent and I are planning to go out on submission next year with the book, which is both exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. When I’m not writing, I can be found working my day job as a regulatory medical writer in the biotechnology/ pharmaceutical industry, running or XC skiing ( my new goal for this winter is to learn how to skate ski), hanging out with the future Mr. Aruffo and taking care of our 3 dogs.
Here’s me outside in my yard after my morning meetings today, throwing the ball for Zoya and stacking the wood pile
2. Chemist give a craft talk?
I have a bachelors degree in chemistry, and I often find that my training as a chemist first, a writer second, has an enormous influence on how I look at writing and craft in general. When presented with a problem, chemists are trained to go back to the basics, specifically atomic structure, and then build upwards. For that reason, I believe that structure is the building blocks of all good writing. Much like a chemist, I like to break down pieces into their component parts and ask myself why something is working like it is. Each essay I write for this collection is teaching me something new about my craft, so I hope to expound upon some of those lessons here. I’ll be sending out this newsletter once a month, or at least that’w
3. Anything Else?
I’ll probably chatter away a bit on here about whatever athletic thing I’m training for, what I’m reading, dogs and Alaska things (since I live in Fairbanks).
Current temperature: -3 F
4. Dogs!
I’ll be introducing the dogs one at a time. This month’s dog is……
Oaken!
8.5 year old Alaskan husky, retired sled dog, and the first member of the pack. He spent 6 years as a racing dog before retiring due to a back injury. He’s a little too smart for his own good, thinks he knows better than anyone and is an angel in the house but a terror on the streets. He’d still be racing if it wasn’t for the injury, and he still loves to run. He loves hanging out on his dog bed in the house, going for off leash hikes and of course, helping me train for races. He’s a handsome boy with a sensitive side and a quirky personality.
Oaken in the snow
Thanks for subscribing!
Heather