Happy July!

News:

• • Writer’s retreat panic! 😱 😬 🤯
  • I made a TikTok! 🙈
  • I was a guest on the National Audubon Society’s “I Saw A Bird” show! 🦆
  • Rebecca DeMoss’s original linocuts for “Minor Holiday” are now available on Bandcamp! Each print is unique, and there are only five of them.

 
Reading Time: 3 minutes

I had a major wake-up call recently when Lambda Literary updated their website with profiles of the 2021 Writer’s Retreat Fellows. As I read through the bios of the other writers in my Young Adult Fiction cohort, a knot began to form in my stomach. Nearly everyone has an MFA in Creative Writing. Several of them have agents and book deals with major publishing houses. Then I noticed Leah Johnson, author of the bestselling YA novel You Should See Me in a Crown (Amazon, Bookshop) — which I’m currently reading — and I thought I’d accidentally navigated to the staff page. But no. Leah Johnson is in my cohort. LEAH JOHNSON. Whose novel was the inaugural Reese’s Book Club YA pick. Reese as in Witherspoon.

Leah Johnson is among the 11 writers who will be reading and critiquing the first 25 pages of my novel-in-progress. I will be reading and critiquing Leah Johnson’s work-in-progress.

In case you can’t tell, I’m a little freaked out.

On the other hand, it’s pretty awesome to be included in posts like these:

So I haven’t gotten much songwriting done. I’ve been editing those first 25 pages. And then avoiding those first 25 pages, and being pseudo-productive by making TikTok videos to get my music out to potential new fans. And then paying way too much attention to how those videos are being received. As Gretchen Rubin says, “working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.”

Because I don’t have a totally new song for you, I’m sharing a demo of my song “Wooden”. I shared it a while back, but now it has percussion by Mathias Kunzli! You can read more about the song here. I’ll be doing more work on this and other songs in the coming months, for an album that will (fingers crossed) be released this fall. I’ve uploaded a sneak peek at the latest mix of “Varied Thrush” to my Patreon.

Something I really wasn’t expecting: the National Audubon Society asked me to be a guest on the final episode of their “I Saw A Bird” show! Their guests have included such luminaries as Jane Goodall, David Sibley, Kenn Kaufman, SNL’s Melissa Villaseñor, actress Lili Taylor, and a number of my wonderful East Coast birding friends, acquaintances, and Twitter crushes. It was such an honor to be asked to be a part of this. You can watch the episode here on Facebook — my part starts around 21:45. They also used my “Bird From Home” parody of Fifth Harmony’s “Work From Home” for a slideshow at the end. (The episode will also be uploaded to YouTube and included with all the other episodes on this page soon).

Speaking of being asked to be a part of amazing things… Last month I mentioned Mother of Color, an upcoming feature film by queer Latinx writer/director Dawn Jones Redstone, who filmed the music video for my song “Overwintered”. Now I’m excited to share that I’ll be in the background in one scene! I’ve never been in the background of anything so noteworthy, except maybe people’s vacation pictures. I’m excited to be even a little involved in telling this important story.

I hope everyone is staying safe and getting vaccinated as soon as they’re able to! For people in the US, you can find out how to get vaccinated here.

Take care,
Stephan
a.k.a. Sparkbird