ICE won a SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION grant for 2015
JELLYFISH DREAMING made the “Short List for Finalists” for the Novel category in the 2014 William Faulkner-William Wisdom awards, and Semi Finalist in the Novel-In-Progress category. And of course an earlier draft made finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant in 2012 (which is what led to ICE).
Lovely little Blog put out by the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Dan Blask, who asks artists from a diversity of genres how they cope with the challenges of having to categorize their work. Feels like I could have written a whole book on this, but fortunately he gave us a word count!
ArtSake Blog
Late night surfing and found a gread review on Good Reads for Whale Road by Phillipa Jamieson (she interviewed me when I was fresh off the plane in NZ for book tour and totally jet-lagged, she was very sweet about it!). She originally wrote the piece for the New Zealand Herald. Great to see it up there. Now have to find the next two mss a home, then figure out what to do with Whale Road next:
Phillipa Jamieson, New Zealand Herald
Review published in the New Zealand Herald, 21 August 2004
THE WHALE ROAD [Random House NZ (Vintage Books), 2004; Blake UK, 2006]
by D.K. McCutchen
Reviewed by Philippa Jamieson
The Whale Road
The Whale Road is a montage of snapshots, layered together in a colourful album of words. There are diary excerpts and ship’s log entries; there is myth, story, and fascinating facts about whales. Deborah McCutchen’s words are interrupted from time to time by her shipmate Simon’s unmistakably Kiwi colloquialisms. The journey ends in Aotearoa, where the author has more encounters with wildlife, does a research project on Hector’s dolphins and marries a New Zealander.
Continue reading
VANUATU
Island Reach sharing stories and images from work in Vanuatu, South Pacific, May-July 2014:
Just out! July 2014. Couldn’t go to the launch in Bantry (so sad) but finally get to see Kakapo Poo in print. I rewrote it after it was too late to include, for a reading at Vermont Studio Center, but hey. Guess that’s what I do. RE-WRITE. A lot.
This is my 3rd Anthology with Fish Publications, out of Cork University Press.
The first of a series of videos on Llyr’s expedition through the South Pacific.
As ever, more details about the expeditions can be seen at their home site Berkshire Sweet Gold & Island Reach
The second video is now out too!
Island Reach part 1, heading to Vanuatu
And a sweet Video about the folks making canoes to sail to Australia to protest the Ozzie coal projects: 350 Pacific, Vanuatu Canoe Project
JELLYFISH DREAMING, has been shortlisted as a finalist for a grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation (Just announced, May 13th, 2014).
A previous version also made first runner up in 2012, which means I’ve been working on this for longer than I realized. 
Got a message from Clem Cairn of Fish Publishing that “The Zen of Kakapo Poo” made Honorable Mention and inclusion in the 2014 anthology out of Cork University.
Finally found that one a home.
Evidently the judge, Irish writer Dermot Healy, said: “The first time I’ve encountered poo as the hero of a memoir.”
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers Route 9 has published an Omnibus of Poets, Writers and Artists from the UMass Amherst MFA program.
My story, The Greening, was accepted. I sent it in because it began in an MFA classroom, when a professor challenged us to read Joyce and write a pastiche that sounded like Joyce. I had a lot of fun with that assignment and happily showed the results to another professor, who was quiet for a long moment, and then said: “Well, there’s no way you can keep that up for a whole novel.” Of course I took the challenge, and of course I couldn’t, but I did get a long short story out of it that I was pleased enough with to make into the frame story for my first book, THE WHALE ROAD.
It’s fun see The Greening published as a stand-alone story in Route 9. Seemed appropriate for an Alumni edition, though odd/nostalgic to see old writing resurfacing. I bet my old writing group, The Fiction Chicks, would say, “oh gahd, not that one again!” There are so very many ways any one story can be told (and creative nonfiction was not popular around the program when I was there).
I do hope to get to the Alum get-together this weekend (I gather Route 9 is asking to record authors reading from their works). A serious question. Why is it so hard to go back?
VSC has given me a partial grant and my amazing department, College of Natural Sciences is picking up the rest with a Mini Grant toward Professional Development.
Vermont Studio Center Residencies
Can’t wait. For the second year in a row, I get a transition between full time winter teaching and full time summer childcare with two weeks to just WRITE.
Feels like Christmas.
