Happy Book Year

I’m happy to say that this new year is starting off with the best of news–my co-edited volume on creative writing pedagogy, Dispatches from the Classroom, is now out in stores and selling well. This book’s a three-year labor of love, dating back to a 2008 MMLA panel in which my co-editors and I, frustrated at the lack of practical books for beginning creative writing teachers, resolved to write one of our own. Written by current graduate students, the essays of our book blend theory and experience to give the nuts-and-bolts suggestions we wish we’d heard in our first year: how to structure a creative writing syllabus, how to set grading criteria for a poem, and how to train students to workshop without bloodshed. And though the essays are grounded in undergraduate workshop experience, it’s a book we hope can help creative teachers of any level.

Check it out at Continuum’s website or Amazon.com–we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Longreads.com

I’ve been a fan of Longreads for several months now, so you can imagine my astonishment to see one of my own pieces (“The Counterfeit”) pop up on their feed. Check out the plug–and some terrific longform journalism on either side–at their website.

Southern Review 47.3

If you haven’t already picked yours up, be sure to check out the latest Southern Review–you’ll find a new piece by me (“Saw Kler and Naw Kler: A Fairy Tale”) as well as knockout stories by Peter Levine and Quan Barry. Fuller description below:

“Travel to Burma, Russia, Japan, and the beaches of Captiva Island in the pages of The Southern Review’s summer 2011 issue, which brims with great new stories by Christine Sneed, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, David Yost, Quan Barry, and others. Essays include Scott Nadelson’s meditation on three writers who shaped his writing life and Peggy Shinner’s exploration of the cultural meaning of hair across space and time. New poetry by writers including Alice Friman, Jim Daniels, Ron De Maris, Laura Kasischke, Peter Marcus, Will Schutt, John Witte, and our own Jen McClanaghan accompanies exuberant artwork by Soren Vandegaard of New Orleans.”

http://www.lsu.edu/thesouthernreview/

 

All Their Riches

My story “All Their Riches,” featuring a Karen refugee’s struggles to resettle in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is now up at The Sun‘s website.

Check it out.

You can find the full version in their April issue, now on quality magazine racks everywhere.

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog of fiction writer David Yost. Judging from Google, I’m probably the world’s fifth-most famous David Yost, my four predecessors being:

4. This Naval Postgraduate School professor who, according to JSTOR, writes an article about NATO every other week:

3. Ohio’s new Auditor of State:

2. University of Missouri’s Offensive Coordinator:

1. And this guy, who’s been the bane of my name for so long that I even wrote a story about it.

I’m not any of those guys.