Craft & the Creative Life: The Art of the Short Story

"Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams." —Neil Gaiman

Every word counts in a short story. It is storytelling, distilled. This panel features three authors talking about how and why they write short fiction. Featuring Toni Mirosevich, Beverly Parayno, and Rita Bullwinkel.

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Panelists:

Toni Mirosevich’s latest book of stories is Spell Heaven (Counterpoint Press, 2022). She’s the author of six previous books of poetry and prose including Pink Harvest, winner of the First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award. Her cross-genre writings have appeared in Kenyon Review, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of many residencies including MacDowell, Hedgebrook, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, she’s a professor emerita in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and former Associate Director of the Poetry Center.

Beverly Parayno was raised in East San José by immigrant parents from the Philippines. Her work appears in Narrative Magazine, Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, Warscapes, Huizache, Southword: New Writing from Ireland, and World Literature. Parayno is the author of the debut story collection WILDFLOWERS (Philippine American Writers and Artists, 2023). She earned a BA from San José State University, an MA from University College Cork, and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Currently, she is working on a teenage runaway memoir set in upstate New York in the mid-1980s. She lives in Cameron Park.

Beth Piatote is the author of two books, including the mixed-genre collection The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Association Prize for fiction. The Beadworkers has been featured on NPR and selected as the “one read” for multiple university and community programs. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Poetry, and World Literature Today, among other journals and anthologies. She is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Rita Bullwinkel (moderator) is the author of Headshot (Viking, 2024) and Belly Up, which garnered a 2022 Whiting Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in ZYZZYVA, Tin House, The White Review, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her work has been translated into Italian, Greek and Dutch. Both her fiction and translations have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is Editor-at-Large for McSweeney’s, Deputy Editor of The Believer, Contributing Editor for NOON, and the creator of Oral Florist. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches at the California College of the Arts and University of San Francisco.

Event Venue

The American Bookbinders Museum, 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco, United States