Some reviews of The Ash Family!

Dear friends,

My book has gotten some reviews, which is really wonderful and exciting. Here are links to all the ones I could find:


The New Yorker Briefly Noted // The New York Times // Paris Review Staff Picks // Minneapolis Star-Tribune // Associated Press // Chicago Review of Books // New York Journal of Books // Fredericksburg Free Lance Star // Book Reporter // Arts Fuse // Barrelhouse // Booklist // Kirkus // Publishers Weekly

Here are some quotations:

“[A] stunning début...Dektar has a gift for describing the wonders of the natural world, and sensitively inhabits a young cultist’s fragile state.” —The New Yorker

“In the recent surge of fiction written by millennial women for their peers, none have done quite what Molly Dektar does in her debut novel, The Ash Family…The ‘millennial novel,’ as it has developed into a subgenre thus far, is in large part about individuation and actualization, but here it is about trying to connect in some meaningful way with the physical world. The protagonist, Berie, is never fully involved in her new family’s increasingly violent acts, and this is likely because Dektar’s attention is as captivated by the natural world as Berie’s is; she would rather linger over landscapes than plot a protest. And thankfully so—Dektar crafts beautiful prose, lush and loamy in the vein of Thomas Hardy’s naturalism.” —The Paris Review

“This debut novel is nothing short of compelling . . . a captivating and haunting tale.” —New York Journal of Books

"If Wild Wild Country was your number one Netflix show of 2018, then you'll love the story of Berie—a 19-year-old who finds belonging in an off-the-grid (and dangerous) collective instead of her freshman dorm.” —Glamour

“Although it’s tempting to rush through this near-thriller, The Ash Family is the kind of novel that should be read slowly. Yes, it’s propulsive and ridden with moments of tension, but savoring on the layered secrets found inside the unraveling Ash Family’s farm is the real treat here.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Molly Dektar's creepy, brilliant debut novel, The Ash Family has not a whiff of the supernatural about it. Yet it is a top-notch horror story, made even more unsettling by the fact that nothing about what it unravels is particularly far-fetched.”—Fredericksburg Free Lance Star

You can find more info about the book on my site, and order it here.

A few book updates

I have a new website for book-related news. See it here.

I also set up a TinyLetter. You can subscribe here.


I'll be doing some readings for the Ash Family in April:

4/8/19, Manhattan, New York: Barnes & Noble, Upper West Side

4/10/19, Brooklyn, New York: McNally Jackson Williamsburg, with Dinaw Mengestu

4/16/19, Durham, North Carolina: Regulator Book Shop

4/22/19, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Porter Square Books

5/6/19, Manhattan, New York: NYPL Young Lions

I hope to see you there!

Grand Pyrenees dogs that made it into the book.

Pre-Order The Ash Family

My first novel, which I've been working on for nearly as long as I've had this blog, will come out on April 9th, 2019. Many experiences I've posted about here have ended up in the book, which is about an off-the-grid homestead in the mountains of North Carolina. 

(The tagline is: "When a young woman leaves her family—and the civilized world—to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost.")

You can order it on Amazon here or IndieBound here.

Also I just joined Goodreads, you can follow me here.

Though the social media I update most often is my Instagram.

As we turn the corner into 2019, I am feeling very grateful to all of you who have read my blog and reached out to me over the years. Thank you, thank you, thank you. <3 

internet favorites for october: favorite enormous eyes

Enormous Eye is a kind of writing project--art project?--by Amy Rose Spiegel of Rookie. Various writers--not all young, but mostly, not all New Yorkers, but mostly--record every single detail of their Saturday, and she publishes the results pretty much unedited. And you're not supposed to go out and have a really dynamic interesting day--just do what you'd normally do.

I got to do one in the spring, and it was my favorite day of living in New York. (It didn't hurt that it was one of the first warm days of spring.) Everything was incredibly vibrant and exciting and fresh, and I felt like I could see it all. I felt half-nervous, half-powerful. I told Eve, this is probably what I hoped being a writer would feel like every day!

Anyways, the whole Enormous Eye experiment is worth reading in its entirety. It TRANSCENDS the sum of its parts. On the one hand, I found it very comforting to realize how many of my writer heroes are introverted like me, or spend a lot of time alone. (Sometimes living in NYC it feels like there's a huge party going on, just beyond my reach.) On the other hand, it reminds me of what the best lecturer I ever had at Harvard, Phil Fisher, said about Joyce's Ulysses--the idea is that in one single day you remember/relive every important thing that's ever happened to you. I also think it's interesting to see who's really blasé about the activity, really bare-bones, and who is a little more writerly.

I have so many favorites, but here is my favorite one ever, by Lola Pellegrino. I also forced Eve to read it.

I also love Haley Mlotek's, so beautiful and simple.

And I love everything by Sarah Nicole Prickett and this is no exception (but have you read her bit in Women in Clothes??).

Here are the other Internet Favorites.

Power animal workshop, for Gothamist!

I'm so happy to share my first piece for Gothamist, about a power animal workshop with a shaman!

Fairy School, at Fusion!

I am really excited to report that my first article for Fusion was published today!

See it here (photos included)!

Favorite Writing Ideas, Part I

Now that I'm coming to the end of my fiction MFA, I thought I'd try to record the most essential lessons I learned.

Internet favorites for March: two favorite New Yorker articles

I think about these two all the time:

Jonathan Rosen about passenger pigeons, 6 Jan 2014:
In 1813, John James Audubon saw a flock—if that is what you call an agglomeration of birds moving at sixty miles an hour and obliterating the noonday sun—that was merely the advance guard of a multitude that took three days to pass. Alexander Wilson, the other great bird observer of the time, reckoned that a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals. To get your head around just how many passenger pigeons that would mean, consider that there are only about two hundred and sixty million rock pigeons in the world today. You would have to imagine more than eight times the total world population of rock pigeons, all flying at the same time in a connected mass.

Burkhard Bilger about Sandor Katz and wild fermentation, 22 Nov 2010:
The ants, collected from his woodpile in the winter when they were too sluggish to get away, had a snappy texture and bright, tart flavor—like organic Pop Rocks. (They were full of formic acid, which gets its name from the Latin word for ant.) He brought us a little dish of toasted acorns, cups of honey-sweetened sumac tea, and goblets of a musky black broth made from decomposed inky-cap mushrooms. I felt, for a moment, as if I’d stumbled upon a child’s tea party in the woods.

ps: all the other internet favorites

from the museum of natural history in berlin

edited to add:
derek parfit
bringing animals along
secret riches beneath a temple

Missed Time

Missed Time

Ha Jin

 

My notebook has remained blank for months

thanks to the light you shower

around me. I have no use

for my pen, which lies

languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live

a storyless life that needs

no writing for meaning—

when I am gone, let others say

they lost a happy man,

though no one can tell how happy I was.

The most perfect song ever written

"The Beer" by Kimya Dawson.

It's really more of an incantation and it is brutal. I remember a friend's quasi-abusive ex boyfriend posting it online, and watching this video with the lyrics, getting more and more enchanted until I started crying. I mean, what is it!?

After that song, I felt as devastated as the pine in our yard that got hit by a lucky lightning bolt and ended up naked, standing in a ring of its own singed bark. We had to cut that tree down!

Here are a couple of the lines that recently most lightning-strike my aesthetic core:

"The Christians gave me comic books as if I would be scared/of burning in hell, well I was already there."

"We had to sit down on skateboards just to make it down the hill."

As well as the most perfect song ever written, it might be among the most perfect short stories. I've wasted so much time trying to recapture in my own stories what this song makes me feel.

When I first heard the song this is the line that just killed me: "First I cried for him, and then I cried for me/haunted by the ghost of the girl I used to be."

Just for making this post I watched this video of Kimya Dawson performing it and its power slayed me all over again!

This video was recorded at Chaz's in Durham when I still lived there. Where was I??

For more things that I think are the best thing ever:

http://malborkmalbork.blogspot.no/2012/12/so-long-its-been-good-to-know-you.html
http://malborkmalbork.blogspot.no/2012/11/one-poem-for-day.html

Picking out the things you like

 Above: My palette right before I cleaned it for the last time, May 2012

In the fourth Betsy-Tacy book and the last childhood one, Betsy talks about how during the Christmas season they'd go to town and visit the department store (I think) where there was a huge array of Christmas tree ornaments. They'd spend hours admiring every one (in those days, they were all fragile blown glass), and finally, at the end, each girl (Betsy, Tacy and Tib) would pick out just one ornament for herself, and that one object would embody the spirit of the season.

Lucy likes anything with a hand motif. She also likes anything with suns and moons with faces on them (within reason). I find I like anything with an eye motif. I would buy a lime-green thing (my least favorite color to wear) if it had eyes embroidered all over it. In my painting, I never get sick of naked women. I've already discussed my love of sweaters, but in college I went through a phase of being particularly obsessed with taupe cardigans. I own about eight cardigans in shades from dark gray-brown to beige, and sometimes wear them all on top of each other, which is my idea of fun. Because of my habit of wearing three or even four cardigans on top of each other, and because of Harvard's habit of overheating the classrooms in winter, requiring the students to undress and re-dress at every class, I'd always be the last one out the door after the lecture.

Lucy and I went to the Folk Tree in Pasadena and I admired every single brightly-painted mirror and ornament of hammered tin. There were torsos and buttocks, flying skulls, hands with bright-red hearts on them, and dozens of desert animals. I lack the restraint of Betsy-Tacy and bought about eight. Lucy bought a silver ring with a large stone set in the top, and some silver earrings that look like tiny chairs. She is such a good present-giver, and spares no expense on the people who will really appreciate it (mostly her sister). The best presents I have given in my life are to guys who aren't that into me. If I could somehow convince myself that I was writing stories for a guy who wasn't that into me, I would be insanely prolific.

For some reason, creative writing teachers like it when they can read a story and tell it's yours, and painting teachers like it when you develop a palette that you like to use. It is so satisfying seeing classmates develop their own styles. I always felt, by the end of the semester, that if we showed a bunch of unlabeled paintings, we'd be able to figure out whose was whose. Even the wild "recipe" experiments of Non-Observational Painting and Monsters were about building up one's way of painting, not destroying it. In high school I was so unsure of everything, and in college creative courses (taken with mostly upperclassmen) they expect you right away to be sure.

My high school art teacher told us to put as few colors as possible on the palette, so I chose a selection of colors that I found exciting and authentic, and they are still the base of all my paintings: Cadmium reds and yellows, alizarin crimson, cerulean, indigo, pthalo blue, yellow ochre, various siennas and umbers, tons of white, and Payne's gray, never black. You can get a more harmonious black by mixing burnt umber and Payne's gray. The first story I ever wrote as an adult centered around a kid who was so obsessed with his watercolors that he wanted to eat them.

I've been having a huge crisis of confidence and direction recently.