<p>Welcome back to the blog! I promise I&#8217;m working on a more regular post schedule; life has been happening lately with unusual speed. But I&#8217;m glad to be back, and I&#8217;m delighted that today&#8217;s post features the work of my friend Meredith Doench, novelist and writer of short fiction. Meredith and I met several years &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2018/01/28/zen-for-ten-35-tuesday-after-lunch/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span clas

<p>Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! Here&#8217;s some new listening to help usher in the New Year. For today&#8217;s post, I&#8217;m delighted to welcome my friend and colleague Susan Ingram. Susan is a fellow Baltimore writer; she and I studied together in the Johns Hopkins MA program in fiction, and she is a &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/12/29/zen-for-ten-34-the-coaster/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader

<p>After a longer-than-expected hiatus, Storytelling and Sound is back! Today&#8217;s guest is my friend and colleague Tom Andes, with whom I was in workshop twice at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Tom is an outstanding writer and workshop mate, and I&#8217;m delighted to feature his work today. Tom&#8217;s writing blends crime fiction with a rich, descriptive &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/12/12/zen-for-ten-33-the-hit/" class="more-link">Continue

<p>Today&#8217;s guest on the Storytelling and Sound series is award-winning, internationally published poet, fiction writer, and essayist Susan Tepper. I&#8217;m delighted to have the chance to feature six of Susan&#8217;s beautiful prose poems in today&#8217;s post. When I read these pieces, I fell in love with them immediately. The lyrical, rhythmic language, the evocative imagery, &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/11/09/zen-for-ten-32-dear-petrov/" clas

<p>Today’s guest on the Storytelling and Sound series is Taylor Larsen. Taylor&#8217;s debut novel Stranger, Father, Beloved was released July 2016 by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. It was chosen as one of Huffington Post&#8216;s Hottest Reads of the Summer for 2017, one of the New York Post&#8216;s Summer Must Reads, and one of Ploughshares&#8216;s Best &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/10/26/zen-for-ten-31-stranger-father-beloved/" class

<p>Today&#8217;s guest on the Storytelling and Sound series is Craig Terlson, whose novel Fall In One Day was released May 2017 by my own publisher, Blue Moon Publishers, and has received a terrific reception. In this week&#8217;s video, I&#8217;m reading a short excerpt from the novel and have paired it with J. S. Bach&#8217;s Sinfonia &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/10/12/zen-for-ten-30-fall-in-one-day/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="s

<p>Today on the Storytelling and Sound series, in which musical and verbal storytelling come together, I&#8217;m delighted to feature the work of my colleague and friend Louise Marburg. Louise and I met at the 2013 Sewanee Writers&#8217; Conference and were back in workshop together this past summer at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Louise&#8217;s debut &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/09/28/zen-for-ten-29-the-truth-about-me/" class="more-link">Conti

<p>Today&#8217;s post features an excerpt from Chapter 4 of To Love A Stranger, paired with two short excerpts from Frederic Chopin&#8216;s Nocturne in B flat Minor, Op. 9 no. 1. The excerpt from Stranger is told from the point of view of Jeannette Reilly, one of my two main characters. Jeannette has just started working &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/09/14/zen-for-ten-28-chopin-and-to-love-a-stranger/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="scr

<p>Today&#8217;s post features my short story &#8220;Night Roses,&#8221; first published in Peacock Journal and featured in the journal&#8217;s 2017 print anthology. I&#8217;ve paired the story with George Gershwin&#8216;s second prelude for piano. &#8220;Night Roses&#8221; is one of my &#8220;Zelda Fitzgerald stories,&#8221; which I admit a little cautiously, because Zelda has been featured so exhaustively in &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/08/31/zen-for

<p>In today&#8217;s post, I&#8217;m continuing with the mix of reading and music, this time featuring my short story &#8220;Fly Away Home,&#8221; first published last year in The Bookends Review. This piece also won an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train&#8216;s Short Story Award for New Writers competition. I chose this particular story in response to the &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/08/17/zen-for-ten-26-fly-away-home/" class="more-link">Continue readi

<p>Storytelling and Sound, with its new words-and-music format, will be back soon! Meanwhile, it was an honor to have this guest post featured at the wonderful book blog The Quivering Pen. Writing about one of my all-time favorite books, and the influence it had on me, was a delight. The post also gave me a &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/08/03/zen-for-ten-25-guest-post/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Zen for Ten 25:

<p>The blog is back! (For now. 🙂 ) Apologies for my long absence, and thank you for visiting again. These past few weeks have been super-busy. To Love A Stranger&#8216;s launch party on June 10 was a great success (pix and video coming soon!). The following week, I went to the wonderful Kenyon Review Writers &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/07/12/zen-for-ten-24-storytelling-and-sound-remix/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-te

<p>&#8220;There isn&#8217;t a way things should be. There&#8217;s just what happens, and what we do.&#8221; &#8211; Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky This post feels haphazard to me, but I&#8217;ve been thinking about it for the past couple of days and wanted to try to put it together. It includes some thoughts about where &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/06/01/zen-for-ten-23-what-will-you-do/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader

<p>(Thoughts on a novel launch: how we got here, what it&#8217;s all about, and what happens next&#8230;) We have liftoff! To Love A Stranger launched on May 23 and is now available in Kindle and paperback form on Amazon. You can also get it in paperback at Barnes and Noble. Yesterday, the day after &#8220;book &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/05/25/zen-for-ten-22-the-bend-in-the-road/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Ze

<p>&#8220;Listen to the mustn&#8217;ts, child. Listen to the don&#8217;ts. Listen to the shouldn&#8217;ts, the impossibles, the won&#8217;ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me: Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.&#8221; &#8211; Shel Silverstein This will be my last post before Novel Launch Day, May 23 (and I&#8217;m running a little early &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/05/10/what-do-you-want-to-be-known-for/" class="more-link">C

<p>This morning, on my way home from a doctor&#8217;s appointment, I stopped at a park about a mile from my house. I&#8217;ve been there a lot: it&#8217;s a big parcel of farmland that also, at one point in its history, housed a row of kilns used to produce agricultural lime. These days, as you walk &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/04/27/zen-for-ten-21-for-the-wild-places/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Zen for Ten 21:

<p>This week&#8217;s post is all about the music. The recording is longish, so I&#8217;ll keep the words short. 🙂 I&#8217;d like to share one of my favorite &#8220;storytelling and sound&#8221; pieces, Robert Schumann&#8217;s Papillons Op. 2. Schumann belongs to the Romantic era in music history (about 1825 to 1900). He&#8217;s one of the composers in &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/04/13/zen-for-ten-20-flying-slips-of-paper/" class="more-link">Continue

<p>There&#8217;s something about spring. Even after as mild a winter as we&#8217;ve had here in Maryland, you feel a change in the air when the season officially turns. New energy, new light; a kind of optimism that gets in your blood with every breath you take of clean, fresh air. No wonder we talk about &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/03/31/zen-for-ten-19-let-the-light-out/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Zen for Ten

<p>(Note: the blog will be on break next week.) A couple of weeks ago, my novel reached a new milestone on its road to release. At the same time that the Kindle pre-order went live on Amazon, the e-version also went up on the online service NetGalley, where you can download a free copy of &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/03/16/zen-for-ten-18-rubber-meets-road/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Zen for Ten 18: Rubber meets

<p>Today&#8217;s post is about sending some good energy into the world, in a couple of different ways. Music first. My featured piece today is Mozart&#8217;s Sonata in F Major, KV 280. It&#8217;s my favorite Mozart to perform, and includes one of my favorite slow movements ever. It has three movements total: Allegro, Andante, and Presto. &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/03/09/zen-for-ten-18-positive-energy/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="