Leah Bailly

Writing and teaching literature on unceded Coast Salish territory— Vancouver, BC. www.leahbailly.com

[leahbailly]

Beyond excited! Thank you to Samantha Haywood, Evan Oakes and Jen Sookfong Lee for bringing this book into the world. March 2027, LFG.

[leahbailly]

Thank you to Joya: AiR located in Velez Blanco, Spain, for the beautiful week of residency to work on my novel late 2024. It was a warm and inviting space for me to rewrite a project from long ago. Returning to Spain was a gift, and I am so grateful to Joya: Air, the volunteers, artists and artists who have run this space for over 20 years. Gracias!

[leahbailly]

Thank you to the LEÑA Artist Research & Residency Centre for hosting me in May 2023 for a beautiful week of writing on Galiano Island.

// GUESTBOOK // Five things that shaped Leah Bailly //

Song: Desperado, Rihanna

Book: Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder

Film: Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel

Trip: Guatemala - Honduras - Belize - Chiapas, 1997-1998

Advice: don't live with your hand on the stove, Dave Hickey

#artistresidency#artistresidence#galianoisland#natureinspired

[leahbailly]

Thank you to the readers at CRAFT and the amazing Maisy Card for choosing Vegaboy’s first chapters for first place in the First Chapters Contest this year. This excerpt will be published in December. Thank you CRAFT!

https://www.craftliterary.com/craft-first-chapters-contest-2022/

[jennwitte-deactivated20260419]

October bestsellers at Skylight Books!

[skylightbooks]

October bestsellers at Skylight Books!

[leahbailly]

Currently digging Trick Mirror, LOVED Luster, waiting on Daddy, Bennett & Ferrante in my queue. Your readers are rad 💕

[leahbailly]

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/bludgeoned-joy/

Happy to have a new essay up at the LA Review of books blog. After a prominent university asked me to write an essay about happiness, I wrote a piece about all the factors that kids need to be happy. I included the fact that we need safe doctors, and the story was killed! So pleased LA Review of books gave it a new home.

[leahbailly]

Eng 103 Capilano University English Introduction to Literature (Leah Bailly)
Defining Our Era 
Rather than look backwards, as so many introduction courses do, this class will look at the most contemporary work we can find—published between 2010 and 2020—to ask larger societal questions about in our current period of literature. Who are today’s poets, story writers, and essayists? How are they recording the narrative of this era? What forms does it take? Together, we will examine how literature reaches us and represents us. We will read diverse voices, find new experiments in hybrid forms, explore many unique points of view, and discuss how the words look on the page. Writers like Morgan Parker, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Abdurraqib, Natalie Diaz and Seo-Young Chu will help us to define to our distinct experiences of the contemporary world.

[leahbailly]

High School, a memoir by Tegan and Sara

High School, a memoir by Tegan and Sara, to be published Sept 24, 2019. A transcendent story of first loves and first songs, it tangles itself up in the parallel and discordant memories of two sisters growing up down the hall from one another. This is the origin story of Tegan and Sara.

Look how super dope their memoir will be. Calgary 1997 forever. Weep at the playlist. Laugh at the blurbs like this one:

“I’m apprehensive about the book- maybe they should let sleeping dogs lie- do they really need to tell people about those experimental times?”

-best friend from high school’s mom

[leahbailly]

The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference, 2019

The Futurists: 

Writing for the Network Society with Leah Bailly

Date(s): Saturday, February 23, 2019, 4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m. Location: Thoren, University Club, Arizona State University Type(s): Presentation, Seminar Genre and Form(s): Experimental, Fiction, Hybrid, Interdisciplinary, Mixed Genre, Science Fiction Tags: Narration, Media, Technology, The Future, Sound, Video, Image

About the Session

How does the global village tell stories? How does the digital age change our thinking and our writing? Thanks to the internet, we are now used to events being broadcast instantly and simultaneously. Plural voices report on every issue, and text is always accompanied by video, sound and image. As we delve further into the digital age, we are increasingly comfortable with hyperlinks and hybrid forms and multiple narrators infiltrating our narration. But do we forsake a certain intimacy in our literature? Are we growing accustomed to the isolation of constant connectivity? This seminar examines what we gain and lose by writing in a networked society, and how these new forms appear on the page and screen.

[leahbailly]

Crystal Hut 🌞 (at Crystal Hut) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsCCC_2H-XA_6enveevlLCWjo0DDQnL4Qd8ZFM0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1hmxibm4cbav1

[leahbailly]

So grateful to Literary Affairs in Los Angeles for inviting me to moderate a panel at the Beverly Hills Literary Escape. Best quote, Joan Silber: “Raise your hand if you’ve never done something stupid for love.” None of us did. 💗

[leahbailly]

New Poetry by Indigenous Women

In my Mojave culture, many of our songs are maps, but not in the sense of an American map. Mojave song-maps do not draw borders or boundaries, do not say this is knowable, or defined, or mine. Inst…

“Our American apocalypse is maybe the best way to start new. Indigenous peoples have survived apocalypse, yet still wake up & imagine, in a Nation designed to kill us. Now you’re here too in the apocalypse your ancestors made. It’s morning now, morning is when revolutions start.”

From Natalie Diaz via Twitter: @NatalieGDiaz

[leahbailly]

Fellows | Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing

Very stoked to be heading to the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing next spring for their conference as a Teaching Fellow. Some desert time next Feb, we’ll be at Arizona State.

[leahbailly]

Victoria 

Botanical Beach 

French Beach 

Sunshine Coast

[leahbailly]

How many ways can teenage girl-lives intertwine and break away. Julie and Celine are white teens in New Mexico, they are actors, misfits, try-hards. Their teen lives can feel deadly serious and also feel light and perfect: crushes and parents and lipsticks and joints and blowjobs and school plays and laugh-attack-nonsense. It can also be about the murdered girls around us, the disappeared, the never-come-backs. The text is always reminding us of what is at stake, the violence done to women in the margins in cities like Jaurez and Vancouver, and how that kind of violence looms in the background for every girl. It is girlhood, adulthood, a book on the cusp. Brilliant and breathtaking, #book*hug seems to have an amazing eye for the unconventional novel

[leahbailly]

Maternity leave, trip to Bali Indonesia, move to Canada-- it’s been a wonderful winter and spring. I’m so happy to be back to writing after eight months away with baby and fam. xox

[mttbll]

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (via mttbll)