Welcome!
The Spark is a place for inspiration and community for readers and writers.
The monthly podcast and newsletter features:
💬 An author interview
📚 Book recommendations for ravenous readers (get the first 16 here!)
✏️ Resources for wonderful writers
👣 Updates on my moseying
A bit of background on my writing: my short story collection, Staring into the Sun, links memoir with narrative nonfiction about my Chinese American family, which includes a millionaire, a magician, and a model. The paperback and ebook will be published in May 2026 by Ten16 Press and I will independently publish the audio book. In the meantime, I am serializing the collection on Substack, publishing every Saturday from August to December 2025. As a subscriber to The Spark, you will also receive the serialization into your inbox every week.
I have also researched and written about the Eastern European Jewish side of my family and am incorporating some of those stories into my work-in-progress novel.
It turns out that having a bunch of short stories is useful for entering competitions and submitting to magazines. I’m over the moon that the collection’s first story, “Things My Dad Told Me,” was shortlisted for The Hope Prize and is published in Tomorrow There Will Be Sun by Simon & Schuster Australia. All royalties from the anthology are donated to Australia’s mental health charity Beyond Blue.
On my website, you can find further writing updates and links to buy anthologies and literary magazines featuring my work.
I use Scrivener (affiliate link here) and Word to write, along with jotting ideas on paper and in the Apple Notes app. I’m American and live outside London with my husband, teenage children, Lele the Labradoodle, Smokey the cat, fish, and a gecko. I write most mornings and in the afternoons, I try to save the planet.
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