Rachel Attias is a writer, educator, and editor from the Hudson River Valley of New York, though she now calls Portland home. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Porter House Review, Portland Review, Columbia Journal and more, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University. Her writing and her heart are concerned with relationships both present and ancestral, memory, time, everyday absurdity and, above all, humor.
Meet Rachel Attias, a fabulous weaver of surreal fictions and one of the newest writing teachers at Literary Arts. Rachel began teaching in our downtown space earlier this year with ‘Weirding the Every Day’, a four-week generative fiction class built on the premise that “being alive is really a very strange endeavor.” Staying in the fiction lane, her next class, ‘The Long Short Story’ , begins on January 22, 2025, and is one of the first in-person writing classes scheduled to take place at the new Literary Arts headquarters in Portland’s Central Eastside. You can sign up for the class here.
We are delighted to introduce Rachel with this short interview below about her upcoming class and pedagogical style, featuring Toni Morrison, tarot cards, and the case for being a little excessive.
Can you share a little about your upcoming class, ‘The Long Short Story’?
This class is centered around longer short stories, which feels almost subversive to me amidst today’s landscape of very short writing. As a reader and editor for literary magazines, and someone who submits stories myself, I’ve been coming up against the word count wall, which seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Contests and awards for flash fiction abound, but it can be very difficult to find an audience for a story that is ten, twenty, thirty pages long. At the same time, some of our most beloved pieces of writing are on the longer side. In this class, I want to brush away the constraints of word counts and publishing preferences, and focus on writing stories that are just as long as they need to be. There are so many luxurious things that long writing can do—provide character background, expand on historical context, allow for surprising tangents and speculation—and we are going to make space for all of them.
What are some things you hope students will learn in this class?
I hope that students will learn to be a little maximalist, a little excessive. I want us to trust our voices more and to believe in the stories we’re telling enough that we can decide, with confidence, what should be cut and what’s absolutely worth leaving on the page. I want to combat those voices that many of us hear inside as we’re writing, which ask, Is this too long? Will anybody want to read all this?, and instead ask ourselves, Where do I want to go next? What do I need to keep writing toward?
If you were to describe your teaching style in five words or less, what would you say?
Girls just wanna have fun.
How is your writing life shaped by the work you do as a teacher, or vice versa?
I’m often seeking ways to play and explore in my writing, looking for those aha moments or things that make me chuckle alone with my cat. In teaching, I get to be a part of those moments alongside other people. My understanding of a story I’ve read a dozen times can suddenly shift after talking with my students, who see and feel things differently than I do. It’s a gift of perspective that I can only really get in a literary community, and reminds me that there’s more to everything, even my own writing, than what I can see on the page.
What books or authors have shaped you the most in terms of your writing life or your pedagogy?
I read somewhere once that Toni Morrison, as a writing teacher, would breeze into class twenty minutes late and spend the session captivating her students by telling stories. I would never presume to be so cool, and I am definitely chronically on time—even early!—but I do value the writing classroom as an alternative academic space, which uses less traditional teaching methods in favor of a conversational, personal relationship between its members. We’re fellow artists, not business associates, after all.
Are there any other current sources of creative inspiration for you, literary or otherwise, that you’d like to recommend?
I’ve been looking almost entirely outside of literature for creative inspiration these days. I’m currently deep inside a novel project, and have been forcing myself not to read fiction for several months in order to remain immersed in my own ideas. This is tough for me, because I’m typically a voracious reader and gain a lot of inspiration from other writers—Annie Proulx, Karen Russell, Scott McClanahan, Bud Smith. Instead, I’ve been finding new sparks all around me. Tarot cards have become an important tool, as have aimless walks around the city, with no headphones so I can eavesdrop! Movies are fair game, and I love John Cassavetes, Terrence Malick, Kelly Reichardt, Yorgos Lanthimos. Engaging with artwork made by my peers and loved ones also gives me the energy I need to keep going.
You can check out some of Rachel’s latest publications via the links below:
The Legs in Bodega Mag
I’m Johnny Knoxville in X-R-A-Y
