by Writing Workshops Staff
4 hours ago
Spencer Fleury already knows what his next book is. He is not entirely sure it will work, which is part of why he wants to write it.
“My vision for it is basically a 150-page Yelp review of the apartment the narrator has been living in for seventeen years and from which he will be evicted in the morning. We’ll see if I can make it work.”
That idea arrived the way the good ones often do: sideways, in the middle of an upheaval. Fleury recently left San Francisco for a new life in Portugal, and the logistics of moving a life across an ocean handed him a narrator, a premise, and a deadline all at once.
Fleury is the author of the novel How I’m Spending My Afterlife (Woodhall Press, 2021) and the story collection I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories (Malarkey Books, 2024).
This September, Stanchion Books publishes his second novel, The Shitbird. He is also, as of earlier this year, an associate fiction editor at jmww. He describes himself as a notorious hat enthusiast and a former Florida Man.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, he took a handful of classes with us.
The first was Writing Workshops Iceland in 2023, where he worked with Amber Sparks, a writer he counts among his favorite contemporary short story writers.
“She’s a perceptive and open reader of her students’ work, and she has a way of distilling narrative techniques down to their essences.”
Two years on, Spencer came back for Writing the New Noir, the eight-week generative workshop led by Tom Andes. That one was aimed at a story he had been circling for years.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that I probably would have abandoned it without the boost I got from the class,” he says.
Ask him to name the single breakthrough moment, and he declines the premise.
“For me, it’s the steady accumulation of smaller tweaks, ideas, and offhand comments that resonate beyond what the instructor probably intended. What I do know is that with each workshop I take, I emerge from it with more energy and enthusiasm for my own work, and that’s worth it all by itself.”
The Shitbird arrives from Stanchion Books on September 15th, and it is a genuinely difficult book to categorize: part noir, part coming-of-age, part very dark comedy. Colin McAllister is a seaman aboard the Coast Guard cutter Stargazer: a stoner with a bad attitude, no friends, and a mouth that keeps getting him hurt. He is what the old-timers call a shitbird. Then he is the one who finds a well-liked petty officer dead, and the crew decides it already knows what that means.
What makes the book work is that the danger is social rather than procedural. There is a body, but the real suspense is a closed world of men arriving at a verdict about someone they had already written off, and a narrator who has to survive other people’s certainty about him. It is a novel that lives or dies on interiority, and Fleury has clearly spent a long time thinking about how to build it.
He is unsentimental about what keeps him going. Asked for his secret weapon when the writing gets hard, he answered in three words: the calendar. “I’m not getting any younger, and the list of projects I want to publish is not getting any shorter. Time is limited, but goals are not.”
His advice for anyone hesitating over a workshop is similarly plain: “You’ll get more out of it than you probably think you will.” What he valued most, he says, was meeting writers from all over, at every stage of their own journeys — a community he calls a true joy.
Three other projects are apparently waiting their turn. But right now there is a novel about to meet its readers, a new country to get lost in, and a seventeen-year Yelp review to write. We cannot wait to see if he makes it work. You can follow along at spencerfleury.com.
Every writer’s path looks different, and most of them are built the way Spencer describes his: out of small accumulations, offhand comments, and the occasional week that sends you home with more energy than you arrived with. If you are looking for that kind of room — a small cohort, an instructor who reads closely, and a community of writers at every stage — we would love to have you. Browse our online creative writing workshops and find the one that fits what you are working on right now.
