by Writing Workshops Staff
58 minutes ago
“Before taking the workshop, my writing life was lonelier, but now it’s more full.”
A father stands in his childhood living room trying to hold time still. The house has, as he puts it, lost the vertical hold — that old television knob that kept a picture from rolling — and every version of himself he has ever been keeps blipping into the room while his seven-year-old daughter watches. It is funny. It is also, quietly, devastating. That’s “Dizzy Llamas,” one of twenty-two stories in Some Stupid Glow, and it is a fair introduction to the sensibility TJ Fuller has spent years sharpening.
TJ writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches composition and creative writing at Mt. Hood Community College and advises Perceptions Magazine, the school’s arts publication. His stories had been finding homes in Columbia Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Juked, and HAD for the better part of a decade. What he did not have, for a long stretch of that decade, was other writers in the room.
Eight Weeks on the Sentence
In September 2024, with a manuscript largely drafted and a collection taking shape, TJ signed up for Tension & Voice, on the Sentence and Beyond, an eight-week Zoom intensive with Nathan Dragon. It is a class built on a narrow premise with wide consequences: that a story is assembled from the sonic qualities of its words, that each sentence should be a solid thing rather than a stepping stone to the next one, and that concision is not trimming but packing.
For a writer already deep into a book, that kind of attention arrives at exactly the right altitude. TJ came out of the eight weeks with one idea he has not put down since.
“I think of Nathan Dragon’s lesson about defamiliarization often, and the power of defamiliarization in writing.”
You can see why it stuck. Defamiliarization — making the ordinary strange enough that a reader has to look at it again — is the engine under most of Some Stupid Glow. A dead-end job. A backyard wrestling match. A parent’s ordinary terror at a sleeping infant. Fuller keeps handing readers something they recognize and then tilting it a few degrees until it goes luminous, or absurd, or both. Of Nathan’s teaching, TJ says simply: “I loved Nathan’s attention to detail.”
The Book
Some Stupid Glow arrived from Featherproof Books in April 2026 — a Chicago independent press with a long history of publishing this kind of formally restless short fiction. The characters in it are desperate in the way most people are desperate: they want their lives to mean something, they look for it in work and in other people, and they fail a lot. The collection is set largely in the Pacific Northwest and populated by, among others, aging backyard wrestlers, homeless gamblers, and more Philip Seymour Hoffmans than seems strictly necessary.
The blurbs are the kind a debut author dreams about. Jess Walter calls it whip-smart-alec and praises its bracing, playful hilarity. Sara Lippmann describes Fuller as a reluctant prophet rendering humanity and its flaws with acuity and tenderness. Lindsay Hunter says the book felt like a playground she got to run wild in — a slightly dangerous one — and that she is going back in.
What He’d Tell You
Ask TJ how he pushes through when the writing gets hard and the answer is unglamorous and immediately usable: “Write less, but write often. Even 15 minutes a day helps keep moving a piece forward.” Twenty-two stories is not a sprint. It is a decade of fifteen-minute mornings, and it shows in the best possible way — in the density of the sentences, in how little fat any of them carry.
He has already turned toward the next thing, and he is frank about the vertigo of it: “I am working on my first novel, and that transition from stories to a novel is keeping me up at night. The space is so wide to play in, but the space is so wide.” That sentence — the same clause doing two opposite jobs, freedom and dread sharing one breath — is a small demonstration of everything the man is good at. We suspect the novel will be worth the sleeplessness.
Congratulations, TJ. We were glad to be one stop along the way.
Every book starts as a handful of pages and a writer who keeps showing up. If you’re working toward something — a collection, a first story, a habit that finally sticks — you don’t have to do it alone. Our workshops put you in a small room with working writers who have been where you are, and with peers who will read you closely and honestly. Browse our upcoming online classes and find the one that meets you where your work actually is.
