Allison Wyss

Allison Wyss is the author of the short story collection, Splendid Anatomies (Veliz Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Water~Stone Review, Monkeybicycle, Split Lip, Lit Hub, and many other places. Some of her ideas about the craft of fiction can be found in Reading Like a Writer, a monthly column she writes for the Loft Literary Center, where she also teaches classes. Find her at allisonwyss.com. 

Artist Blog Posts
Reading Like a Writer
Bibi B.’s “Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin Should’ve Interviewed Some Women”: Serving a Reprimand with Tea (GUEST blog by Karen Zwolenski)
A daughter’s silent rebellion: How Bibi B. uses fiction to critique erasure in storytelling.
Allison Wyss
Dec. 1
Reading Like a Writer
At the Mercy of Movement: "Our Castle" by Christine H. Chen (GUEST BLOG written by Luke Nolby!)
Lit!Commons subscriber Luke Nolby takes over Allison's column for a special exploration of the relentless momentum and powerful movement in “Our Castle” by Christine H. Chen.
Allison Wyss
Oct. 26
Reading Like a Writer
Mrs. March and Bodily Emotion
How do physical sensations deepen emotional impact and reader connection?
Allison Wyss
Oct. 23
Reading Like a Writer
Salt and the Significance of a Quiet Moment
How a child's touch shifts perspective in a mother's world.
Allison Wyss
Aug. 31
Reading Like a Writer
Never Have I Ever and Sustaining Wonder
What makes Isabel Yap's storytelling so captivating?
Allison Wyss
Jul. 9
Reading Like a Writer
Sea Change and Thematic Linking
Explore time and memory in Allison Wyss' insightful review of Gina Chung's beloved novel.
Allison Wyss
May. 3
Reading Like a Writer
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez and a Prologue
Prologues: Your Story's First Impression—A Case Study with Ruthy Ramirez
Allison Wyss
Apr. 9
Around the Loft
Writing Doesn't Have to Be So Lonely
The Loft's debut digital literary community is almost here!
Allison Wyss
Mar. 15
Reading Like a Writer
Verushka and a Child's Perspective
Experience Verushka through the eyes of its youngest character, Devon, and discover how a child's view can transform our understanding of both magic and reality.
Allison Wyss
Jan. 24
Reading Like a Writer
The Light at the End of the World and Dream Language
Colonialism, climate disaster, and supernatural marvels intertwine in the surreal world of Siddhartha Deb's narrative.
Allison Wyss
Dec. 15
Reading Like a Writer
Jackal and an Unusual P.O.V.
Between the Trees: Join Allison Wyss on a journey through 'Jackal', where the search for missing girls reveals a town's dark secrets.
Allison Wyss
Nov. 7
Reading Like a Writer
Nothing But Blackened Teeth and the Accumulation of Horror
An almost-inaudible whisper, an ancient sacrifice, and a party gone wrong—enter the ghostly world of Cassandra Khaw.
Allison Wyss
Sep. 28
Reading Like a Writer
Unwieldy Creatures and Vulnerability
How 'Unwieldy Creatures' makes you invest emotionally in a character you can't trust.
Allison Wyss
Aug. 29
Reading Like a Writer
"Nightbitch" and Dual Sensibility
An ordinary mother, an extraordinary transformation. Dive into the world of 'Nightbitch' by Rachel Yoder, where the line between human and dog gets blurred in the most astonishing way.
Allison Wyss
Jul. 11
Reading Like a Writer
White Ivy and Physical Description
Read on to learn how Susie Yang's NYT Bestselling Novel "White Ivy" Explores Identity through Physical Description.
Allison Wyss
Jun. 5
Reading Like a Writer
People Want to Live and Description that is Alive
Explore the dynamic world of character creation in Farah Ali's "Beautiful," where danger, adventure, and complex personalities intertwine.
Allison Wyss
Apr. 23
Reading Like a Writer
White Horse and a Scary Start
Analysis of Erika T. Wurth's strange and mysterious horror novel "White Horse"
Allison Wyss
Mar. 10
Reading Like a Writer
Snow Hunters and a Layering of Feeling
How we can use fiction to capture emotional states that are far too complicated to state simply
Allison Wyss
Feb. 7
Reading Like a Writer
The Women Could Fly and Landscape Reflections
The Women Could Fly, a novel by Megan Giddings, is set in a world like ours, except the misogyny's a bit more blatant: women must marry men or else register to be carefully watched, and the accusation of witchcraft could lead to execution.
Allison Wyss
Jan. 17
Reading Like a Writer
The Hole and a Late Revelation
The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun (translated by Sora Kim-Russell) is a terrifying novel told from the perspective of a person (Oghi) at the complete mercy of his caregivers. Some are careless. Some are cruel for the sport of it. Some fail to understand him. But the most frightening is his mother-in-law.
Allison Wyss
Nov. 29
Reading Like a Writer
O Beautiful and Getting Ideas in Around the POV
How do we let in outside perspectives beyond our main character's POV? Jung Yun's O Beautiful has some lessons for us.
Allison Wyss
Oct. 18
Reading Like a Writer
The Ghost Bride and a Scene Told Out of Order
I'm interested in the way the opening moments of the book introduce both the literal idea of a ghost bride, and the upside down logic and atmosphere of the afterlife more generally.
Allison Wyss
Sep. 16
Reading Like a Writer
How High We Go in the Dark and Denying Closure
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is about climate change, a worldwide pandemic, and a whole lot of death. The book chronicles multiple generations and includes robot pets, space travel, and a suicide theme park. But it's also a novel about grief and the devastating struggle of loss.
Allison Wyss
Aug. 19
Reading Like a Writer
Ready, Set, Go and Jumping Right In
Ready, Set, Go by Inés Bortagaray (translated by Ana Patete) is about a family on a road trip. The narrator is a child who watches the scenery, squabbles with siblings over the window seat, and lets her mind wander just about everywhere.

Here's how it opens:
Allison Wyss
Jul. 7
Reading Like a Writer
We Ride Upon Sticks and a More-Than-Apt Metaphor
Quan Barry's We Ride Upon Sticks is about a high school field hockey team in the late eighties who make a pact with the devil (or Emilio Estevez, in notebook form) under the shadow of the Salem witch trials (they live where they happened).
Allison Wyss
May. 25
Reading Like a Writer
City of Incurable Women and Artifacts
City of Incurable Women, by Maud Casey, is a book about the psychiatric patients of Paris's Salpêtrière Hospital in the 19th century. It's about women diagnosed as hysterical. It is both historical and fictional.
Allison Wyss
May. 5
Reading Like a Writer
This is Paradise and the Movement in a Still Object
"Portrait of a Good Father" by Kristiana Kahakauwila (found in the collection This Is Paradise) is a short story that takes place over many years, following different family members as they cope, or fail to cope, with a traumatic loss. It's devastating.
Allison Wyss
Mar. 23
Pro Tips
On Revision
This past fall I found myself teaching an intense class on revision. I also found myself with about the same amount of time to complete final revisions on a short story collection that would launch in March (Splendid Anatomies, Veliz Books). What a thing!
Allison Wyss
Mar. 4
Reading Like a Writer
Mongrels and Wonder
Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels is a novel about werewolves. Oh! I've spoiled it. But of course that much is spoiled. We live in a world of hype and trailers and book covers. You might only pick it up because you are looking for a book about werewolves. (You should pick it up either way.)
Allison Wyss
Feb. 22
Reading Like a Writer
Quantum Girl Theory and a Twisting Metaphor
Erin Kate Ryan's novel Quantum Girl Theory starts with a true story of a missing girl, but instead of centering those left behind, the novel imagines the many different lives she may have lived. It's a beautiful book that is clever and subversive but also suspenseful.
Allison Wyss
Jan. 26
Reading Like a Writer
If You Leave Me and Fear
Crystal Hana Kim's novel If You Leave Me opens with three teenagers living in a refugee camp in Korea in 1951 and follows them for many years after the war, as two of them settle into a bad marriage and all three into some serious regrets. I'm interested in a scene early on.
Allison Wyss
Dec. 22
Reading Like a Writer
Beneath the Rising and a Terrifying Motif
Premee Mohamed's Beneath the Rising is about two teenagers, Nick and Johnny, who inadvertently awaken The Ancient Ones and must race around the world to save humanity. It's also about good and evil, the perils of transactional relationships, and what makes friendship real.
Allison Wyss
Nov. 30
Reading Like a Writer
A Separation and Physical Intrusions upon Fantasy
Kate Kitamura's A Separation is about a woman who travels from London to Greece to find her estranged husband so she can ask for a divorce. The book is her physical search for him, but more than that, it's the narrator's search through memory and fantasy for some understanding.
Allison Wyss
Oct. 21
Reading Like a Writer
Freshwater and Sitting with Uncertainty
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, opens in a strange and magical way. Not only is the POV “we,” the narrators are not yet born and might be magical. When we first encounter this voice, it's hard to tell what is happening—what is "real," what is human, what is something else.
Allison Wyss
Sep. 23
Reading Like a Writer
Sharks in the Time of Saviors and Transcendent Imagery
Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn is about a Hawaiian boy with special powers and the rest of his family. I'm interested in how the specific language choices make us understand those powers, creating a thrilling sensation, and also resonating with the book's bigger themes.
Allison Wyss
Aug. 12
Reading Like a Writer
This Close to Okay, Subtext, and a Layering of Setting
Leesa Cross-Smith's This Close to Okay is a novel about a recently divorced therapist who stops a man from jumping off a bridge and then befriends him. One of the ways Cross-Smith makes the characters both real and compelling is through her deployment of setting and subtext.
Allison Wyss
Jul. 15
Reading Like a Writer
Salt Houses and Creating a Magical Object
Salt Houses is a novel that follows multiple generations of a Palestinian family. It opens during a wedding, in the perspective of Salma, who is the bride's mother. Against her own mother's advice to never do a reading for family, Salma is about to read her daughter's fortune in coffee grounds.
Allison Wyss
Jun. 8
Reading Like a Writer
The Wolf of Oren-Yaro and Some Playful Metafiction
The Wolf of Oren-Yaro is a fantasy novel about a young queen traveling in a hostile land. Queen Talyien is the narrator—she's messy and violent and also cunning and sometimes vulnerable. Her tone is conversational, and her approach to storytelling seems straightforward—until it's not.
Allison Wyss
May. 12
Reading Like a Writer
The Kiss Quotient and Another Kind of Sex Scene
The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, is a romance novel about an autistic woman, Stella, who hires a professional escort to teach her how to have sex. And it's sexy. It also uses some really great strategies in its depiction of sex.
Allison Wyss
Apr. 14
Reading Like a Writer
Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear and Emergent Dialogue
Matthew Salesses's Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a novel about doubling and disappearing. It's funny and frightening and sad. It's also very much interested in what is real and what is imagined, what is said out loud and what is merely thought.
Allison Wyss
Mar. 18
Reading Like a Writer
Leave the World Behind and a Strange Omniscience
Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is about two families who are thrown together as the world is ending. The precise nature of the disaster is never revealed; we only know it's bad. I want to talk about how the particular style of narration works to unsettle the reader.
Allison Wyss
Feb. 18
Reading Like a Writer
Trail of Lightning and Sentence Structure
Trail of Lightning is set in the time after the Big Water, a climate catastrophe that has drowned most of the continent. It’s a world “where the old gods have risen, where monsters threaten the five-fingereds, where death stalks the few who still live on the land of their ancestors.”
Allison Wyss
Jan. 13
Reading Like a Writer
Certain Dark Things and Dynamic Description
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things is about Atl, a vampire on the run in Mexico City, and Domingo, a teenager who lives on the streets and decides to help her. I’m interested in the way Atl is described, how the sequence of the details creates a dynamic—and magical—understanding of her.
Allison Wyss
Dec. 9
Reading Like a Writer
Signs Preceding the End of the World and Layering Imagery
Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is the story of a woman crossing the border from Mexico to the United States in search of her brother. The novel is a study in unsettling the reader to create an experience that is frightening, beautiful, and astounding.
Allison Wyss
Nov. 11
Reading Like a Writer
A Burning and Death
Megha Majumdar’s A Burning is about a young Muslim woman in India who witnesses a terrorist attack and then makes a reckless post on Facebook. She is accused of being a terrorist and ultimately pays a terrible price. I'm interested in how Majumdar handles that price.

Warning: Spoilers in this post.
Allison Wyss
Oct. 7
Reading Like a Writer
Such a Fun Age and Opening Scenes
There’s a lot of talk about starting books off at exciting moments, right in the middle of things. And there are many great reasons to do this. There are also a lot of challenges! How do we cram in the backstory and character building needed to fully understand the scene?
Allison Wyss
Sep. 9
Reading Like a Writer
We Love You, Charlie Freeman and Sensibility in Scene
We Love You, Charlie Freeman is about a Black family who agrees to teach sign language to a chimpanzee. The story follows teenage Charlotte and her family during the time of the linguistic experiment as well as older stories relating to the institute running the experiment and its racist history.
Allison Wyss
Aug. 12
Reading Like a Writer
The Mothers and Surfacing Bias
Brit Bennett’s The Mothers starts with a 17-year-old girl whose mother has just died by suicide and spirals from there, following not just her, but the other lives that hers touches. I want to talk about its fascinating style of narration.
Allison Wyss
Jul. 22
Reading Like a Writer
The Magicians and Intimacy from a Distance
I’m not reading as much as I did pre-isolation. It’s harder to focus, and with a kid at home, there is very little time. But I can manage a bit of TV—which is just as good for finding writing techniques and strategies. I promise.
Allison Wyss
Jul. 2
Reading Like a Writer
Pachinko and Sensibility
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee, is a novel that spans generations—an incredibly difficult thing to do! 

I’d like to talk about how the style of narration and the careful way it is filtered through various characters helps Lee to a create story that moves through long periods of time with elegance.
Allison Wyss
May. 5
Reading Like a Writer
The Little Stranger, a Shift in Atmosphere, and the Illumination of Mystery
Sometimes, as writers, we need to show a shift in atmosphere or mood—but how to describe that? A great technique is to describe the same unchanging thing but in a different way. I think of it as a shift in the sensibility of the character as they respond to the change in the air.
Allison Wyss
Apr. 7
Reading Like a Writer
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Saturation
Ocean Vuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel about a Vietnamese-American boy, his childhood, and his first boyfriend. It’s written as a letter to the boy’s mother, a woman who is both traumatized and abusive. Vuong is not only a novelist but a poet . . .
Allison Wyss
Mar. 24
Reading Like a Writer
The Memory Police and Forgetting
Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police is set on an island in which disappearances occur. Things like hats, roses, fruit, and calendars are made to vanish—not only from the physical world but also from memory. And those who mysteriously manage to remember are detained and killed by the Memory Police.
Allison Wyss
Feb. 25
Reading Like a Writer
In the Dream House and Unsettling
Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House is a devastating memoir about an abusive lesbian relationship. The structure is strange and lovely. Machado doesn't pick a genre for her story but uses a different one each chapter.
Allison Wyss
Feb. 6
Reading Like a Writer
An Unkindness of Ghosts and the Unexpected Action
The main characters in Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts have been stuck on a spaceship for generations and brutally oppressed by those on higher decks with lighter skin.
Allison Wyss
Nov. 26
Reading Like a Writer
"Blue Light in the Sky" and Shadows
"Blue Light in the Sky" is the title story of the collection by Can Xue (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping). It's a creepy story about two sisters, their adversarial relationship, and what happens when one is mysteriously injured.
Allison Wyss
Oct. 29
Reading Like a Writer
The Unpassing and Beginnings
The hardest thing is figuring out how to begin a story. It's your one chance at a truly pure and vulnerable reader. The reader knows nothing, and must trust everything—or not—and you can work with that in the best ways.
Allison Wyss
Sep. 19
Reading Like a Writer
The Regional Office is Under Attack and Structure
Manuel Gonzales's The Regional Office is Under Attack is about forces of darkness, those out to stop those forces, and others out to stop the forces stopping the forces. It has assassins, oracles, and robot arms. And it's riveting.
Allison Wyss
Aug. 20
Reading Like a Writer
The Moor's Account and Witness
When fiction refuses to look at non-centered characters, it teaches us to do the same in our lives, normalizing the erasure of real human beings.
Allison Wyss
Jul. 24
Reading Like a Writer
The Incendiaries and a Layered Perspective
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon is about a college student (Phoebe) who becomes enmeshed in a violent religious cult, while her boyfriend (Will, the narrator) grapples with his own discarded faith in God.
Allison Wyss
Jun. 26
Reading Like a Writer
"The Lonesome Bodybuilder" and a Terrifying Sex Scene
Yukiko Motoya's collection "The Lonesome Bodybuilder" (translated by Asa Yoneda) is wonderfully strange and darkly profound.
Allison Wyss
May. 28
Reading Like a Writer
Reading Like a Writer: Omniscience in "Sons and Other Flammable Objects"
Porochista Khakpour's Sons and Other Flammable Objects is about family strife. A mother, father, and son flee Iran during the revolution to settle in Los Angeles, but when the son grows up, they are torn apart by alienation, pride, and miscommunication—among other things.
Allison Wyss
Apr. 22
Reading Like a Writer
Reading Like a Writer: "What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky" and Puncturing a Closed World
The story is magical, but also strange and complex. There is a particular world created inside the story, one in which all babies are made from the materials that surround us—yarn, clay, porcelain—and debts can be repaid in happiness and empathy.
Allison Wyss
Mar. 18
Reading Like a Writer
"Heavy" and Inclusive Intimacy
Kiese Laymon's Heavy: An American Memoir is about being black, male, heavy, brilliant with words, and growing up in Mississippi. It's devastating to read—in a good way. I'd like to talk about a beautiful moment of friendship in the book.
Allison Wyss
Mar. 1
Reading Like a Writer
Reading Like a Writer: Setting and Sensibility in White Dancing Elephants
Because it's unaligned with a character, I initially wonder if the voice is omniscient, or even objective third-person. When the "I" emerges in the second paragraph, it's a surprise. I realize the character has been hiding from me, effacing himself behind the dense description of his hiding place.
Allison Wyss
Jan. 23
Reading Like a Writer
Reading Like a Writer: THE TIGER'S WIFE and Strange Perspective
Téa Obreht's THE TIGER'S WIFE is about a young doctor who pieces together the history of her grandfather—a mysterious life story that is filled with fairy tale-like magic—while she cares for orphans in a war-torn country.
Allison Wyss
Dec. 21
Reading Like a Writer
Where We Go When All We Were is Gone and Gross Details
I want to talk about grossness and gore. I want to talk about when a detail in a story makes you shudder or gag. Can the repulsive be misused? Of course! But it can also do wonderful things for a story.
Allison Wyss
Nov. 2
Reading Like a Writer
The Merry Spinster, Defamiliarization, and Fairy Tales
Daniel Mallory Ortberg's THE MERRY SPINSTER is a collection of retold fairy tales and children's stories that play with reality, both twisting and shedding new light on it.
Allison Wyss
Sep. 19
Artist Classes & Events
Class
Narration: Finding the Right Voice
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 Class
Intimacy and Conflict: Creating a Scene in Fiction
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 Class
Awkward is My Superpower: Writing Sex
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