Yesterday “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” won the Ignyte Award for Outstanding Short Story!!  Congratulations to all the winners and finalists!

Tempting though it may be, I won’t do the whole post in columns.

As both a writer and as a reader, I love stories that really delve into ideas. How do we process the world around us, what are the limits of attention, which things might aliens do differently? I’ve written a lot of stories with the goal of evoking an emotion, but “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” is the first story I’ve written that tries to evoke a specific cognition. I wanted to give readers at least the illusion of doing something that human brains don’t really do: read two things at once. My favorite reader feedback, which I had (with variations) from many people was “This completely broke my brain, but in a good way.”

A few thank yous that didn’t fit neatly into the two-column format above:

Thank you to my wonderful family for many years of love and encouragement. I’m also grateful to the Ignyte Awards admins for their work running the award, to the Ignyte jury for including my story in the nominations, and to everyone who read and voted.

Thank you all so much, this is my first time winning an award, and I can’t even begin to say how much it means to me.