Blair Nishkian
Fiction • Essays • Editing
Literary fiction that moves through darkness toward the light. Author, essayist, and editor working at the intersection of mythology, consciousness, and the strange beauty of being human.
Literary fiction that moves through darkness toward the light. Author, essayist, and editor working at the intersection of mythology, consciousness, and the strange beauty of being human.
Olivia Tarkanian is twenty, broke, and living in a rotting Fresno apartment when her mother, Mabel, calls and says come home. Mabel is a force that bends the world around her — brilliant, brutal, tender in flashes that make the cruelty worse. When Olive tells her about the woman who groomed her online since she was twelve, Mabel doesn't call a lawyer. She packs a bag, calls in favors from people who owe her, and drives her daughter cross-country to settle it her way. What follows strips both of them to the root — past the rage, past the protection that became its own kind of violence, to a shared wound neither of them knows how to name. Moonblood is about what lives between a mother and daughter when love and damage share the same body.
Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix is a psychopunk — a wetware-assisted healer who dives into the subconscious to clear out whatever's gone rotten. When a catatonic old man with a bucket of live jellyfish and no language anyone can translate is dropped at her door by a corporate agent, the job looks routine. It isn't. His mind is a centuries-deep wound, his suffering is being maintained on purpose, and the corporations that run Noviko's oceanic world can't agree on whether he should be healed or kept broken. Now she's neck-deep in something much bigger than an exorcism, with her family at stake and her sanity being spent like currency.
Jingle Bell runs Winter Wonderland with absolute sincerity and a smile that could power a city grid. She loves Christmas so much she wants it every day — and when spooky old Halloween won't get out of the way, Bell bulldozes right through. What follows is a consumerist apocalypse in rhyming verse: children buried under toys, parents worked to the bone to afford the gifts, grabby little opportunists, and a world bleached by mandatory joy. A picture book about what happens when generosity has no off switch, illustrated in the vein of DiTerlizzi and Froud, for kids who can handle the dark and adults who've forgotten they need it.
Developmental editing and manuscript consultation for fiction writers. Long-term client relationships built on direct, craft-focused feedback.
Blair Nishkian holds an MFA in fiction from Sierra Nevada College, where she studied under Patricia Smith, Alan Heathcock, Ben Percy, and Gayle Brandeis. She has also been privately mentored by Caitlyn R. Kiernan. She has been writing for fifteen years across literary fiction, speculative fiction, essay, and poetry.
Her work draws on Daoist philosophy, Gnostic and Western mystical traditions, and the deep structures of mythology. She reads upstream — studying the source material that contemporary literature draws from.
She spent two years teaching in Zhengzhou, China, where she immersed herself in Mandarin and local culture. She lives in Washington state with her wife.
"Blair is one of the most talented, dedicated, prolific students I've ever worked with — creative energy radiates from her; it vibrates from every word she writes. Some of her images will stay with me forever."
"Whenever I feel like not writing, I think to myself… 'Blair is probably writing right now.'"
"As a bestselling novelist and screenwriter, I recognize Blair's skill and artistry as a professional colleague — a colleague I entrusted with the difficult task of crafting a full-length, publishable, narrative memoir for one of my clients. It was a project she excelled at."
"Honest, direct feedback is the single most valuable thing a writer can have, and Blair consistently gives it to me."