An author born and raised in a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in a home built by an artist father and a carpenter mother.
As moved by Jim Henson's puppetry as she is by the works of Gabriel García Márquez.
Accused of being a poet disguised as a novelist by Patricia Smith during a thesis defense.
Olive 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 violence 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.
"If you write it, a curse on anyone who reads it." A warning ignored by Jeremy Jordan, author of the collected diaries and transcribed interviews with his own hellbound mother in 1909. Sidney Jordan, murderer, outlaw, fallen woman passing often as a man in her travels, has her 1870's adventures in America documented by a son who, through the process of writing this book, opens up questions about his own origins, and where his mother found him as a baby in the first place.
A death and a discovery lead to Sidney Jordan seeking Alva, her mother, across the United States in a bid for answers -- while Alva sends Pinkertons, Templars, and even an assassin-turned-friend to make attempts on Sidney's life. Along the way, Sidney comes to face her true inheritance -- not silver, but hunger. This hunger, for righteous bloodshed, the suffering of men she deems evil, for any perceived justice, is her road to Hell.
The friends she makes along the way are Jeremiah Cain, legend of the Civil War and killer of white slavers, and Lovey Sluder, an Appalachian-Cherokee bard who sings to guard god's secrets. Together, they brave adventures across the Americas, from New York to Memphis, Cape Horn and Los Angeles, San Francisco and at last, Virginia City, the violent heart of Alva's empire of bloody silver.
What awaits them there is a promised feast, a great spoiling of their spirits, a banquet laid out to rival the excesses of the old gods. In this tale, the question of who eats, and who is eaten, is asked of the 19th century and beyond.
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.
Short stories are published in both Meat for Tea: The Valley Review and Artwife magazines. Poetry has been featured in Monkey Puzzle.
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 — and where she met her wife. They live in Washington state.
"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."