About

Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.

Contact Jennifer de Guzman at blog@jenniferdeguzman.com

What Are Possible Impossiblities?

“The Poet ought rather to chuse Impossibilities, provided they have Resemblance to the Truth, than the Possible, which are Incredible with all their Possibility.”
- Henry Fielding, quoting Aristotle in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

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The Books I Read

“Dark” Subjects in YA Fiction, or Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before

Yet again, someone is wringing their hands about the content of young adult fiction. This time it’s Meghan Cox Gurdon in the Wall Street Journal. I responded to a similar article ten months ago. The arguments were a little different, but the main concern was the same — that the subjects of YA fiction are [...]

Word Traveling

Revisiting and Revising

70/365 by Amy Loves Yah. Used under Creative Commons License.

Young writers have to have a certain reckless confidence if they’re going to turn into experienced writers. You have to believe in yourself so much to keep writing — in all but a very few cases, it is an endeavor without great reward, especially [...]

The Books I Read

They Say You Were Something in Those Formative Years

"Not quite Sophie Beer" by Dan Foy, www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/, used under Creative Commons License

Via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, I found “Bad Books for Kids,” an essay on young adult fiction by David Mills, first published in Touchstone, a Christian magazine. Mills expresses his shock at what he calls “commercial depravity” in [...]

Word Traveling

Adolescent Dystopia, or Is It a Teenage Wasteland?

At The New Yorker, Laura Miller reviews The Hunger Games, a series of young adult novels set in a society in which teenagers are annually drafted to take part in a gladiator-like contest. But more broadly, Miller explores the genre of dystopian fiction and its appeal to teenagers. She attributes it partially to teenagers’ ability [...]

Word Traveling

All We Ever Wanted

About ten years ago, after a couple of bad jobs and something of an emotional meltdown, I took a little more than a year off to work on my writing. The result was about a score of short stories of varying quality (a couple of them received honorable mention in their respective years of [...]