Tomas Moniz on family, friends, writing, awards, and elbows

I first met Tomas Moniz more than a decade ago, long before his debut novel, Big Familia, which was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway and LAMBDA awards; even longer before his latest novel, All Friends Are Necessary, which won the 2024 California Golden Poppy Award. Ensconced in a dive bar with our mutual writing friends, Tomas asked me: which part of your body do you like the least? A rather forward question, I thought, but I gave him the answer: my elbows. The next morning, he sent me a poem about elbows. Not mine. Just something he had in the drawer. I was impressed.

Tomas now teaches at Berkeley City College and the Antioch MFA program. We had not spoken for ages, but by his book titles, it looked like we were both spending less time in dive bars and more time with family and friends. So, I took the opportunity to catch up with Tomas about how his writing and life have evolved—and how he still manages, evidently, to pack a punch. He is impressing award juries as he had once impressed me. And he is just as warm and open, and willing to share. You can see for yourself by watching this recording.

I had only just returned from our fourth international writers’ retreat, this time in Portugal! We spent two days in Lisbon getting acclimatized, eating good food, listening to fado, and riding around on trams, and then headed to our own private mini stone castle in Obidos where we could fully concentrate and workshop in atmospheric surroundings, sipping ginjinha or port.

Our living room and library!

If you would like to be on the waitlist for future retreats, you’ll find a registration form half way down my Events page. For those of you who are right now preparing to query, don’t forget that Heather Lazare, Lisa Manterfield, and I have a query-writing workshop (a one-day retreat in Half Moon Bay) coming up on September 6th. Attendance is juried in and limited to 12 participants. If you think you might like to join us, you can register here to receive a submissions package when full details become available. (Soon, I promise!) And for those of you who are tempted to skip the querying and are considering self-publishing, here is the link to our recent Secrets to Self-Publishing panel, just in case you missed it.

Lynn Rankin Esquer, Alyssa Jarrett, and Wendy Adair spill the secrets of their self-publishing success.

To all of you, happy writing!

Shirin