Michelle Huneven says critically acclaimed ‘Bug Hollow’ owes debt to her UCLA students
Sean Brenner I UCLA
After she finished her 2022 book, “Search,” Michelle Huneven had an experience familiar to many writers: She felt like she had run out of ideas.
In search of inspiration for her next project, she turned to the model for her UCLA fiction-writing workshops, in which her students write a story per week, based on prompts she assigns.
“I just made a list of all of the prompts I’ve given them, and I wrote on one of them for 20 minutes every day,” said Huneven, a continuing lecturer in the English department. “It wasn’t so much that those prompts gave me the idea for new stories, but doing that reconnected me to my imagination — it got the juices flowing again.”
Around the time those creative wheels started turning, Huneven reached back into her archive and found an unfinished short story she had begun a few years earlier — also in response to one of the prompts she had assigned her students. Ultimately, that germ of an idea became “Bug Hollow,” Huneven’s sixth novel, which was published in June.
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Photo credit: Stephanie Yantz for UCLA Humanities