Michelle Huneven says new book ‘Bug Hollow’ owes debt to her UCLA students

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.

The book follows the lives of the Samuelsons, a middle-class family from Altadena, California, over the course of five decades, as they cope with the aftermath of a tragedy. A New York Times reviewer wrote that the novel "instantly seduces the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose," while Lit Hub called it "a masterful collage of character and connection."

The positive reception has been a "big boost" coming just months after her Altadena home was destroyed in January's wildfire, Huneven said. Setting the Samuelson family in her own hometown was a decision she had made well before the fires; the book was already in galleys by the beginning of 2025. But the tragedy prompted her to change the novel's dedication page to read, simply, "To Altadena."

Read more on the UCLA Humanities website.