Michelle Huneven says critically acclaimed ‘Bug Hollow’ owes debt to her UCLA students

Sean Brenner | July 8, 2025

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.

Critics have raved. A New York Times reviewer wrote that it “instantly seduces the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose.” Lit Hub called it “a masterful collage of character and connection.” NPR described the work as “an expansive meditation on loss and grief … lovingly rendered.” And in the Washington Post: “Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds.”

Although Huneven said she generally doesn’t pay attention to reviews, she admitted that her husband, Jim Potter, encouraged her to read the Times and Post endorsements, and that she has been aware of the positive commentary in general.

“It has been heartwarming,” she said. “It’s really wonderful when there’s a lovely response to a book you’ve written.”

Huneven added that the reception also has been a “big boost” coming just months after her Altadena home was destroyed in January’s wildfire. (The foundation for a new home, on the same site, was being poured on the day Huneven was interviewed for this article.)

Setting the Samuelson family in her own hometown was a decision Huneven 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.”

Born as it was from her own classroom writing assignments, Huneven said “Bug Hollow” owes a debt to her UCLA writing students.

“I really have to thank them,” Huneven said. “Whenever I start feeling whiny or like I can’t do something, I think of how brave they are to write every week … and to read their work aloud to classmates. How can I be whiny when they do that?”

Writing “Bug Hollow” might also have given Huneven a few lessons she’ll be able to share with her future students. For example, the novel employs an unconventional structure in which each of its 10 chapters is narrated by a different character.

“All of the stories are connected, but there’s no main character,” Huneven said. “So one of the things I would tell my students is that if you’re writing connected short stories, they don’t all have to be from one point of view, or from one main character — they can connect in different ways.”