Particularizing Experience: A Conversation with Charles Blackstone
by Nick Ostdick
“The answer, perhaps, is not being afraid to get up at four in the morning”: Charles Blackstone tells Nick Ostdick about his latest novel, Vintage Attractions.
Nick Ostdick is a husband, runner, writer, and award-winning journalist currently residing in Western Illinois. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University and is the editor of the anthology Hair Lit, Vol 1 (Orange Alert Press, 2012). He’s a frequent contributor to Fiction Writers Review, the winner of the Viola Wendt Award for Fiction, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His stories, interviews, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Annalemma Quarterly, Exit 7, The Emerson Review, Big Lucks Quarterly, Bookslut, and elsewhere.
“The answer, perhaps, is not being afraid to get up at four in the morning”: Charles Blackstone tells Nick Ostdick about his latest novel, Vintage Attractions.
Nick Ostdick sits down with Todd Dills to talk about his collection of stories, Triumph of the Ape, the role of setting in his work, using Kickstarter to fund a print-run of his new book, and much more.
It wasn’t until Peter Anderson began commuting by train from Joliet for his job in the heart of Chicago’s downtown financial district that he unearthed perhaps the most valuable aspect for any fiction writer: time. Nick Ostdick speaks with Anderson about his debut novel, Wheatyard, and how he turned his scribblings during his daily commute into the beginnings of a literary career.
I’m not the kind of bibliophile who owns multiple copies of the same book—first editions, paperbacks, reprints, limited editions, and so on. I’ve never really had the living space to accommodate such a habit, but more over my books are littered with margin notes, end notes, notes for stories I’m working on, notes for stories I want to work on, so many red and blue-inked annotations that purchasing a new copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories or Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago would feel like cheating on the marked-up copies, betraying some long-term, intimate relationship. So there was no reason to […]
Nick Ostdick talks with Katey Schultz about her debut collection, Flashes of War, the choice of flash fiction as a form, and what makes a story worth telling.
Real Monsters: B.J. Hollars talks to Nick Ostdick about arrested development, stories hiding secret novels, and the uneasy relationship between fact and fiction.
Nick Ostdick sits down with Jared Yates Sexton to talk about his new collection, An End to All Things, as well as writing “Recession America” stories, gauging story arcs in terms of “how the plane lands,” and constructing new worlds.
Nick Ostdick talks with Megan Stielstra about the 2nd Story reading series in Chicago and a new anthology of performed essays from the series’ ten-year history, Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck, which she co-edited.
