Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘craft’

Interviews |

Architectures like Underground Cities: Part IV of an Interview with Julianna Baggott

In Part IV of Sebastian Matthews’s five-part interview with Julianna Baggott (who also writes as Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode), the two discuss being prolific, writing practice, and working on more than one project at a time.


Shop Talk |

My Inner Erma: Embracing Humor Writing

My close friend Anthony once told me during an e-mail conversation that he considered me the modern-day equivalent of Erma Bombeck. I was offended. I think my actual reply was “WTF?” Anthony was confused. “Erma Bombeck was a great writer,” he typed. “She melded all of this every day experience into something bigger, but she did it by being funny.” “I don’t want to be Erma Bombeck! I want to be Joan Didion!” “You’re not that kind of serious,” he wrote. “Can I be Alice Munro?” It went on like this until he said, “You know, I meant it as […]


Essays |

That’s Funny

Debra Spark on what’s funny in fiction–and what’s not. “The humor that works in literary fiction, the humor I like, is female. I mean ‘female’ in a pretty stereotypical way here. I don’t mean that the literary work is by women per se, but that it is relational.”