Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘rebecca scherm’

Interviews |

Writing is More than Your Word Count: An Interview with Brit Bennett

From the Archives: “I think characters resist being known in the way real people do. When I start to construct a character, I never begin with their deep dark secrets or biggest fears or hidden shame. I usually start with the surface details—physical features, occupation, interests—and over time, I learn the things the character secretly wants or hates or tries to hide.”


Interviews |

Writing Toward a Less-Mythic Southern California: An Interview with Chris McCormick

“You know how questions can be hydras—you think you’ve solved one, and then two more sprout. I’m sure the desert will continue to baffle me in the future, but I’m excited to say my next book has more stamps in its passport.”


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: "Revenge," by Ellen Gilchrist

“Raised on Southern manners, I thrill at the way Gilchrist foxtrots through tea-sipping customs while exposing all manner of prejudice through her narrator, ten-year-old Rhoda, who absorbs the language of the adults around her and then spits it back at them indiscriminately”: Rebecca Scherm explores the power of child narrators through Ellen Gilchrist’s story “Revenge.”


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: "Dick," by Antonya Nelson

“Dick” is a snorter, a mean cackler, a muffled hooter. It’s a story to read on the subway home from a maddening staff meeting, or on your front steps after a surreal and unpleasant interaction with a neighbor, or to prepare for a holiday with extended family. Ann Ponders (har har) moves her husband and son from L.A. to Colorado, hoping to leave everything unnerving behind: her snorting, smoking daughter Lizzie, “clever and duplicitous” in “the whole smooth suit of skin she wore without thinking”; her Alzheimer’s-addled mother, now in a nursing home; her young son’s best friend, Dick, who […]


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: I Want to Show You More, by Jamie Quatro

This week’s feature is Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want to Show You More, which was just published by Grove Press. Quatro’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction Story Contest, she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She holds graduate degrees from the College […]