Peter Selgin’s debut novel, Life Goes to the Movies, is based in large part on his experiences growing up in New York in the 1970s. JT Torres talks to the author about bringing fact to fiction, strategies for the revision process, why identity is so important in his work, and more. Following the interview is an exclusive excerpt from Selgin’s novel-in-progress, Hattertown.

Friend of FWR (and very talented writer) Elizabeth Ames Staudt reflects in the Kenyon Review on writing about children and one’s children becoming writers:
Do writers want their babies to be writers? I feel like, in the way-too–many-celebrity-profiles I’ve read, most famous people hope their progeny will not head Hollywood-wards, but are quick to add that [...]

he more MFA programs spring up, the more people seem to look down on them—as if some kind of MFA-inflation and devaluation were taking place. Novelist Lev Raphael, however, recently wrote about why he found his MFA program valuable:
I was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst MFA program for two and a half [...]

Author Elizabeth Benedict, editor of the recent anthology Mentors, Muses, & Monsters, discusses her experience being forced to unplug:
Finding this blank book already so full of hope and history — from Hemingway’s to my beloved sister-in-law’s — was a bit like encountering a bear in the woods: it was just the two of us, and [...]

“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

— a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

Did you miss FWR Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin on the “Living Writers” show on Wednesday? No worries. You can now stream the podcast on iTunes preview—mouse over the August 11th episode and click play, or click “View in iTunes” to download. The interview starts at about 15:30.
“Living Writers” airs every Wednesday [...]

So maybe Tuesday’s post on the 10-year novel got you down. Here’s some encouragement: lit site The Rumpus is introducing a new occasional column, “The Long Haul,” featuring writers reflecting on the (long-term) writing life. Or, as the editors put it:
Whether you’re a literary wunderkind whose first book was a bestseller, or one [...]

We’re excited to announce that FWR Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin will be this week’s guest on “Living Writers”, hosted by T. Hetzel. “Living Writers” airs every Wednesday at 4:30pm on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. Tune in to hear him discuss Fiction Writers Review, his own writing, the Inside Indie Bookstore series he publishes in Poets & Writers [...]

n Slate.com, Susanna Daniels reflects on the process of writing her first novel—which she describes as “the quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing”:
During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts. My “novel” (which had started to wear its own air quotes [...]

Anthony Doerr’s newest collection, Memory Wall, was published by Scribner in July. Christopher Mohar talks with the author about such topics as the politics of writing, the importance of curiosity, the role science plays in his fiction, why he likes the novella as a form, and how we can successfully inhabit characters different from ourselves.