If you're learning about the craft and loving the experience, you're succeeding.
“I think all honest, literary effort reflects the fact that we humans are imprisoned by our cultures. It isn’t so much getting the internal conflict onto the page, it is letting it come out.”
“Between those lines I sketched a person. I hope I did her justice.” Carrie Callaghan talks with Kate Lemery about bringing seventeenth-century painter Judith Leyster to life for her debut novel, A Light of Her Own, out now from Amberjack.
“Imagine two thousand people reading your interactive novel and each having completely unique story experiences. To me it sounded like the future—and I, as a writer who believes in exploring new storytelling tools, wanted a piece of it.” Returning to his “Quotes & Notes” series, Steven Wingate explores the pleasures and pitfalls of writing interactive fiction.
“Reading The Dakota Winters entertains—like visiting a museum of ephemera, or skimming through decades-old back issues of People Magazine“: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Tom Barbash’s new novel.
“Yes, I have faith in my process, but I also know that it could fail me at any time.” Louise Marburg chats with Mary Volmer about patience, process, and the short story form.
“We need to ask why we choose the characters we do and what we are trying to communicate with them. We need to challenge our own biases.” Rene Denfeld talks with Kate Lemery about writing, social justice, and The Child Finder, out now in paperback by HarperCollins.
“Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Welcome Home alongside a new collection of Lucia Berlin’s short stories, Evening in Paradise, on the same day as the midterm elections last week. A knowing wink from the publisher to the politics that these books contain? Perhaps.”
“So in the novel I’m driving at the idea that justice and freedom don’t wait. It’s not, well, you need to suffer just a little more and then things are going to be peachy in fifty years. No. That was the rationale for colonialism and you can see the wreckage that left behind.”
“It’s the ultimate act of forgiveness, I think, this deciding to let go of how our lives might have turned out differently.” Jaclyn Gilbert and Shayne Terry talk writing, running, and Jaclyn’s debut novel, Late Air, out next week from Little A.
“My overall feeling is that it likely took a lot of energy just to keep track of what was going on around me at home—to make sure everyone was okay and the day wasn’t going to veer off into territory that felt fraught and unstable.” Paula Saunders talks with Steven Wingate about her novel The Distance Home and the winner-take-all emotional violence that underpins America.
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"
