Garden Paths and Brick Walls
by Nicole Nelson
Nicole Nelson on defamiliarization in Amy Hempel’s syntax in Tumble Home.
Once I had the voices, it was almost as if I were channeling them.
In so much literature the Midwest is a place that’s kind of stuck in time. It’s...
Nicole Nelson on defamiliarization in Amy Hempel’s syntax in Tumble Home.
“I wrote out of a kind of homesickness, I guess, and out of a sickness of spirit over what was happening at the border, the dehumanization of children.” Melanie Bishop interviews Beth Alvarado about her new collection, Jillian in the Borderlands, out this week from Black Lawrence Press.
“When we connect to the personal story we understand the macro-story. The history. The bigger story.” Isabel Allende talks with Nina Buckless about her new novel, A Long Petal of the Sea.
Edward Hamlin talks with Rachel Swearingen about her debut collection, How to Walk on Water, as well as her roots as a writer and a Midwesterner, challenges women face in harmonizing public and private personas, and more.
“She kept coming back, speaking to me in the night, adding to and deepening her story, so in a way the realization that I needed to write a novel about her was very natural: she led me there.” Maxim Loskutoff talks with Steven Wingate about his novel Ruthie Fear, the gravity of Montana, and the freedom of the natural world.
Scott Nadelson on disorientation as a craft technique in the work of writers like Jamel Brinkley, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, and Eduardo Halfon.
“When it comes to the Holocaust and the Apollo program, we have an added sense that they both seem impossible. These two events represent the worst of what we are capable of doing to each other, and also the best of what we are capable of doing together.” Hannah Redder talks with Patrick Hicks about Nazi concentration camps, America’s space program, and his second Holocaust novel, In the Shadow of Dora.
“I saw a parallel in the way the body attacks itself in an autoimmune disease to the way guilt attacks the mind. The bodies of many of these characters define, in some ways, the boundaries of their lives.” Alexander Tilney talks with the most recent Prairie Schooner Book Prize winner, Megan Cummins, about her short story collection If the Body Allows It.
Linda Kass talks with Eleanor J. Bader about her new book, A Ritchie Boy, the ways fact and fiction merge in the story, and the importance of remembering both our personal and political histories.
“In ways large and small, the task of a novelist who writes about the past is to make it come to life, to find singular details that make the story breathe”: Christina Baker Kline talks with Jennifer Solheim about her new novel, The Exiles.
