Suspend Your Disbelief

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Lydia Fitzpatrick

Contributor

Lydia Fitzpatrick is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan. She’s been published in Opium magazine, was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s May 2009 Short Story Award for New Writers, and the 3rd-place winner of Glimmer Train’s September 2009 Fiction Open. If she could enlist Doc Brown and take the DeLorean back in time to write three books, they would be: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico, and East of Edenby John Steinbeck.


Articles

Interviews |

Interesting Characters: An Interview with Brad Watson

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

Watson was born and raised in Meridian, Mississippi. And the Mississippi of today, and of the not-too-distant past, is the setting of much of his fiction. In Airships, Barry Hannah wrote that “In Mississippi, it’s hard to achieve a vista,” but Brad Watson does just that in this new collection. Not only is there a breathtaking sense of the Gulf Coast and the Delta in his writing, that geography is given depth—a hardscrabble social landscape inseparable from the place itself.


Interviews |

The People We Know: An Interview with Donald Ray Pollock

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

Donald Ray Pollock, author of the 2008 collection Knockemstiff, left high school at seventeen to work at a meatpacking plant. A year later, he landed a union job at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, where he worked for the next thirty-two years. He didn’t start writing until his forties, and even then he kept his day job—writing mornings, nights, and weekends. Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin talk with the author about coming to writing late, getting an MFA, and making disreputable characters empathetic.



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