#empathyforeverybody: An Interview with Maya Sloan
by Steven Wingate
Ever wonder what it’s like to keep your writerly identity while collaborating on novels with incredibly famous people? Maya Sloan can tell you.
Ever wonder what it’s like to keep your writerly identity while collaborating on novels with incredibly famous people? Maya Sloan can tell you.
In the newest contribution to our Teaching Writing Series, Laura Valeri describes the rewards of teaching her students to utilize primary research such as oral histories, court transcripts, and testimonies as avenues for inspiring their own fiction, as well as how working with these resources can prompt productive classroom discussions on “ownership, truth in fiction, and about the ethical nuances of writing another person’s story.”
Laura Valeri’s Get Writing prompt offers a game for understanding images—and, perhaps, ourselves
“I heard Marilynne Robinson say once that “we can never escape the landscape of our preoccupations.” I was struck by that phrase and I think of it all the time, the landscape of our preoccupations. I feel liberated by it.”
“Writing the surfing scenes terrified me. I worried about pushing readers away—writing passages that would only connect to surfers and not to the larger audience. But the bigger concern was just what you describe: the inability to translate such a physical sensation onto the page.”
“I write about these environments for the same reason I’ve put myself in them so many times. It’s a heightened experience. Things are unfamiliar and exciting and you get to redefine yourself, if only briefly.”
“There came a day, about ten years ago, when I stood with my father in front of an elevator in Denver—we were helping one of my brothers move—and he had no idea what it was for.”
Matt Bell sits down with Hobart founder Aaron Burch to discuss Burch’s soon-to-be-released debut story collection, Backswing.
Every time I read this story I get a thrill, the sensation of having to hold on tight for a wild, plummeting ride, a dizzying shift in perspective, a cascade of questions that I can’t answer.
This week’s feature is Jesmyn Ward’s new memoir, Men We Reaped, which was published this week by Bloomsbury. Ward is also the author of the National Book Award winning novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury, 2011) and the novel Where the Line Bleeds (Agate, 2008), which was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan in 2005, was a Stegner Fellow from 2008-2010, and served as the 2010-2011 John […]
