Brandon Bye has been a paperboy, a chef, a farm hand, a soccer coach, a barman, a fact-checker, and a freelance writer. He writes short fiction and non-fiction, and he is currently working on the pilot episode of the next big TV series, guaranteed to fill Facebook status updates across America. He grew up in New Hampshire, spent several years in Michigan, and now lives in Washington State.
From the Archives: Brandon Bye on questions of influence, literary values, and more from Aleksandar Hemon’s 2012 visit to the Hopwood Room at the University of Michigan.
From the Archives: In honor of Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent Nobel Prize, we revisit the author’s visit to the Hopwood Room in 2015.
Kazuo Ishiguro visits the Hopwood Room and talks about what qualifies a person to teach writing.
“I think for a work to really ascend, there has to me something magical in the creation of it. It’s the difference between the art and the craft. The craft we can teach…The art is the stuff that only comes from inside the heart and the soul of the creator.”
Editor’s Note: The Hopwood Room Roundtable is a weekly event in which visiting writers of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing discuss their work and the writing life with the University of Michigan’s student body, faculty, and the local literary community. Despite the ongoing gloom of this Midwestern winter, Kathryn Davis filled the Hopwood room with writers eager to ask her questions. Davis told us that she loves answering reader questions. “You never know what somebody’s going to ask you.” It seems simple now to write this out, but I suppose you never know what you really think […]
Editor’s Note: The Hopwood Room Roundtable is a weekly event in which visiting writers of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing discuss their work and the writing life with the University of Michigan’s student body, faculty, and the local literary community. Inside the Hopwood Room, friends and colleagues caught up over coffee and cookies, discussing avalanche survival tactics and personal rules about never living in alligator-populated states, awaiting the main event: an in-the-flesh Genius. When Karen Russell—novelist, short story writer, MacArthur Genius Fellow, and probably the most easy-to-be-around and gracious person you’ll ever encounter—entered the room, which was […]
Dale Peck visits the Hopwood Room and talks about the difference between “good book reviews” and “smart book reviews.”
In 2009, Narrative Magazine published Anthony Marra’s short story “Chechnya.” He was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop then and “Chechnya” was his first published story. It won a Pushcart Prize before Marra expanded it into his first published novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, released this week by Hogarth. Lauded by Ann Patchett for being the most “ambitious and fully realized” first novel since Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena connects the lives of six characters surviving the dense hellscape of war-torn Chechnya, 1994-2004. I finished the novel two days before last […]
Once upon a time in Seattle I lived with a lawyer, a librarian, an engineer, and a retailer. We threw dance-y parties and hosted champagne and apricot scone brunches. We read by the fireplace and played after dinner games of Settlers of Catan. And although we did not know one another prior to moving in together—we met the old-fashion way, on craigslist—we became close. It started with the lawyer, and after a time the whole house was online dating. They, like many twenty-odds, were using OkCupid—“the Google of online dating.” Soon, our wholesome after dinner board games changed to after […]
Italo Calvino once said, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” For author Kevin Smokler, who spent last year re-reading 50 “classics,” the dictum rings true.
