Suspend Your Disbelief

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Celeste Ng

Editor at Large

Celeste Ng is the author of the novels Everything I Never Told You  (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017). She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Articles

Shop Talk |

Why Teach Book Reviewing? or, How Penn State Graduate Students Become Responsible Literary Citizens: a guest post by Robin Becker

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Robin Becker. “To stimulate, to argue, to celebrate, to explain, to describe, to amuse, to popularize new ideas, to keep the conversation going—these are part of the job and a large part of the ideal to which any good book reviewer will always aspire.” –John Gross, New York Times Book Review Editor; editor of the special 100-year anniversary issue of the NY Times Book Review I designed the graduate seminar The Writer as Critic: Reviewing Contemporary Poetry, Fiction & Non-Fiction (English […]


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Au Revoir, Nicole!

by Celeste Ng

As the new academic year revs up and our teaching-focused month winds down, we here at FWR want to take a moment and say a huge THANK YOU to our wonderful summer editorial intern, Nicole Aber. All summer long, Nicole provided invaluable assistance behind the scenes, as well as writing up some excellent posts for the blog (see below). No matter what challenge we threw at her, she handled it with aplomb! This year, Nicole will be Managing News Editor at the Michigan Daily, and we know she’ll be amazing there as well. Dear readers, please join us in thanking […]


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Get Writing: Stolen-Form Stories

by Celeste Ng

As part of our teaching theme this month, we’re sharing some of our favorite exercises in our “Get Writing” series for classroom (or personal) use. Enjoy! Last week, Michael Rudin suggested that stealing a first line can help you overcome that new-story inertia. Here’s another larcenous twist: instead of stealing a line, steal a form. For this exercise, write a story in the form of some other piece of writing—a grocery list, an obituary, a set of instructions, liner notes, the back of a cereal box, a help wanted ad, a press release, a weather forecast… The less literary, the […]


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A Brief History of an Ongoing Series: a guest post by Peter Turchi

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Peter Turchi. Nearly twenty years ago, when I became director of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, I moved into a small office that had been left neat and nearly empty by the previous director. Most of what he left behind were helpful files and books, but under the desk there was also a cardboard box filled with miscellaneous manuscripts, some stapled, some paper clipped, some typed, some covered with handwritten notes and corrections. Months passed before I asked […]


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Writers Writing About Writing: The Dirty Little Secret – a guest post by Richard Goodman

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Richard Goodman. When a writer publishes a book about writing, I’m often excited to read it.  Especially if it’s by a writer whom I admire.  He or she has been in the trenches, encountered problems and, more often than not, has solved them—or come near enough.  And he or she can write, which means it’s a pretty good bet the book will be readable.  So, I think: let’s hear what this writer has to say.  I want to learn, like we […]


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Remembering 9/11

by Celeste Ng

In one of my undergraduate creative writing classes, a student turned in a poem that referred to tall buildings collapsing to the ground. His classmates interpreted this as reference to the events of September 11. Later that week, the student came to my office and confessed that he’d actually written the poem in 2000, well before the attacks on the World Trade Center, and he didn’t want to write a “9/11 poem,” because–he said–he didn’t feel personally affected by the events of that day. What he wanted to know was this: Did he have to make the poem about 9/11, […]


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Class project: Adopt a lit mag

by Celeste Ng

Kittens get adopted because they’re cute and fuzzy, with big eyes and adorable faces. (And those wee paws! Those little whiskers! Those tiny noses! Ahem.) But what about lit mags? No big eyes, no fuzzy paws—but they, too, deserve to be adopted. Enter the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Lit Mag Adoption Program, which offers discounted subscriptions to literary journals in exchange for insider access for the students. Says the program’s website: Most poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction by emerging writers first finds its way into print through literary magazines, yet few student writers actively engage with the […]


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I'll see your 140 characters and raise you 55 words.

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked about Twitterfiction quite a bit here on the FWR blog (see the Further Reading section, below), but meet a new form of microfiction: 55 Fiction. Actually, 55 Fiction isn’t all that new: for years, The New Times, an alt-weekly paper in San Luis Obispo, California, has been running contests challenging writers to tell a story in 55 words or less. Here’s one of this year’s winners: “Kinda Blue,” by John Garaci Chillin’ on the sofa. Text from Michelle. She’s comin’ over. Roll a doobie. Play Kind of Blue. She melts at this song. thanks Messieurs Davis and Coltrane. […]


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Help launch The Little Bride!

by Celeste Ng

Debut novelist Anna Solomon writes us: For the past six months, I’ve been working on an unusual and exciting collaboration with singer-songwriter Clare Burson: a literary-musical performance interweaving story, song, and projected images inspired by my novel, THE LITTLE BRIDE. We call it A Little Suite for The Little Bride, and we’ll be performing it at the Tenement Museum on Wednesday, September 7 to celebrate the book’s birthday and kick off a great party. The (free) performance will start at 6:30 PM at the Tenement Museum in NYC as part of the museum’s Tenement Talks reading series. There will also […]


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It's all in the details… or is it? Movies vs. Fanfiction

by Celeste Ng

I don’t know about you, but when I see a movie after reading the book on which it’s based, I almost always prefer the book to the movie. Okay, there are exceptions: The Lovely Bones, for instance, where I prefered the film, and The Princess Bride—I love both the movie and William Golding’s novel deeply, and differently. But when it comes to Harry Potter, I land firmly on the book side. For me, much of the fun is in the details of Rowling’s world: the Fizzing Whizbees and Puking Pastilles, the elaborate recipes for Polyjuice Potion and the Draught of […]




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