Suspend Your Disbelief

Charles Conley

Contributor

Charles Conley is the 2011-2012 Second-Year Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He has also received fellowships from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars. His stories have appeared in Southern Review, Harvard Review, North American Review, and Gargoyle, and he received his MFA from the University of Minnesota. Recent novels he can confidently recommend for your reading pleasure are The House on Salt Hay Road by Carin Clevidence, The End by Salvatore Scibona, and The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman.


Articles

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Under the Influence… of Arnost Lustig

I was the worst writer in my MFA program my first year.  I know this thought isn’t unique, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.  My confidence was shot.  I was lost as a writer and so concerned with impressing my teachers and fellow students that I had abandoned whatever it was that made me worth accepting into the program in the first place. The following summer, I attended the Prague Summer Program, where Arnost Lustig was my workshop teacher.  We began each class with jokes.  We wrote a fable every day.  We read (after a fashion) Aristotle’s Poetics.  We discussed […]