Suspend Your Disbelief

Contributor Types

Laura Valeri

Contributor

Laura Valeri is the author of the collection Safe in Your Head (2013), winner of the SFA Prize in fiction, and author of The Kinds of Things Saints Do, winner of the Iowa/John Simmons Award in 2002 and the Binghamton University John Gardner Award in 2003. She was a Sewanee Walter E Dakins Fellow in Fiction in 2008 and earned her two MFAs from Florida International University and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Glimmer Train, Gulf Stream, Big Bridge, Waccamaw, Inkwell/Literary Potpourri and a collection of essays by Italian Americans published by Creative Nonfiction and Other Press, titled Our Roots Are Deep With Passion.


Articles

Essays |

Stealing From The Past: A Research Assignment in Realist Fiction

by Laura Valeri

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.”


Reviews |

Animal Sanctuary, by Sarah Falkner

by Laura Valeri

Published last month by Starcherone Books, Sarah Falkner’s debut novel is the winner of their seventh annual Prize for Innovative Fiction. Contributor Laura Valeri says this of the book: “Even beyond the novel’s halfway point, the reader may still be uncertain of the story’s protagonists or the animal sanctuary’s role. But the pages keep turning because of Falkner’s incisive prose, her accurate and fluid discussion of the aesthetic values of film, and the moral complexity of her characters.”


Reviews |

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, by Alissa Nutting

by Laura Valeri

Alissa Nutting has “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. Imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.


Interviews |

A Texture the Facts Can't Convey: An Interview with Susanna Daniel

by Laura Valeri

In this conversation with FWR’s Laura Valeri, Susanna Daniel discusses her debut novel, the fictional memoir Stiltsville, and shares her insights on the process of writing, the power of quiet stories—which she terms eminently readable—and the perseverance and faith that writers must nurture for their own work.


Reviews |

The Countess, by Rebecca Johns

by Laura Valeri

Erzsebet Bathory gained immortal fame as one of the first female serial killers; known as the “Bloody Countess,” she was accused of brutally torturing and murdering over six-hundred young women. But was she really an unrepentant, psychopathic murderer—or simply a political obstacle to the king? Was she really bathing in the blood of her victims, or was she herself the victim of a witch hunt? Such questions haunt the pages of The Countess (Crown, 2010), Rebecca Johns’s lively historical novel, which reconstructs the complexity of this 17th century scandal and brings alive the woman behind the myth.


Reviews |

Valeria’s Last Stand, by Marc Fitten

by Laura Valeri

The imagined Hungarian village of Zavitar is home to the indomitable Valeria, a single lady of a certain age, given a second chance at love and excitement in the arms of the local potter. Marc Fitten’s debut novel, Valeria’s Last Stand, explores how the fall of Communism effects a memorable cast of characters, all through the lens of fable.


Essays |

All That Poetry

by Laura Valeri

At Sewanee everyone mingled with everyone else—poets with playwrights with fiction writers, famous and not, published and not, emerging or well established. It didn’t matter. Therefore, when it was Andrew Hudgins’ turn to give a craft lecture, I was one of the first to go, eager to absorb what I could smuggle back to those students in my undergraduate workshop who had more of an ear for poetry than me, their fiction-writing professor. I needed to be at that lecture for professional obligations; I wanted to be there for personal desires. But just as I was beginning to reach towards the trellises of poetic symmetry, grasping for that hanging fruit, I heard Hudgins say, a mocking lilt to his voice, “…and then he became a fiction writer, like all failed poets tend to do.”



Literary Partners