Suspend Your Disbelief

Polly Stewart

Contributing Editor

Polly Stewart is the author of The Good Ones, forthcoming from Harper in 2023, and a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review. As Mary Stewart Atwell, she’s also the author of Wild Girls. She teaches English and creative writing at Virginia Military Institute.


Articles

Interviews |

Hogs Will Inherit the Earth: An Interview with Pinckney Benedict

“I am tempted to spin you a story about a chance boyhood encounter in the deep forest with a wild hog that left me scarred and terrified and thus writing out my fear and horror for the rest of time, but I’ll restrain the impulse.” Pinckney Benedict talks with Mary Stewart Atwell in this second interview in a series on rural fiction.


Interviews |

Not Just Visible But Beautiful: An Interview with Kevin Brockmeier

Known for stories and novels that force us to question the conventional dichotomy between realist and fantasy fiction, Kevin Brockmeier knows how to reveal the strangeness of the world around us. In conversation with Mary Stewart Atwell, Brockmeier discusses his new novel, The Illumination, and the compelling metaphors that inform his writing.


Interviews |

Starting with Small Moments: An Interview with Andrew Porter

Polly Atwell talks with Andrew Porter about how crafting stories is like editing film, what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford, and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.


Reviews |

Pieces for the Left Hand, by J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand is a collection of 100 linked short short stories–linked by their location, a small upstate New York town that resembles Lennon’s hometown of Ithaca, and by their narrator, described as “unemployed, and satisfied to be unemployed.”


Interviews |

Creative Writing and the University: an Interview with Mark McGurl

McGurl, a professor of English at UCLA, is a literary scholar who actually likes writers. More amazingly, he likes MFA programs. In The Program Era, published by Harvard University Press, McGurl argues that the rise of the MFA program in the twentieth century made a uniquely significant contribution to the excellence of postwar American literature.