Suspend Your Disbelief

Contributor Types

Steven Wingate

Associate Editor

Steven Wingate is the author of the novels Of Fathers and Fire (2019) and The Leave-Takers (2021), both part of the Flyover Fiction Series from the University of Nebraska Press. His short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) won the Bakeless Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has taught at the University of Colorado, the College of the Holy Cross, and South Dakota State University, where he is currently associate professor of English.


Articles

Shop Talk |

And Now for Something Completely Different: Electronic Literature

by Steven Wingate

Going to writers’ conferences like AWP, I usually know what to expect: I’ll go to panel discussions and readings, meet friends I haven’t seen in years, and listen to my fellow fictionistos talking about agents, and publicity. Not so with the recent conference of the Electronic Literature Organization, hosted this June by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. The ELO, co-founded by metafictionist Robert Coover, is one of a handful of organizations working to study and produce literary projects designed for (and frequently created by) computers. I came to the conference armed with nothing but curiosity and […]


Shop Talk |

Connecting the Dots: International Lit and Collaboration in Bulgaria

by Steven Wingate

In 2009 I attended the second annual Sozopol Fiction Seminars, sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and held each May on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. I lost my sunglasses in the sea, which the Bulgarians told me meant I had to return. This year I did go back, and most things have remained the same. There are still five English-speaking fellows and five Bulgarians, and the bus ride from the capital city of Sofia cross-country to Sozopol is both long and beautiful. Elizabeth Kostova, whom one might assume has too big of a name to share her work […]


Interviews |

Surfers and Cowboys: An Interview with Robert Garner McBrearty

by Steven Wingate

Beneath an unassuming demeanor, Pushcart Prize-winning Robert Garner McBrearty writes stories of the revolution. The former dishwasher on the mythologies of the American West, the bravery of small presses, Colonel William B. Travis, and why he feels solidarity with scrappy underlings.


Reviews |

East of the West: A Country in Stories, by Miroslav Penkov

by Steven Wingate

Bulgarian-American author Miroslav Penkov’s debut short story collection East of the West (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) comes at a time when his native country’s literary star is on the rise in the west. In this auspicious moment, Penkov delivers a heck of a book.


Interviews |

Write from Your Own Chair: An interview with Bret Lott on teaching

by Steven Wingate

In the midst of a stellar authorial career and after a quarter century of teaching creative writing, Bret Lott takes a moment to talk about sending students in the right direction, maintaining a sincere workshop practice, and keeping your writing (and reading) life alive as you teach.




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