The Power Paragraph
by Candace Walsh
With some help from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Candace Walsh explores the power of the paragraph.
With some help from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Candace Walsh explores the power of the paragraph.
“Like the eye of a passing storm, these interludes bring a necessary interruption, a pause that allows us (not to mention the characters themselves) to have the time needed to process the stories’ crises before facing their conclusions.” In the second half of this craft essay, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple explores the “penultimate space”—between crisis and resolution—in William Trevor’s “Le Visiteur.”
“Like the eye of a passing storm, these interludes bring a necessary interruption, a pause that allows us (not to mention the characters themselves) to have the time needed to process the stories’ crises before facing their conclusions.” In the first half of this craft essay, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple explores the “penultimate space”—between crisis and resolution—in Gina Berriault’s “The Stone Boy.”
“By imaginatively playing with a visual work of art, the writer can expand its meaning—not in terms of enlarging the original work, but in terms of offering more possibilities.” Donna Baier Stein explores the limits and liberties of perception in this essay on writing fiction from images.
“An ocean gyre is a spiral of currents—formed by the combined forces of global wind patterns and the earth’s rotation—that can swivel up to 330 feet below the water, just like a theme is a dynamically layered mass beneath the front story, or surface, of a novel”: Candace Walsh takes an ocean-deep dive into Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being.
“An ocean gyre is a spiral of currents—formed by the combined forces of global wind patterns and the earth’s rotation—that can swivel up to 330 feet below the water, just like a theme is a dynamically layered mass beneath the front story, or surface, of a novel”: Candace Walsh takes an ocean-deep dive into Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being.
“Here, in the end, we realize the extent of the narrator’s dark obsession.” In part II of her essay on strange objects in fiction, Elizabeth Mayer offers a close reading of Yoko Ogawa’s “Sewing for the Heart.”
“She is in love with the deer foot lamp—so be it!” In the first installment of this two-part essay on strange objects in fiction, Elizabeth Mayer goes in-depth with Joy Williams’s “Congress.”
“If writing is kintsugi on the page, kintsugi is the art of losing”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on returning to the writing life, her debut novel, and piecing together lives and art.
“A close examination of economy and endings in this collection reveals several craft choices made by the author that consistently bolster efficiency and surprise.”
“Can one really learn by copying?”: Michael Noll discusses borrowing moves from great writers.
“I don’t cater to the fiction writers in my poetry courses, yet they have taught me to acknowledge commonalities across genres. In exploring these commonalities, we better see distinctions as well.”
