Twilight of the Übermensch: An Interview with Neil Connelly
by Steven Wingate
…3. He is an Assistant Professor at South Dakota State University, where he directs the Great Plain Writers Conference. Visit his website: www.stevenwingate.com….
…3. He is an Assistant Professor at South Dakota State University, where he directs the Great Plain Writers Conference. Visit his website: www.stevenwingate.com….
…for Literature. Interview: Sebastian Matthews: The main character of your latest novel, Lost Memory of Skin, is called the Kid. Where did you find him? And could you talk a little about him as a character? Russell Banks: Actually, he arose, as often is the case, out of a situation that I was aware of. The situation preceded the character, or the context preceded the character, or the house preceded the residence in a sense. I live six months a ye…
…Amick’s map of Chicago showing scenes from Nothing But a Smile / from www.steve-amick.com Any reader with an historical perspective will feel the tension created by a potential love affair in the forties, as well as what an affront it was to the prevailing morays to get into the girlie magazine business, and how dangerous a place Chicago was in the forties due to the prevalence of mob control. Amick taps into our common knowledge of the perio…
…bit of a tribute to Art School Confidential, which is just one of the greatest comic books I’ve ever seen. I found it interesting, too, or maybe a little bit sad, that all these boys come from a sort of scoffable background. A what background? Scoffable. Is that a word? It is now. Not scoff-worthy. I mean, Shane was in this Christian rock band, and Bobby is the passenger musician, and Adam has a non-ironic mustache— (Laughs.) The ’tache! The Fu M…
The eleven stories in Jason Brown’s latest collection, Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work, are linked not so much by character as by geography and tone. Set in and around the fictional town of Vaughn, on the banks of the Kennebec River in central Maine, Brown’s stories contain characters driven by duty and guilt down paths furrowed by their own lapses and eccentricities. A cloud of fatalism hangs over many; the weight of the past—person…
…lover. Her writing can be found at The Thrifty Gourmet and her own blog, Comestibles. She has studied food writing with Alan Richman at the International Culinary Center in New York City, and is a member of the Culinary Historians of New York. For her full bio, visit FWR’s Contributors page….
…ords of wisdom for young writers today? My advice is don’t get addicted to computers and computer technology. Don’t get addicted to looking up things on your smartphone, or online. Or apps. Have more emptiness whereby some kind of fertile ground can grow out of your emptiness. If you have some unusual slant on things, write about it, because people like to see things in new and individual or unique ways. If you have some sort of new twist on how t…
…ng they weren’t finding. The idea that there’s space in there that’s still new is hard to wrap your brain around, but I do think it’s true. Do you feel like readers that are now familiar with your work will be surprised by the range of subject and style in your collection of stories, You Know You Want This? Yeah, I mean, it’s surprising! It’s definitely not ten other “Cat Person” stories. One of the things I really liked about Allison [my editor]…
…multaneously torn between needing to be outside, in the world, and feeling compelled to write (and, like all writers, thus also compelled to read). Much of his ability to observe and love the world came through his discipline of writing. However, instead of acting as emissaries between the woods and the classrooms, nature writers often seem to be picking a fight with academia, inviting discord, much like Aldo Leopold, the author of A Sand County A…
…to do with the now trendy so-called hashtag online—all of these can create new combinations and valid modes of experiencing things for the reader, shaking up the standard look of narrative form and more accurately capturing the way our contemporary minds actually often operate, which isn’t always, if ever, reflected simply by the repeated and seamlessly connected-together blocks of print commonly called paragraphs. In the story we just spoke about…
