“The focus here isn’t on point of view, but on positioning: a way of thinking about who a character is as well as who they are in relation to the others in the world of the story.” In part I of this essay on subject position in fiction, Leah De Forest explores Allan Gurganus’s “Blessed Assurance.”
Eleanor J. Bader talks with Lee Zacharias about her new novel, the zeal of the 1960s and 70s, and the momentum that led some activists to embrace violence.
“Writing about characters who decide to stay is a way to maybe imagine a different life for myself, and to better understand the folks who are still there, to feel closer to them.” Dariel Suarez talks with Tim Weed about his debut novel, The Playwright’s House, which takes place in Havana.
“That’s what made me a writer as much as anything. I wanted to hear the endings of stories that didn’t have endings.” Kathleen Alcalá talks with Elizabeth Huergo about storytelling, craft, and her 1997 novel, Spirits of the Ordinary, recently reissued by Raven Chronicles Press.
“This book is not really me looking into that world, but rather me looking out from it. Writing the novel was not so much an intellectual exercise as it was an empathetic one.” Simon Van Booy talks with Jennifer Solheim about his new novel, Night Came with Many Stars.
Elaine Neil Orr on the mysterious process of fiction writing and the faith it takes to attempt it.
“When we busy ourselves too much with keeping up appearances, we might not hold enough space for authenticity, intimacy, and engagement with the world bigger than our own.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Steven Wingate about her new novel, The Hive.
Dorothy Reno talks to Ellen Prentiss Campbell about her new novel, Frieda’s Song, which imagines the private life of eminent German American psychotherapist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and explores her legacy in the therapeutic community.
“I started this novel because I wanted to write about pick-up basketball, because I loved it, and I didn’t understand why it felt almost holy in my memories…I just wrote about the love and the fulfillment of that experience, and it exposed other things—darker things, more painful things.” Walter Moore talks with J.T. Bushnell about his debut novel, The Step Back.
“Like my predecessors, I want to show us grappling, resisting, and (hopefully) healing, to show our full humanity in a country that was not designed with our freedom in mind, and in which those freedoms are still threatened, daily.” Deesha Philyaw talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her award-winning collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
