Is All Writing A Mystery?: An Interview with Patricia Ann McNair
by Katey Schultz
Katey Schultz and Patricia Ann McNair talk bad characters, breaking rules, and McNair’s latest collection, Responsible Adults.
Katey Schultz and Patricia Ann McNair talk bad characters, breaking rules, and McNair’s latest collection, Responsible Adults.
“His narrator’s point of view evolves with the story, revealing this evolution through how he sees his setting”: Kent Kosack on Tobias Wolff’s subtle gem “Powder.”
“One of the things that was really important to me was to find a structure that was different in order to talk about nature, to talk about climate change.” Alexander Tilney asks Madeleine Watts about writing climate change and her debut novel, The Inland Sea.
“If the book strides beyond the noir conventions, as you suggest and certainly I hope, it does so especially to please a couple of ideal readers I had in mind as I wrote it, readers who loved language as much as they ever loved anything….” Charles Lamar Phillips talks with James Whorton, Jr. about his novel Estranged.
Robert L. Shuster examines works of fiction that purport to be real accounts, analyzing how authenticating elements influence our engagement with stories, as well as how these techniques shaped his own debut novel, To Zenzi.
“There are those who think comic novels are not serious novels. Tell that to Chaucer, Dickens, Heller, Vonnegut, among others. Tell it to Shakespeare! Humor is just a different way to tell a story.” John Blumenthal talks with Nina Buckless about his new comic novel, The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird.
“The writer has no expiration date. I left my corporate career at fifty-six and turned to writing full time. I had no illusion it would be easy.” Dawn Ryan talks with Paul Vidich about his new novel, The Mercenary.
“When these stories occur—both in life and in fiction—there can be an almost a ghostly quality that arises.” Drawing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stuart Dybek, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Tyler McAndrew illuminates the narrator on the sidelines, caught between actor and observer.
“My goal is to make fiction that doesn’t read too much like ‘life,’ stories that repress the urges and impulses of characters.” Aaron Hamburger and Avner Landes discuss Landes’s debut novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years, out this week from Tortoise Books.
“There’s plenty of great fiction about belonging to a place and being part of a community—with the opportunities and obligations this brings—but that’s not a state of being I understand well.” Steven Wingate talks with Melissa Scholes Young about The Leave-Takers.
