Suspend Your Disbelief

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Under the Influence… of prepositions?!

by J.T. Bushnell

Before submitting stories to workshop in graduate school, I spent hours combing my sentences for inefficiencies. I scrutinized verbs. I wrenched clauses from passive construction. I asked myself some hard questions about adjectives. My classmates often called my writing “clean,” which pleased me. I aspired toward concision. One term workshop was led by an intimidating man largely considered a genius among the graduate students. He introduced us to Chekhov and eviscerated stories with uncanny precision. When my turn came, I was nervous—with good reason. The week my story was up, he sent an email asking everyone to bring three pages […]


Writers Writing About Writing: The Dirty Little Secret – a guest post by Richard Goodman

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Richard Goodman. When a writer publishes a book about writing, I’m often excited to read it.  Especially if it’s by a writer whom I admire.  He or she has been in the trenches, encountered problems and, more often than not, has solved them—or come near enough.  And he or she can write, which means it’s a pretty good bet the book will be readable.  So, I think: let’s hear what this writer has to say.  I want to learn, like we […]


Under the Influence… of Stuart Dybek

by Kelly Luce

The first serious writing course I took was an undergraduate seminar on image taught by Stuart Dybek. Stuart stressed to us the importance of the well-chosen detail, the picture that would sear itself onto the reader’s retina all at once, creating a meaning-packet that was intuitively felt but also stood up to thematic interrogation. He gave an example that’s never left me: a drop of blood in a puddle of lime juice. I don’t know whether this image came off the top of his head or if it was taken from a published piece by another writer; I don’t remember […]


Book of the Week: Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward

by Travis Holland

This week’s feature is Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward. Published last month by Bloomsbury, the book is Ward’s second novel. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed novel Where the Line Bleeds, which was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2008 to 2010, Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won Hopwood Awards for essays, drama, and fiction. She was the 2010-2011 […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Once Upon A River

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Once Upon a River as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Amused By Books (@amusedbybooks) Kevin Sampsell (@kevinsampsell) Ilie Ruby (@IlieRuby) To claim your signed copy of this novel, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!


Remembering 9/11

by Celeste Ng

In one of my undergraduate creative writing classes, a student turned in a poem that referred to tall buildings collapsing to the ground. His classmates interpreted this as reference to the events of September 11. Later that week, the student came to my office and confessed that he’d actually written the poem in 2000, well before the attacks on the World Trade Center, and he didn’t want to write a “9/11 poem,” because–he said–he didn’t feel personally affected by the events of that day. What he wanted to know was this: Did he have to make the poem about 9/11, […]


Class project: Adopt a lit mag

by Celeste Ng

Kittens get adopted because they’re cute and fuzzy, with big eyes and adorable faces. (And those wee paws! Those little whiskers! Those tiny noses! Ahem.) But what about lit mags? No big eyes, no fuzzy paws—but they, too, deserve to be adopted. Enter the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Lit Mag Adoption Program, which offers discounted subscriptions to literary journals in exchange for insider access for the students. Says the program’s website: Most poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction by emerging writers first finds its way into print through literary magazines, yet few student writers actively engage with the […]


I'll see your 140 characters and raise you 55 words.

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked about Twitterfiction quite a bit here on the FWR blog (see the Further Reading section, below), but meet a new form of microfiction: 55 Fiction. Actually, 55 Fiction isn’t all that new: for years, The New Times, an alt-weekly paper in San Luis Obispo, California, has been running contests challenging writers to tell a story in 55 words or less. Here’s one of this year’s winners: “Kinda Blue,” by John Garaci Chillin’ on the sofa. Text from Michelle. She’s comin’ over. Roll a doobie. Play Kind of Blue. She melts at this song. thanks Messieurs Davis and Coltrane. […]


Help launch The Little Bride!

by Celeste Ng

Debut novelist Anna Solomon writes us: For the past six months, I’ve been working on an unusual and exciting collaboration with singer-songwriter Clare Burson: a literary-musical performance interweaving story, song, and projected images inspired by my novel, THE LITTLE BRIDE. We call it A Little Suite for The Little Bride, and we’ll be performing it at the Tenement Museum on Wednesday, September 7 to celebrate the book’s birthday and kick off a great party. The (free) performance will start at 6:30 PM at the Tenement Museum in NYC as part of the museum’s Tenement Talks reading series. There will also […]


Self-publishing: A fad, or the next American Idol?

We’re delighted to present another blog post by our able editorial intern, Nicole Aber. Enjoy! With the proliferation of self-published books, especially in e-book format, the New York Times recently took a look at the pros and cons of the controversial route of getting one’s book to market. And since the practice of self-publishing has become so widespread, even the author of the article, Alina Tugend, found herself re-evaluating a publishing form she once found inferior: I’m a snob. Oh, I don’t particularly care what kind of car you drive or if you wear the latest designer fashions, but until […]


It's all in the details… or is it? Movies vs. Fanfiction

by Celeste Ng

I don’t know about you, but when I see a movie after reading the book on which it’s based, I almost always prefer the book to the movie. Okay, there are exceptions: The Lovely Bones, for instance, where I prefered the film, and The Princess Bride—I love both the movie and William Golding’s novel deeply, and differently. But when it comes to Harry Potter, I land firmly on the book side. For me, much of the fun is in the details of Rowling’s world: the Fizzing Whizbees and Puking Pastilles, the elaborate recipes for Polyjuice Potion and the Draught of […]


Book of the Week: Once Upon a River, by Bonnie Jo Campbell

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel Once Upon a River (Norton, 2011). Campbell grew up on a small farm in Michigan and studied philosophy at the University of Chicago. She received her MFA from Western Michigan University, and now lives outside of Kalamazoo. She is the author of a previous novel, Q Road (Scribner, 2003), and two collections, Women and Other Animals (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), which won the AWP prize for short fiction, and American Salvage (Wayne State University Press, 2009), which was a finalist in 2009 for both the National Book Award in Fiction and […]




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