“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.”
Every time I read this story I get a thrill, the sensation of having to hold on tight for a wild, plummeting ride, a dizzying shift in perspective, a cascade of questions that I can’t answer.
From the Archives: Dana Kletter sits down to talk with famed fiction writer Allan Gurganus. Their conversation ranges from sexuality to southernness, from his affinity for the 19th century to how reading the work of fellow writers can be a shaping force in one’s fiction, and plenty more about teaching and the craft of writing.
From the Archives: Got a dreadful first novel stashed somewhere in the proverbial drawer? Take heart, dear writer. Roberto Bolaño will show you how to salvage from the wreck.
From the Archives: “I can only write if I have stolen something valuable that day”: Shawn Andrew Mitchell asks Jesse Ball about lies, dreams, and his novel Silence Once Begun.
From the Archives: “The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
From the Archives: Charles Johnson is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage. Zachary Watterson, one of Johnson’s former students, spoke with his mentor in 2010 about the literary friendships that have influenced the author’s more than forty-year writing career.
From the Archives: “Quatro’s stories are often fabulist, if fabulism is magical realism plus a reckoning.” Rebecca Scherm on Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want to Show You More.
From the Archives: Chloe Benjamin speaks with her mentor and friend Judith Claire Mitchell about A Reunion of Ghosts, which took ten years to write. Mitchell says of the process, “When students are struggling with their own novels, I do understand what they’re going through and I think I’m often able to give them perspective on the nature of this massive, unwieldy, impossible enterprise that keeps them from giving up.”
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"
