Particularizing Experience: A Conversation with Charles Blackstone
by Nick Ostdick
“The answer, perhaps, is not being afraid to get up at four in the morning”: Charles Blackstone tells Nick Ostdick about his latest novel, Vintage Attractions.
“The answer, perhaps, is not being afraid to get up at four in the morning”: Charles Blackstone tells Nick Ostdick about his latest novel, Vintage Attractions.
So many stories I come across may bang around in my head—at best—for a few minutes after I’ve finished them. But I can sit here and recall “A Small Good Thing” in such detail—emotional detail—without even a glance at the text. That’s a well-told story, I’d say.
It was October 2005, and professionally and personally, I was rudderless. Where had I gone wrong? In the preceding two years, I’d finished serving my grad school sentence and been released from Boulder. Back in Chicago, the city in which I’d grown up, I’d taken a one-bedroom apartment in a baseball-sodden neighborhood with scant street parking. I was halfheartedly teaching some community college comp and developmental reading courses (my sole qualification for getting the unclaimed developmental reading assignment: my willingness to take the teacher’s edition and my vow to learn something in the days before I’d have to face the […]
