Andrea Nolan examines the new “nature writing” taking place in such journals as Ecotone, Flyway, Orion, and Fourth River, as well as how environment shapes the work of all contemporary writers.
The yarn-like stories that make up this debut collection recount the life of an imagined town in northern Virginia. Unlike a traditional collection, Neofotis chooses an oral storytelling method to structure these stories, utilizing the conceit that the narrator is not just the vehicle through which we are relayed the narrative but an actual character himself, one who sits down beside us to spool out poignant stories, juicy pieces of gossip, and far-fetched legends from his small town.
Polly Atwell talks with Andrew Porter about how crafting stories is like editing film, what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford, and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.
“Whatever you do, stay in the room.” So advises Ron Carlson in his book on the craft of writing, appropriately titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story. He knows what world exists on the other side of the door: a world full of televised sports, dirty dishes, iced mochachinos. A world full of distraction from the task at hand. Writing, he argues, is about staying in the room, pushing beyond the point where your eyes glaze over and your fingers refuse to type. That’s where the magic lies.
Prior to writing his novel The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, Hesh Kestin mastered all things non-fiction, serving as European bureau chief of Forbes and war reporter for Newsday before founding two newspapers himself—the Israeli daily The Nation, as well as the prize-winning expatriate, The American. A career crafting leads and managing word counts has shaped Kestin’s fiction in a distinct way: though written richly, it never wastes a cent.
It turns out it’s difficult to find a novel in which the phrase “Somewhere a dog barked” or something similar does not appear, as novelist Rosencranz Baldwin reports in Slate: Having heard the dog’s call, it seemed like I couldn’t find a book without one. Not The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Not Shadow Country. Not Ulysses. Not Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, or Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue, or Stephen King’s It or Christine. Not Jodi Picoult’s House Rules. If novelists share anything, it’s a distant-dog impulse. Picture an author at work: She’s exhausted, gazing at her laptop and […]
“I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.”
Hannah Tinti was raised in Salem, Massachusetts, a place she credits with having influenced the darker side of her fiction. Charlotte Boulay talks with the much-admired author and editor about the influence of art in her work, how writers find their subject matter, her editorial approach at One Story, and trusting your gut during the drafting process, among other subjects.
Adam Haslett’s 2002 story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. His first novel, Union Atlantic, which focuses in part on unregulated trading, unethical banking, and the prospect of a massive economic collapse, was published this spring by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Kate Levin talks with the author about fiction meeting reality, the psychology of power, the responsibility of writers to capture the social and political context of an era, and exposing ourselves in our characters.
“I don’t mind that when I’m interviewed I am speaking as a representative of biracial women. I’m heartened that people are interested. I do wonder, though, when the book is critiqued as being not enough about the biracial experience. To that criticism I say, Well, okay, but it’s not a position paper. It’s a story. … I have had a number of people “come out” to me, for lack of a better word, about their blended families, or about their grief, or about simply being a young person struggling against the labels, like geek or nerd, that they’d been assigned by peers. … They’ve connected their own stories to the stories I’ve told and suddenly feel empowered to talk about it.”
