Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘craft’

Shop Talk |

Jim Shepard on Using History in Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Over at The Outlet, Jim Shepard has a great essay on working with historical events in fiction: Writers shouldn’t lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility. And that they should take heart from that chutzpah, as well. The whole project of literature – the entire project of the arts — is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Why were we given something as amazing as imagination, if we’re not going to use it? Shepard is a master at inhabiting and re-imagining historical events in his stories. One of my all-time […]


Reviews |

God's Dogs, by Mitch Wieland

by Tyler McMahon

In an age of books built from blogs, tweets, and text messages, God’s Dogs, Mitch Wieland’s new novel-in-stories, feels as though it were made of wood. It is regional, elemental, and bears the marks of its maker: the careful grooves of his chisel, the smooth surfaces from the author’s finest sandpaper, even rough-hewn gouges by what might have been teeth or fingernails.


Essays |

Magic and Music Steer this Vessel: On Jorge Luis Borges’s This Craft of Verse

In This Craft of Verse, Jorge Luis Borges’s collected Norton Lectures, Borges diverges–with sparkling erudition–from conventional forms, offering lectures that are not arguments, but gentle provocations. Remarkably, these visionary pieces were composed at a time when Borges was nearly blind. By this time, as editor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu writes in the book’s postscript, Borges could see “nothing more than an amorphous field of yellow.” We quickly learn, however, that his mind’s eye was as sharp and discerning as ever.


Interviews |

Those Magic Carbons: A Conversation with Eileen Pollack

by Brian Short

Brian Short talks to fiction guru Eileen Pollack about the juggling act of writing fiction, teaching writing, and directing the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Michigan. Her advice to writers: Be bold.

“The first thing I love, when I read, is the language. I can’t read anything where I don’t like the voice. What else do I like? I like plot, I like setting, I like humor, I like boldness. I think part of it has to do with being female. No one ever told Philip Roth to be more timid or nice, to have nicer characters or less sex, to not be as broad. And when a woman tests boundaries, it’s seen as unbecoming. We’re supposed to write these quiet, domestic stories or novels. I’ve just never been one to do that.”


Reviews |

Secret Son, by Laila Lalami

Few places are more evocative of mystery and the exotic than Casablanca. And anyone who has ever imagined its fragrances or color will recognize the setting of Laila Lalami’s second novel. But those who imagine Casablanca merely as a city of romance and North African charm may find themselves at a loss to reconcile the spices of their imagination with the brutal realities of poverty and the political and religious corruption Lalami portrays in Secret Son (Algonquin Books, April 2009).


Interviews |

Unexpected Connections: A Conversation with Allison Amend

by Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng talks with Allison Amend about the author’s debut short story collection, Things That Pass for Love, as well as “likeable” characters, unfaithful dogs, the future of short fiction, Allison’s current projects, and those unexpected moments we share with strangers.


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: In Praise of Perpetual Self-Reinvention

by Steven Wingate

“Every book I publish is an opportunity for me to reinvent myself as a writer.” — Steve Katz

The easy thing to do when we finish one writing project, the default thing, is to simply think about what we’re going to write next. Katz’s words, however, call us to engage in a deeper kind of reconsideration of ourselves, because what we write and who we are as writers are two crucially different things.


Shop Talk |

Dispatch From Bread Loaf #4: What I Learned from Ann Hood

by Celeste Ng

With all the posts on lectures and readings, you may be surprised to hear that we had any time to workshop at the conference at all. I was very lucky to be in Ann Hood’s workshop, as Ann offered specific concrete approaches to thinking about plot, theme, tension, and all of those nebulous concepts fiction writers have to deal with. We had a lot of novel excerpts in the class, so much of the workshop discussion focused on issues of the novel rather than the short story—a change from the norm. Fellow Bread Loafer Eugene Cross has written an account […]


Shop Talk |

Sirenland 2010: workshop your writing in Italy

by Anne Stameshkin

So…who wants to spend a week with One Story magazine at this hotel in Positano, Italy, engaging in a series of advanced fiction- and memoir-writing workshops with Dani Shapiro, Jim Shepard, and Ron Carlson; giving and attending readings; and dining with a view of the Tirreno Sea? Submissions are open from now through October 31 for the third annual Sirenland Writers Conference (March 21-27, 2010). As someone lucky enough to have been workshopped by Shepard once, I urge other writers to jump at any chance to discuss work with him! Visit the Sirenland website to learn more about the conference […]


Shop Talk |

Dispatch from Bread Loaf #3: Maud Casey on Historical Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Toward the end of the conference, I was seriously overstimulated and running on an average of 5 hours of sleep per night. But the title alone of Maud Casey’s lecture, “The Secret History: The Power of Imagined Figures in Historical Fiction,” lured me out of bed that very last morning. Although I haven’t yet written any historical fiction myself, I’m especially interested in the space where the fictional meets the real, and how writers balance the responsibilities they have toward historical fact with the responsibilities they have toward emotional and aesthetic truths. Casey’s lecture was more than worth the lack […]




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