Danielle LaVaque-Manty and Holly Goddard Jones sit down to talk about fabulism vs. realism, teaching and learning from students, and Jones’s new collection, Antipodes.
“I think that the whole project of fiction is that you’re asking somebody to leave themselves and be somebody else in this fictive space”: Catherine Lacey talks with Danielle Lavaque-Manty about short fiction, identity shedding, the poetics of sentences, and more.
Danielle LaVaque-Manty talks with Nick Scorza about lakes vs. oceans, genre, and the work of plotting and publishing his debut novel, People of the Lake.
“I wanted to explore how the uniquely female experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding might impact women who otherwise often try to resist traditional gender roles”: Polly Rosenwaike talks with Danielle LaVaque-Manty about her debut collection, Look How Happy I’m Making You.
“I wrote big swaths of this book operating on instinct, and I had a lot of luck with the instincts later bearing fruit”: Holly Goddard Jones with Danielle LaVaque-Manty on dystopian fiction, Cracker Barrel, and The Salt Line, out this week from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
“My final suggestion is to feel free to ignore all of the above advice or any other ‘shoulds'”: Ann S. Epstein with Danielle LaVaque-Manty on self-teaching, researching historical fiction, and her debut novel, On the Shore.
“[A]nd then I see it—the destination. It always rises up out of the dust, closer than I thought it was, and usually as a little bit of a surprise.”
“While the focus remains on R’s mother and her quest, we see how a plight that seems unique when the story opens—how many mothers set out to rescue their sons from foreign militants?—lies on a continuum of vulnerability for women living in nations at war.”
Holly Goddard Jones on her new book, The Next Time You See Me, the shift from writing stories to the novel, and the almost unconscious act of drawing details from everyday life to construct fiction.
A professor of pediatrics writes what she knows in her debut novel: a harrowing portrait of a family facing the illness of a child. A conversation with Janet Gilsdorf.
