“Writers can almost be defined as professional outsiders. It’s part of the job. You often have to step outside of a situation to observe it—to choose the right details—to reshape a mess of events into a narrative.”
Literary journal Electric Literature has put out a wonderfully weird animation based on one sentence from Jenny Offill’s short story “The Tunnel,” from Electric Literature No. 3. It reminds me of a mix between Alice and Wonderland and Monty Python, both whimsical and serious, but take a look for yourself: This video is actually the latest in a series: lots more are available on Electric Literature‘s website. But the videos aren’t just a gimmick; they’re an integral part of the journal’s mission. The editors write: Electric Literature’s mission is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short […]
“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.”
Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”
NYC-based writers, head to Brooklyn’s newest bookstore, Fort Greene’s Greenlight Books (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland), tonight (Monday, November 23) at 7:30 PM for a special event featuring local authors and the editor of Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, a book that we at FWR are excited to read. This is also the bookstore’s first installment of what promises to be an exciting series of events featuring both authors and lit bloggers. On a personal note, I’m thrilled at Greenlight’s birth, if a bit heartsick that I had to leave Fort Greene about a month before it opened; when I […]
If you liked Alexander Chee’s essay on studying with Annie Dillard, rejoice. There’s more where that came from. Chee’s piece is part of the just-published anthology Mentors, Muses and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict (Simon & Schuster, Oct. 2009). I love hearing about how writers interact with other writers and what lessons–positive or negative–they gleaned from their teachers, so I can’t wait to read this. Here are some additional sneak peeks: “The Scholars and the Pornographer”: Carolyn See on her father, who turned to writing pornography at the age of 70, […]
