FWR at AWP
by The Editors
A highlight of 2018 AWP Conference panels and events featuring our recent contributors.
A highlight of 2018 AWP Conference panels and events featuring our recent contributors.
“When I write about Japan, I want to get it right, but I wouldn’t say I’m nervous because I’m not Japanese. Just like I’m not nervous writing from the point of view of an elderly man because I’m neither elderly nor male. My gut tells me if I know enough about a place or character to get it right.”
Stuart Dybek is often mentioned in the same breath as Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Andersen—male writers of a certain era who wrote realistic, place-based fiction. And yet when I began reading Dybek, I couldn’t shake the feeing that something different was going on.
The first serious writing course I took was an undergraduate seminar on image taught by Stuart Dybek. Stuart stressed to us the importance of the well-chosen detail, the picture that would sear itself onto the reader’s retina all at once, creating a meaning-packet that was intuitively felt but also stood up to thematic interrogation. He gave an example that’s never left me: a drop of blood in a puddle of lime juice. I don’t know whether this image came off the top of his head or if it was taken from a published piece by another writer; I don’t remember […]
Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. Four of the 2010 English speaking fellows–Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich–collaborate on a group portrait of their experience at this year’s seminar.
