Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Margaret Lazarus Dean’

Shop Talk |

Shout-out: FWR’s Celeste Ng on Five Chapters

by The Editors

Yes, we here are FWR are hardworking editors bringing you the best reviews, interviews, and essays we can find—but we’re also writers ourselves.  So we’re happy to share that Celeste Ng, our own editor-at-large (and longtime blog editor)  has a story up on Five Chapters. If you’re not familiar with Five Chapters, they’re a great online journal publishing one story each week, in five parts—a little throwback to the old days of serial literature. Celeste’s story, “The Kind of Man,” features a troubled marriage, a meddling father-in-law, a nine-year-old with an unfortunate crush, and… Dick Cheney?  Don’t worry: the entire […]


Shop Talk |

Shout-out: FWR’s Celeste Ng on Five Chapters

by The Editors

Yes, we here are FWR are hardworking editors bringing you the best reviews, interviews, and essays we can find—but we’re also writers ourselves.  So we’re happy to share that Celeste Ng, our own editor-at-large (and longtime blog editor)  has a story up on Five Chapters. If you’re not familiar with Five Chapters, they’re a great online journal publishing one story each week, in five parts—a little throwback to the old days of serial literature. Celeste’s story, “The Kind of Man,” features a troubled marriage, a meddling father-in-law, a nine-year-old with an unfortunate crush, and… Dick Cheney?  Don’t worry: the entire […]


Essays |

The Long Hard Slog: From the 2010 AWP Panel “From MFA Thesis to First Novel”

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

“When I was asked whether I’d be interested in taking part in a panel on turning the MFA thesis into a first book, I said yes right away, but I wasn’t sure what I could contribute. In fact, I felt like a bit of a fraud because my journey from the thesis to the published book was so long and roundabout. But I’ve convinced myself that this is part of what makes my story worth telling here, because long and roundabout might be just as common as quick and straightforward, and my particular kind of roundabout experience makes me feel emboldened to give certain bits of advice.”


Interviews |

The Shape of Disaster: An Interview with Margaret Lazarus Dean

Margaret Lazarus Dean’s The Time It Takes to Fall takes place in the early 80’s in Cape Canaveral, a space town, during a time when NASA and shuttle launches were still a part of the American story of success. Jennifer Metsker talks with the author about how the Challenger disaster affected us, the unique ways fiction captures the felt world, writing from the point of view of a child, and why we should allow our characters to misbehave.


Interviews |

Type type type: A Conversation with Mimi Smartypants

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

I don’t generally read personal blogs, partly out of an allergy to the twee self-consciousness that so easily results from self-chronicling. But when I stumbled across Mimi Smartypants’s diary a few years ago, I found that I was looking at something different from the typical navel-gazing blog. Rather, what I experience sometimes when I read her diary is that strange phenomenon that first brought me to fiction as a child, and has kept me here all these years.



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