Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘mentors’

Interviews |

Literary Mentors and Friends: An Interview with Charles Johnson

From the Archives: Charles Johnson is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage. Zachary Watterson, one of Johnson’s former students, spoke with his mentor in 2010 about the literary friendships that have influenced the author’s more than forty-year writing career.


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: Season of Water and Ice, by Donald Lystra

This week’s feature is Donald Lystra’s debut novel Season of Water and Ice. Lystra, a retired engineer, lives in Ann Arbor and spends part of each summer in northern Michigan, on the Leelanau Peninsula, where this book is set. His short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Other Voices, The North American Review, Passages North, and The Greensboro Review. A story called “Family Way,” which eventually grew into Season of Water and Ice, appeared in Cimarron Review in 2006, and an excerpt from the book appeared in Natural Bridge in 2009. This is his first novel. This novel […]


Interviews |

Burst of Inspiration: A Flash Interview with Meg Pokrass

In Meg Pokrass’ debut collection of flash fiction, Damn Sure Right, each story gives the reader just enough to imagine a universe. Lee Thomas and Pokrass discuss first publication, the harmony between poetry and short short stories, and the soundtrack to the author’s creative process.


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: The Writer as Apprentice

“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.” —Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction


Shop Talk |

Mentors, Muses, and Monsters event at Greenlight Books

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 […]