Yiyun Li (Gold Boy, Emerald Girl) discusses with Angela Watrous what it means to be an American writer; the elusive process of revision; the art of transforming stories into screenplays; and the act of talking aloud to famous dead writers.
Graywolf published Benjamin Percy’s much-anticipated debut novel The Wilding earlier this week. Shawn Mitchell talks with the acclaimed story writer about making the transition between the short and long forms, his apprenticeship to the craft of story, the obsessions that drive his work, and how he manages to balance his fiction and family life with teaching, traveling on assignment for magazines like Outside and The Wall Street Journal, and contributing regularly to publications like Esquire, Men’s Journal, and Poets & Writers.
Polly Atwell talks with Andrew Porter about how crafting stories is like editing film, what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford, and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.
“Whatever you do, stay in the room.” So advises Ron Carlson in his book on the craft of writing, appropriately titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story. He knows what world exists on the other side of the door: a world full of televised sports, dirty dishes, iced mochachinos. A world full of distraction from the task at hand. Writing, he argues, is about staying in the room, pushing beyond the point where your eyes glaze over and your fingers refuse to type. That’s where the magic lies.
“I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.”
Dana Kletter sits down to talk with famed fiction writer Allan Gurganus. Their conversation ranges from sexuality to southerness, from his affinity for the 19th century to how reading the work of fellow writers can be a shaping force in one’s fiction, from gardening between paragraphs to Halloween political activism, and plenty more about teaching and the craft of writing.
“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
Due to the unexpected retirement of one of their faculty members, Ball State University has had a sudden opening for a tenure-track position in fiction writing. The ad was posted last week on their website. Here is the announcement: Assistant Professor/Fiction Writing, Department of English Tenure-track position available August 20, 2010. Responsibilities: teach and develop a wide range of undergraduate and graduate creative writing courses, particularly in fiction; publish fiction. Minimum qualifications: earned MFA or PhD in creative writing by August 1, 2010; strong record of publication in fiction; record of effective teaching at the college or university level. Preferred […]
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor
It’s hard to argue with your heroes, though it’s significantly easier after they’ve died. Flannery O’Connor—the first writer I wanted to be—refers in this quote to creative writing workshops, which were just becoming the new standard for writerly apprenticeship when she launched her career. But I don’t have the same issues as she had with the workshop paradigm as it’s now practiced, or with the proliferation of creative writing programs.
In Malie Meloy’s most recent collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, there are no clear lines, no obvious right answers. Meloy’s characters are caught between two choices that are both right—or both wrong—and that’s what makes their decisions so difficult, and makes these stories so compelling. In reading them, you feel, as the author puts it, “both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything [you] wanted, all at once.”
