Daniel Orozco’s debut has been a long time coming. Now fans of his prizewinning fiction can enjoy an entire collection, Orientation: And Other Stories. Michael Shilling calls him in Idaho to talk geographic love letters, G. Gordon Liddy, and the peculiar challenge of gimmicks.
Last week we featured the multi-genre craft anthology Lit from Within as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Michelle Hoover (@MichelleHoover_) Rick Fisher (@fishfire) Lit Drift (@litdrift) To claim your copy of this anthology, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!
Sometimes all the talent and skill in the world are not enough to get a book written. Valerie Laken makes a case for coaching, not just teaching, young writers.
I began submitting to Glimmer Train in 1997, the same year I received my undergrad degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan. That fall, following graduation, my now-wife and I moved to a small cabin on a lake in northern Michigan so that I could be “a writer.” I’d thought I needed to live deliberately, like Thoreau, to nurture my creative spirit. But as we’ve often joked since, the experience was more like The Shining–though with a lot less space. One positive during that experience, however, was that a story of mine received an honorable mention from Glimmer […]
Last week we featured A Kite in the Wind as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Danielle Davis (@writesinLA) Danielle Villano (@daniellevillano) Chase Burke (@chasedaway) To claim your signed copy of this novel, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!
People tell me that I am a poetic writer. My response to this characterization varies from Thanks! to What does that mean? to Yes, my novel did sell like poetry to I want people to love my work in the way that poetry lovers love poetry, desperately and a bit dangerously, gripping the pistol under the pillow with one hand and the childhood stuffed rabbit with the other. But what, really, does this cross-genre accusation imply? It’s meant as praise (I’m fairly certain), but wary praise, as if I’ve stumbled into a neighbor’s backyard party, where I’m welcome as long […]
Writer, teacher, administrator, and mom Stephanie Vanderslice explains why she decided to spend a week at the Dairy Hollow Writer’s Colony, and how the space, time, and setting helped her finish another draft of her novel.
When I was an MFA student at the University of Maryland, Stanley Plumly said two things about my poetry that have stuck with me and shaped not only how I think about my writing process but also how I approach teaching creative writing. In one conference, he asked, Will you ever write a ten-syllable line? Stanley Plumly is fond of John Keats’s work, so maybe he did want me to write in ten-syllable lines, but the question was designed to force to me think about formal choices I was making. My initial, silent response was that I was experimenting with […]
This week’s feature is A Kite in the Wind, edited by Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi. Published this spring by Trinity University Press, the book is the most recent title in a series of craft books that are drawn predominately from lecturers given as a part of the Warren Wilson MFA program. Previous collections include Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, edited by Ellen Bryan Voigt and Gregory Orr, and Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, edited by Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi. The series has also published anthologies of both […]
Shawn Mitchell talks to Elif Batuman and Geoff Dyer (and they talk to each other) about obsession and addiction, the permeable line between labeling work fiction or nonfiction, Stendahl syndrome, and future projects.
