Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘writers on writing’

Shop Talk |

Introducing: Flipbooks

by Lee Thomas

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to inspire, encourage, and challenge our fellow readers and writers. During the past two and a half years, we’ve featured more than 50 interviews with authors established and emerging. And they’ve had such valuable insights into the writing life – from thoughts on process and craft to ideas about community and influence – that we wanted to find a way to further these conversations within our writing community. So we’re pleased to announce the Fiction Writers Review “Flipbook.” Flipbooks debut today on the FWR Facebook page. Every few weeks we’ll post a […]


Interviews |

He Was Just There For Me: An Interview with Lily King

by Joshua Bodwell

Lily King’s three novels stand as testaments to the power and endless variation of familial relationships. King’s latest novel, Father of the Rain, tells the story of a daughter’s life-long, primal loyalty to her charming and manipulative father. Interviewer Joshua Bodwell discusses longhand, autobiographical influence, puppies, and how to depict realistic sex, with a writer whose work remains “a beacon of tenderness and sincerity.”


Reviews |

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, Second Edition, by Betsy Lerner

After its publication in 2000, the first edition of Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers became one of my students’ favorite writing books, and over time it became my go-to gift to graduating seniors with whom I’d formed a special bond, and whose persistence I hoped to bolster in those daunting years ahead. I even kept a small stash of copies in my office. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to this second edition, published in October 2010.


Interviews |

Stalking the Inner Celestial: An Interview with Michael Byers

Michael Shilling’s interview with Percival’s Planet author Michael Byers delves into the fascinating characters – both historical and imagined – that populate Byers’ novel, which deals with the 1930s discovery of Pluto. Shilling says, “Reminiscent of such lightweights as James and Welty, Byers’ work shines with studied and infuried illuminations of the imperfect spirit; he can map out this process of inner grappling with a lovely, intense, and disciplined artistry.”


Shop Talk |

Ode to Barton Fink

by Lee Thomas

I first watched Barton Fink years ago in Chicago, and wasn’t sure what to make of it. It’s one of the Coen brothers’ lesser-watched films. John Turturro plays the title character, hired to write a Hollywood script, and his rendition of writer’s block still makes me want to crawl out of my skin. The wallpaper peels, his neighbor Charlie at the Hotel Earle (a genius turn by John Goodman) interrupts him, Barton loses himself in a picture of a woman on the beach that hangs on his hotel room wall. People may debate the symbols of the movie itself, but […]


Interviews |

Interesting Characters: An Interview with Brad Watson

Watson was born and raised in Meridian, Mississippi. And the Mississippi of today, and of the not-too-distant past, is the setting of much of his fiction. In Airships, Barry Hannah wrote that “In Mississippi, it’s hard to achieve a vista,” but Brad Watson does just that in this new collection. Not only is there a breathtaking sense of the Gulf Coast and the Delta in his writing, that geography is given depth—a hardscrabble social landscape inseparable from the place itself.


Shop Talk |

Defending the un-Status quo

by Lee Thomas

In The Faster Times, Chloé Cooper Jones holds a discussion with her former fiction professor, Deb Olin Unferth, and Unferth’s former professor, George Saunders. The results: a rational, practical and, in the end, laudatory discussion of MFA programs – a counterpoint to the voices raised against the model. The piece, You Are Not the Only One Writing About Moldavian Zookeepers: George Saunders and Deb Olin Unferth Discuss the State of the Creative Writing Degree, left me feeling hopeful and refreshed – mostly because, as good writers can, Saunders and Unferth reminded me that the world is not made up of […]




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