Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy, by Joshua Corey
“Like its predecessors, Beautiful Soul appears postmodern in its aesthetics and innovations in that it leverages devices common to the Nouveau Roman and Experimental Novel.”
“Like its predecessors, Beautiful Soul appears postmodern in its aesthetics and innovations in that it leverages devices common to the Nouveau Roman and Experimental Novel.”
In the newest contribution to our Teaching Writing Series, Laura Valeri describes the rewards of teaching her students to utilize primary research such as oral histories, court transcripts, and testimonies as avenues for inspiring their own fiction, as well as how working with these resources can prompt productive classroom discussions on “ownership, truth in fiction, and about the ethical nuances of writing another person’s story.”
“I heard Marilynne Robinson say once that “we can never escape the landscape of our preoccupations.” I was struck by that phrase and I think of it all the time, the landscape of our preoccupations. I feel liberated by it.”
“Writing the surfing scenes terrified me. I worried about pushing readers away—writing passages that would only connect to surfers and not to the larger audience. But the bigger concern was just what you describe: the inability to translate such a physical sensation onto the page.”
Editor’s Note: The Hopwood Room Roundtable is a weekly event in which visiting writers of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing discuss their work and the writing life with the University of Michigan’s student body, faculty, and the local literary community. Inside the Hopwood Room, friends and colleagues caught up over coffee and cookies, discussing avalanche survival tactics and personal rules about never living in alligator-populated states, awaiting the main event: an in-the-flesh Genius. When Karen Russell—novelist, short story writer, MacArthur Genius Fellow, and probably the most easy-to-be-around and gracious person you’ll ever encounter—entered the room, which was […]
Alex Shakespeare talks with William Boyle about his first novel, Gravesend, which releases this month, as well as leaving a place to write about it, crime as character study, and what we get from novels that we can’t find in other art forms.
Nina Buckless talks with Peter Orner about his most recent collection, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, as well as writing silence, where characters think they belong, and how gossip can reveal story.
Elizabeth Cohen chats with Assistant Editor Claire Skinner about The Hypothetical Girl, her new collection of short stories, as well as the human heart, online dating, and making a life as a writer.
My close friend Anthony once told me during an e-mail conversation that he considered me the modern-day equivalent of Erma Bombeck. I was offended. I think my actual reply was “WTF?” Anthony was confused. “Erma Bombeck was a great writer,” he typed. “She melded all of this every day experience into something bigger, but she did it by being funny.” “I don’t want to be Erma Bombeck! I want to be Joan Didion!” “You’re not that kind of serious,” he wrote. “Can I be Alice Munro?” It went on like this until he said, “You know, I meant it as […]
Robin Black speaks with friend and fellow Beyond the Margins contributor Nichole Bernier about her debut novel, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D., as well as about coming to a first book with a journalism rather than creative writing background, how facts and truth fit into fiction, and The Mommy Question.
