“For about 15 minutes a day for 41 days I wrote whatever came into my head. I then began elaborating on these bits. Having a hobbyist’s fascination for neurology, I figured they would being to knit themselves into some sort of pattern, or narrative. They did, though not necessarily all interwoven. I had also heard repeatedly that it was impossible to write a Los Angeles novel about all of Los Angeles. This seemed a stupid challenge to me, and I very much like stupid challenges.” – Vanessa Place, in Examiner

“I don’t know. There are points in there—I mention the U.S. Census. I think what they are talking about is, I had—this is a real county. I just gave it a different name. Well, in fact, in addition to my intention of doing the research, I was going down to Lynchburg (VA) to visit a friend of mine and use his county as a setting for the novel. I was going to call whatever his county is Lynchburg County or something. But I never got around to visiting him. So I had to create my own place. In doing that I was sort of freed [up], because had I used his county I would have had to know every single thing there is to know about that place in case someone came along and said, “Well, you got this fact wrong.” But if I created my own Manchester County I can say the U.S. Census in 1840 said this many people, and this many people. I can say these three people in the 20th century wrote these history books about this county. And they said this, that and the other. It’s all out of my imagination. I was freed because of that.” – Edward P. Jones, in Identity Theory

“You can’t be afraid of what people will say about your work, otherwise you’re going to have a very loud invisible audience in the room while you’re writing.  And just like when you’re in the sack, you don’t want an audience.  At least I don’t think you do.  I don’t, in any case.” – Christine Sneed, in The Nervous Breakdown

“I don’t know if there are ghosts. I’ve had experiences, but that doesn’t prove they exist. I lived in an apartment in New York where there was a ghost, and I used that for the last scene in the book where Jane feels a presence in her apartment. But I didn’t make it clear if that came from outside her or inside her. I do think that people have those experiences, but what it is, I’m not sure. I also believe in more subtle experiences where people have the chance to communicate with dead people in all kinds of ways. It’s happened to me and to many people. There’s not as much as a barrier as we think between the living and the dead. Whether it manifests as a ghost, or a strong sense of that person’s spirit, even in your own mind, it’s a very powerful experience. I chose a ghost for the story because it’s the most extreme form of that experience.” – Alice Elliott Dark, in Beatrice

“I think if you’re really good at something you should keep doing it. One of the things that’s going on with a lot of writers today is that they get big contracts for two- or three-book deals, and they get caught in the intense need to fulfill that contract. They crank the novels out. As a short story writer, I’m under pressure to write a novel now, but it seems stupid to me to just make yourself work in a completely different genre if you’re already doing what you want to do.” – David Means, at Powells

“Even when I was in college, that’s always what my professors would say: ‘your voice is so detached.’ What does that mean? I don’t know! I don’t think you really get to choose the way your voice is on a page. A lot of these stories are extremely internal and that just felt natural to me. What’s supposed to happen in a short story? Is a comet supposed to hit? No! For me, the short stories I really love — not the only stories I love, but the stories I love best — are really, really quiet. They’re about someone just thinking and trying to figure something out. Like Margaret Atwood’s story, ‘Death by Landscape’ — she’s just thinking about her friend going missing at summer camp fifty years ago, but it’s really just an old woman sitting in her apartment. Perfect. I don’t need explosions.” – Emma Straub, in Full-Stop

“Somehow the same concerns keep coming up. Most of the characters seem to be confused, unsure of how it is they are supposed to live. This reminds me of the wonderful epigraph to Grace Paley’s Collected Stories, which itself is one of my favorite pieces of writing. Ms. Paley relays a story about her friend and colleague in the ‘writing and mother trade.’ She asks Grace a few days before she dies, ‘The real question is, how are we to live our lives?’ The narrators and characters always seem to be entirely baffled by their circumstances. They find themselves put upon and disconnected. They usually cannot account for what has happened to them, let alone how to address the problem(s). Another concern is language and how inadequate it can be. I never consciously set out to write about these issues, but these issues keep coming up.” – Robert Lopez, in Bookslut

“A novel determines its own size and shape and I’ve never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require. (Underworld wanted to be big and I didn’t attempt to stand in the way.) The theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time—time and loss. This was not a plan; the novels have simply tended to edge in that direction. Some years ago I had the briefest of exchanges with a professor of philosophy. I raised the subject of time. He said simply, “Time is too difficult.” Yes, time is a mystery and perhaps best examined (or experienced by my characters) in a concise and somewhat enigmatic manner. Next book may be a monster. (Or just a collection of short stories.)” – Don DeLillo at PEN

“In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book — leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe [those categories]. I think it’s off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.” – Toni Morrison, in Salon

“I grew up as a New Critic at Kenyon College. It was an historical response, you know, to a real lack of precision in critical thought. It was valuable in drawing attention to the text-in its presumption that the text itself could teach you everything you needed to know about it. I think what you describe as lethargy has more to do with the fact that with the Cold War the entire country, including a large part of the intellectual community, turned right. Domestically, the Cold War at its worst was a kind of civil religion with distinctly Puritan cruelties. People were cowed. It’s true that a generation rose up against the ideology in the 1960s, but by the seventies they were pretty well mopped up. The ranks of the public critics began to thin-the generations behind Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin disappeared into the academy. Fled, one might say. There seemed to be a depoliticization of cultural life, generally. It was clear the USSR was a terrible mistake. But the correlate to that was … that anyone in America who wrote a political novel was writing a foolishly adversarial novel. It was possible according to Cold War orthodoxy to appreciate political novelists like Kundera from Czechoslovakia, or Coetzee or Gordimer from South Africa, but the American political novel was an egregious aesthetic error. A novel about an heroic CIA operative could be a good story… but a novel about a conscientious objector was a political tract.” – E.L. Doctorow, in Weber Journal

“What interests me most about poetry is the elegant envelope of form and the kind of density and compression that a poem demands. Because of those demands, I think I get to work more with silences than if I were writing prose. The silences are as big a part in my poems as what is being said. I believe my poems do a lot of work with what is implicit, rather than what is explicit. I just finished writing a work of creative nonfiction, Beyond Katrina, and I noticed that even in prose I have a strong tendency to circle back; repetition is a thing that I make use of constantly. It seems to me to be more natural in poetry and yet it also appears in my other writing.” – Natasha Trethewey, in Waccamaw

“No. I feel that my models came to me pretty early on, and it was who you mentioned—the early 20th century urban writers, like Richard Wright and Hubert Selby and Lenny Bruce—the language of Lenny Bruce. I like that rhythm, that high-speed, free-floating synaptic, anything comes out of your mouth, the acculturation, free-firing cultural riffs. Since then I sort of made my own way and made my own voice. I’ve read books that I admire, but nothing that made me, that taught me how to write.” – Richard Price, in Washington City Paper

“At eighteen I began reading biographies of writers: where had they gone to school? Were they married, childless, published before age thirty? Were they mad, alcoholic, suicidal, dead at forty? I was not so unhappy growing up that I did not fear the loneliness that seemed to come with being a writer; many of my favorite writers had dispiriting lives, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to suffer if that is what it took, but I did want to write. Suffering comes in many different styles, of course; mine involved years of writing and rewriting paragraphs—typing, deleting, typing again and again before giving in to a watery glue of dialogue.  (Writing dialogue most often makes me cringe. Recently, I discovered that verisimilitude or interest can be had in columns of dialogue if every other line is crossed out.) To be embarrassed by a story of one’s own making that dissolves after the first wrought gesture is one way of suffering.” – Christine Schutt, in Prime Number.

“Well, there was a time when I thought Richard Russo and John Irving (and Dickens) were gods — that long, overstuffed narrative exposition was entirely where it was at. I tried to write like those guys throughout my undergraduate and M.A. years. But then I graduated and discovered Blake Butler’s story in Ninth Letter, “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach,” went to his blog, discovered online writing, small presses, venues for innovative writing, writers like Millet and Bernheimer, discovered an entire world of publishing that didn’t give a hoot about the mainstream. I discovered a love of reading short, concise forms — flash fiction and prose poems. I hacked my previous writing to bits, culled the tightest, stand-alone sections, hacked away at them some more, and then suddenly I was publishing. These discoveries led to my breakthrough, surely.” – Molly Gaudry, in Hobart

“Yes, the Pee On Water title has been troubling from before Adam Robinson. At my thesis defense, all three of my advisors advised me strongly against it. For a while, it seemed like people younger than 30 liked it, and people older than 30 did not. For a few weeks I tried to find a title to replace it, but I had been calling the bookPee On Water in my head from the time I first wrote that story, so it was a strong instinct to override.” – Rachel B. Glaser, in Rumble Magazine

“So a lot of the things in my books are going to be your problems. They’re not my problems because I will be dead. So maybe I’m writing my books for you. That’s a scary thought, isn’t it?” – Margaret Atwood, in The National

“It’s also important to say that I don’t write to find answers to anything—that’s just not the way I am, in my fictions and in my life. Questions don’t necessarily mean answers. It is more about seeing. Some kind of glimpse that helps me think about, say, why in peacetime American fighter planes dropped bombs on a Pacific island that was used by fishermen. Who those fishermen were, where they were from, who loved them, who they loved. Or why a man seems to grow more sad with his marriage and his own achievements in life as this island, his home, flourishes around him. These kinds of questions are endless, of course, and I think a part of me could have written about Solla forever. But I can now see the larger canvas of that place and the dark places aren’t so dark anymore.” – Paul Yoon, in The Rumpus

“I truly believe that writing is a continuum—so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don’t write essays as often as I should.” – Chris Abani, at Utne Reader

“I think, as Nabokov did, that ‘all great novels are great fairy tales,’ and then some. If you show me a book – a novel, a story collection, a collection of poems, a series of one-act plays, a screenplay – in any style from mainstream to experimental – I will show you the fairy tales in it.  I can find not only the influence of fairy tales, but how fairy tales have given the narrative shape.” – Kate Bernheimer, in Room 220

“First, it’s hard for me to say that I ‘expect’ a reader to do anything. (Although the book does posit an imaginary reader, a construction which seems to issue from my neuroses.) But I believe there are a number of things a reader might do with entries such as those: she might be compelled to project a narrative from the fragment; she might be compelled to gather these fragments so to project an intellectual persona for their author; or she might be compelled to mine these fragments for clues, for something like the shadows of a narrative that isn’t explicitly presented by the book, a narrative whose protagonist is named Evan Lavender-Smith. Or she might perform some combination of these three operations. Or she might slam the book closed. In any case, part of my intention in constructing a book out of a seemingly haphazard collection of notes was that these notes, by virtue of their accumulation and juxtaposition and patternation, would end up working overtime (not unlike what we might expect of the bits and pieces of a conceptual art). The tenor of that extra work would, ideally, be unnameable, too complex to pin down; just as the tenor of great allegorical writing constantly eludes the grasp of full understanding and interpretation.” – Evan Lavender-Smith, in The Faster Times

I’m a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone at home, but I also spend a lot of time as an activist in the streets, in gatherings and things like that, and following revolutions around the world: the Velvet Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the Zapatistas … In those moments, I’ve discovered in myself and in others a deep happiness, an unknown desire that’s finally fulfilled to be purposeful, to be a part of history and society, to have a voice.

One of my arguments in A Paradise Built in Hell is that we have almost too much language for private needs and desires and not nearly enough for these other things. This need and desire is so profound that when it’s fulfilled, you find these weird moments of joy despite everything in disaster. The whole world is falling apart, but I am who I was meant to be: a citizen, a rescuer, a resourceful person who belongs to and is serving a community.

Read the rest at BOMB Magazine.

Wilson Harris

In this 2003 interview with Fred D’Aguiar, Wilson Harris speaks of place as character:

FD’A: A great magical web born of the music of the elements is how one may respond perhaps to a detailed map of Guyana seen rotating in space with its numerous etched rivers, numerous lines and tributaries, interior rivers, coastal rivers, the arteries of God’s spider. Guyana is derived from an Amerindian root word, which means “land of waters.” The spirit-bone of water that sings in the dense, interior rain forests is as invaluable a resource in the coastal savannahs which have long been subject to drought as to floodwaters that stretched like a sea from coastal river to coastal river yet remained unharnessed and wasted; subject also to the rapacity of moneylenders, miserable loans, inflated interest. READ MORE >

J. Robert Lennon’s Ward Six blog has something interesting at least twice a week. The latest post, “Forbidden things you can do anyway,” concerns:

an amusing exchange with a friend on facebook, a fellow teacher, who presently is grappling with inexperienced writers’ mistakes.  She has been citing the mistakes, and then I have been firing back with examples of really good fiction that uses the “mistake” to greater ends.  For instance, to “it was all a dream” I countered David Foster Wallace’s “Oblivion.”  “Everyone dies in a car accident at the end” reminded me of Charles Baxter’s “Saul And Patsy Are Getting Comfortable In Michigan” (although he did bring them back to life in a later story and novel).  And when my friend complained that her students don’t even know to start a new paragraph for dialogue from a new speaker, I threw down Stephen Dixon’s Interstate.

Reading it put me in mind of a beloved former teacher who intentionally pushed everyone’s dare-me buttons by passing out a list of twenty declarations about writing he called “The Rules” at the beginning of every new class, and no one ever seemed to notice amidst the grousing that Rule #20 was: You can do anything you want, so long as you can get away with it, or that none of his own stories strictly followed the prescriptive regime The Rules would imply.

This week in one of my classes, a student turned in a story that began: Here I am, facing the blank page, and someone said: You can’t do that. But I was thinking of the second paragraph of E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, which goes like this:

This is a Thinline felt tip market, black. This is Composition Notebook 79C made in the U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products, Inc. This Daniel trying one of the dark coves of the Browning Room. Books for browsing are on the shelves. I sit at a table with a floor lamp at my shoulder. Outside this paneled room with its book-lined alcoves is the Periodical Room. The Periodical Room is filled with newspapers on sticks, magazines from round the world, and the droppings of learned societies. Down the hall is the Main Reading Room and the entrance to the stacks. On the floors above are the special collections of the various school libraries including the Library School Library. Downstairs there is even a branch of the Public Library. I feel encouraged to go on.

A young woman I know once wrote a beautiful story from the point of view of a wine glass that sat in a room where a pair of lovers were ruining themselves. READ MORE >

Frank Bill

There is a lot of talk about the MFA, pro and con, and a corresponding vilification or romanticization of the autodidact who goes it alone and succeeds. As a writer, I’m glad I’m better because I got one. As a reader, I say: Who cares whether the writer did or didn’t get one? All that matters is whether or not what’s on the page knocks me out.

My buddy Frank Bill went it alone, and he’s doing pretty well these days. Soon FSG will publish his short story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana and his novel Donnybrook. They’re gritty stories that might put you in mind of Larry Brown or Donald Ray Pollock or Bonnie Jo Campbell. Today he posted a brief synopsis of the hard road from there to here. It is full of long hours reading and writing and stuff like this:

I gave up my studies in Chinese martial arts to write. I lost two grandparents. My dog died. My wife lost both of her grandparents within six months. My mother was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. She went through a second divorce. I went from 14 years on night shift to day work. The economy went to shit.

Reading it, I thought: Here is a guy who works harder than any seven human beings. That’s no guarantee that you’ll ever find readers, but that plus some talent plus having something to say plus the ability to be like a small child who will never take no for an answer plus some good luck might do the trick. Now the good luck is the reader’s. I can’t wait for his books to come into print, so I can buy copies for everyone I know. Here’s a link to his blog post.

From the Paris Review interview:

No, I think all writing is experimental. The very obvious sort of experimental writing is not really more experimental than that of a conventional writer like myself. I experiment all the time but the experiments are hidden. Rather like abstract art: You look at an abstract picture, and then you look at a close-up of a Renaissance painting and find the same abstractions.

Have you checked out the Writers at Cornell interview series? The latest installment is twenty-five minutes of Nicholson Baker answering to J. Robert Lennon’s questions about formal experimentation, John Updike, libraries, Human Smoke, and so on. Also worth your time (all of these interviews are downloadable MP3’s): Lydia Davis, Julia Alvarez, Terrance Hayes, Patrick Somerville, Alison Bechdel, George Saunders, and  Junot Diaz.