I’ve been going through my older writing I never did anything with to see if I can send any of it out. In 2000 and 2001, I wrote my master’s thesis, a short story collection called How Small The World. I wrote a bunch of other, mostly insane stories about, well, most of the themes I’m still writing about. I was 26. I was writing literary fiction for the first time after writing genre fiction, erotica, for years, so I was trying to learn the rules as I wrote and also trying to be less filthy. I only sometimes succeeded on that front. Some of the stories hold up in that I’m not totally humiliated. Don’t get me wrong. There is embarrassment but I’ll survive. The stories are certainly workshoppy at times, a bit ponderous, slow moving, introspective, and far more sedate than what I’m currently writing but they’re also publishable with work. This is how I spent my summer vacation–identifying the strange preoccupations I had ten years ago and pretending I don’t have a whole new set of preoccupations now.
READ MORE >
Craft Notes / 31 Comments
August 2nd, 2011 / 4:34 pm
Anna Clark offers a reading list for narrative nonfiction. Along those lines, longform nonfiction might be enjoying a surge in popularity.
At The New Republic, Ruth Franklin talks about writing about captivity.
Did you know Colson Whitehead is writing about The World Series of Poker for Grantland?
The Atlantic’s Fiction 2011 issue is now online.
More reading: Sarah Malone at the Good Men Project and Gabe Durham at Route 9.
By the way, you can take a free online class in artificial intelligence at Stanford this fall.
Roundup / 9 Comments
July 31st, 2011 / 1:05 am
Over on the Versal blog, one of the editors (Megan M. Garr) talks about the impossible economics of publishing a literary magazine and there’s a great discussion taking place in the comments. Money and literary magazines–there are no easy answers. The whole post is worth reading. After a conversation with some strategy consultants, he writes:
They were appalled by some of the cliches we throw around every day. Like, writers are poor. Like, people submit to journals they’ve never read. Like, bookstores buy the journal at a 40% discount. Like, bookstores don’t even buy it, they just take it on consignment.
I was floating after that meeting. I took a breath, got some perspective, confirmation that we navigate somewhat crazy waters here, that we model ourselves after the socialist university mags or the utopian zines but we’re actually crashing against regular-old capitalist realities. So of course our survival has become rather freaktified and precarious.
READ MORE >
Random / 173 Comments
July 28th, 2011 / 4:52 pm
I’ve read some interesting books and magazines over the past couple weeks so I’m going to talk about them in one big post. Also, I’m giving several books away.
They Could No Longer Contain Themselves
I don’t care for the term flash fiction. I understand the etymology but I often think, “Why not call it a story?” There are so many terms now for different kinds of fiction. There is an obsession with naming, creating taxonomies so we can better understand the nature of a thing. Flash fiction. Very short stories. Sudden fiction. Microfiction. Nanofiction. All these terms strive to categorize the nature of stories that fous on brevity and compression. Ask five different writers how to define flash fiction and you will likely hear five different definitions. I read an article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker about tiny houses, and the writer talks about the article’s main subject, this guy named Shafer who designs tiny houses and the writer says, “What makes Shafer’s houses different from others is the classical elements of form and proportion and the graceful compression of his design.” I kept thinking about that line as I thought about the stories in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves. They each contain the classical elements of good fiction and the compression in each story is also graceful like a tiny house that holds everything you need to feel at home.
In They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, the latest book from the reliably excellent Rose Metal Press, five writers offer five unique interpretations of flash fiction in chapbooks by Mary Miller, Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and Sean Lovelace (I reviewed his chapbook in 2009, here).
READ MORE >
73 Comments
July 25th, 2011 / 5:36 pm
I’m working on some longer things to post here over the next couple weeks but in the meantime:
At Slate, Robert Pinsky offers three rules for writing a book review.
Anil Dash writes about how to foster productive online communities on your website by managing comment threads.
Roundup / 14 Comments
July 21st, 2011 / 2:08 pm
You must read the first ten pages of Kyle Minor’s The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, which is up at Guernica.
Michelle Dean wrote a great essay, What Harry Potter Knows, for The Millions.
Wendy Wimmer does some analysis of Best American Short Stories and where those stories come from. Others have done similar breakdowns but it is worth reading. Over half of the stories over the timeframe she studied come from the same twelve journals. I’m not surprised.
There is a drawing for every page of Moby Dick.
Patsola Press is doing a Kickstarter.
Do we focus too much on plot?
Harper’s has six questions for Colson Whitehead. I only have one. You might also enjoy this interview with John Freeman.
Roundup / 35 Comments
July 17th, 2011 / 6:20 pm
