July 14th, 2011 / 3:12 pm
 Power Quote & Snippets
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“My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.” — Gary Lutz, interviewed by David Winters @ 3:AM Magazine. Also: Lutz is reading tonight at the Soda Series.

9 Comments

  1. July 14th, 2011 / 7:40 pm Parker—

      Thanks Mike! Reading Stories in the Worst Way for the first time.

  2. July 14th, 2011 / 7:46 pm davidpeak—

      Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Mike.

      This is the best kind of interview. The interviewer is clearly familiar with the work, brings their own insights to the table. Fantastic read.

      I particularly loved this:

      “When I picked up this piece, I’d been looking for two things. First, a
      story to bear out my hunch that life is just something that’s done to
      you. Second, a prose that could claim at least some of the rigour of
      poetry — what you’ve since called a ‘poetics of the sentence.’”

      I was hooked right there.

      Also, Gary is reading tonight in Brooklyn, in case people don’t know:

      http://sodaseries.com/

  3. July 14th, 2011 / 8:10 pm elizabeth ellen—

      i’m in love with that quote. “a little crawl space.” perfect. 

  4. July 14th, 2011 / 9:48 pm Leapsloth14—

      “It is more like a tiny annex to my life”

      I like this. I feel the same. It’s ONE aspect of a larger life.

  5. July 14th, 2011 / 10:10 pm EC—

      It looks like a dynamite line-up there tonight at the Soda Series, with Tim Horvath and Mary Caponegro there alongside Lutz.  Somebody please invent a transporter machine so that I can go.

  6. July 15th, 2011 / 4:18 am Samuel Gulpan—

      Thanks for this! Finishing Stories in the Worst Way tonight…

  7. July 15th, 2011 / 7:46 am Penina—

      The Soda event was incredible! In the post-reading discussion, answering a question about his writing method, Gary said he writes on a computer, using a large (18-20) font, because he’s “very concerned with the typographical physique of the words” and is “trying to divorce them as much as possible from conventional meanings.” Elaborating, he said, “I think of the individual letters and words as blocks of typographical matter” and that his writing is like “playing with blocks” and an attempt to regain the playfulness with language that comes naturally to children.

  8. July 15th, 2011 / 6:01 pm Nathan Huffstutter—

      Interesting quote in the interview, where G. Lutz says: 
                “The sentence, if it is doing every one of its jobs, does not
              want you to desert it for another.”
      Captured my reading of Stories in the Worst Way. I remember countless extraordinary sentences; I can’t necessarily remember which extraordinary sentence connects to which individual story; I know they all exist in the same book; that’s enough.

  9. July 15th, 2011 / 8:57 pm Murder Virus—

      Hey where do you guys get your information about readings and shit like that? Assume I hate facebook and refuse to use twitter. Is there a place that lists them all? (Guess I could just buy timeout)