Just another writer
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Beautiful sentences
Maybe our own parents will eat us eventually—they may have eaten us already, and the rest of our life is just the process of their digestion. Richard Howard, “A Proposed Curriculum Change.”
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Beautiful sentences
In the end, every corpse has the same face: your own. David Bezmogis, The Free World
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Beautiful sentences
His cry went on through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and…
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Beautiful sentences
It is not a question of where one writes it, Samuil said. Apostasy is apostasy. It is always between one’s self and one’s soul. David Bezmogis, The Free World.
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Residency day 9
And the last day of my penultimate residency. One of these kind of open days. A morning residency with Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin which, it turns out, was not so much about collaboration (although they did talk about writing The Tilted World towards the end of their time and more about writing very short…
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Residency day 8
We’re in the final stretch on the residency. Our morning residency was Hal Hartley talking nominally about dialogue but as much talking about how his writing process builds on the standard three-act 64-scene screenplay format but then is willing to move beyond that. After workshop and lunch, we then had a panel on “Literary Professionalism,”…
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Beautiful Sentences
It seems as though there might be some place in the world they could have been left alone. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky.
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Residency day 7
We began with a fiction workshop on revision from Corinna Vallianatos. She began with her top ten on revision, with the #1 position comprised of suggestions from the class: 10. Put your classmates’ response letters away. Read them, but don’t keep them handy. 9. Be impatient. Be impatient with your own preciousness. Revision is like…
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Residency day 6
Our morning seminar was Jason Ockert on writing idiosyncratic characters. How does one go about moving a reader? Balance between writing familiar and distinctive. That which is relatable and that which is somehow unfamiliar. Who cares about idiosyncratic characters? For Ockert it’s rudimentary. He has a terrible memory: the great thing about literature is the stuff…