Just another writer
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Residency day 5
Another full day. It began with Stefan Kiesbye giving a seminar looking at blurred boundaries between fiction and CNF. I was reminded of James Tadd Adcox saying that, to him, CNF was just fiction where the protagonist had the author’s name. Kiesbye looked a number of works, talking about the controversy around the publication of…
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Residency day 4
The reading/writing day of the residency. I got a fair amount of work done, although there’s always more to write. Our workshop time was spent looking closely at “Paper Lantern” by Stuart Dybek (which is finally coming out in a Dybek collection in June) and “Differently” by Alice Munro. Our lone seminar of the day…
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Residency day 3
We began the day with a seminar on revision with Jennifer Vanderbes. There were some nice resonances between what she was saying about specificity and yesterday’s fiction genre workshop. Today was my day to be workshopped, which gave me some excellent feedback on my first chapter of the novel. I’m inclined to do a complete…
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Residency day 2
The day began with a seminar from Erika Meitner and Mary Biddinger on literary taboos. Between the reading that was assigned beforehand and the handout for the seminar there was a lot of food for thought. One student was a bit concerned about “earnest Christianity” being among the taboos so I directed him to Robert…
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Residency day 1
So today (and yesterday) turned out to be quite the odyssey. The original plan was to take a 7.25p flight from Midway to Tampa, arriving at 10.50p. After a lot of delay, the flight was canceled. At 2a. I was able to get a seat on an early flight to Orlando (which was then delayed for…
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Beautiful sentences
And sometimes the night wind nudged his feet so that they struck the circle of his priestly garment like dumb clappers in a deaf-and-dumb bell; they seemed to be tolling without evoking a sound. Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
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A year of rejections
At this stage of my life, I’ve been submitting stories for publication for seven years. It’s interesting to see the results of these years in handy graph form. The aqua section of the graph has been steadily widening with time. Last year it got to 19% and this year it edged up to 20%. And…
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A year of reading
So in 2013, I ended up reading a total of 114 books. Some interesting statistics along the way: 27.2% were written by women. Asians and Latinos each made up 2.6%. Blacks were 1.8%. I find these numbers to be rather disgraceful. 40.4% were for my MFA. Two were in Spanish. Eleven were translated (from French,…
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Beautiful Sentences
This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty—this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice