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She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I Memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief—like the Much Ado wrap party at the old Playhouse in 1961, when you seduced Ron. Even recalling it is like […]

A woman’s life runs from wedding to childbirth to nothing in a twinkling of an eye. A. S. Byatt,The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

Alvis stared into the drawing for a long time. He even thought about buying it, but he realized that if he hung it this way, upside down, people would just turn it over. This, he decided, was also the problem with the book he hoped to write. He could never write a standard war book; […]

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan […]

And we’re pretty much done with the residency. A morning seminar with Jeff Parker on his place-based narrative project (I sent him my story earlier this week. It’s interesting to write something in the place where the story is located and that will be read in that same place. This was followed by a final […]

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who’s lining up to see a sequel to Truth? Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

We’re just about done with the residency. We started with the genre workshop with Tibor Fischer and Corinna Vallianatos talking about beginnings of works. We workshopped a new piece that I wrote this week and despite it being relatively rough in my opinion was well-received by everyone else. I went for a walk after lunch […]

The pacing of the residency is such that it kind of feels like it’s all coasting from here on. The morning seminar was “Anthology” with Denis Johnson in which we contributed poems that made us want to be a writer. I, being a fiction person, lied and chose “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst. […]