Category: writing

In the woods, bewildered, in a peck of troubles, at a loss. To ascend a pulpit, to cant, to remove one’s vestments with one’s teeth, to chase foxes at clicked in a hedge, to stand stooped in a pillory, cunny-thumbed, one who has eaten shame and drank a dram after it. Lawrence Sutin, When to go […]

Did lifeguards look like lifeguards only after they‘d saved somebody? And what if they failed? What did they look like then? Abby Frucht, Polly’s Ghost.

I want to do everything I haven’t yet dared to do, and to escape everything I’ve already done. I want to die in a cataclysm of my own making, not in a world war fashioned by great nations. And I want to leave a written record of my passage across this earth, so that others […]

In her contributor’s note in Best American Short Stories, Katherine Bell writes: I loved the way Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield handled point of view and I wanted to see if I could manage shifting among several characters’ consciousnesses from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence, without ever zooming out. (360) Bell manages […]

I wanted to believe him and he wanted to be believed, and I guess that’s the beginning of hope anyway, a tiny seed you hold real careful in the palm of your hand. Robert Vivian, The Mover of Bones.

Hector liked the saints best in the early paragraphs of their lives when they were still being tempted. Lawrence Sutin, When to go into the Water.

The day began with Jeff Parker’s seminar on “repetition” which he turned into a seminar on “not-knowing/repetition” building a great deal off of the essay “Not Knowing” by Donald Barthelme, an author I’ve found I greatly enjoy. A handful of good things and Parker ran his seminar a bit more like a seminar, although having […]

So what people think makes you special is just the disappointment of their own lives. Robert Vivian, The Mover of Bones.

A useful guide for plotting from Emma Coats. Via Kottke.