Just another writer
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Final Residency—Final day
It’s a day of lasts for me. My last seminar, Rick Moody and Susan Minot discussing John Cheever (although I have to say that I’m finding a lot of Cheever to be a bit of a mixed bag, with more duds than successes to my mind, but I did rather enjoy the convoluted storytelling of…
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Final Residency—Days 7 & 8
Day 7 The morning opened with Rick Chase’s seminar. He began with a bit of “buddhist” meditation. I use quotes and lowercase since I’m not entirely sure if that’s how he views it, although the mindfulness of it does seem very much in that vein. He expanded from this into some poetic writing exercises. Our…
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Final Residency—Days 5 and 6
Monday was another short day. After lunch we had Mikhail Iossel giving a seminar on close reading, which was a repeat of a seminar from an earlier residency. Then we had the final round of readings from the graduates. I really enjoyed the stories from Jared Silvia and Benjamin Tier, although all were good. The…
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Final Residency—Day 4
The day began with a seminar led by Benjamin Percy and his deep voice of doom. He spoke a bit about genre “barriers” remarking, “So much of what AWP is about is taxonomy… Rather than genre barricades, perhaps we should distinguish literature on the basis of ‘good’ and ‘not good’.” The afternoon was composed of…
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Final Residency—Day 3
We began the day with another fiction workshop, this time led by Jessica Anthony, who answered the question of how do we compete with all the multitudinous inputs of contemporary life? Her answer: Surrealism! We did a few surrealist exercises: First was the two minute conversation: Two eople speak to each other for two minutes continuously…
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“Le Pont des Arts”: The Story Behind the Story
I wrote the first draft of this story while staying in the same apartment building in Paris where Katherine Mansfield wrote “Feuille d’Album.” The apartment was located on Ile de la Cité a short distance from Pont de l’Archevêché which has become a popular spot for tourists to attach locks declaring their eternal love as…
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“Thy Neighbour’s Goods”: The story behind the story
Some background on my story, “Thy Neighbour’s Goods” which appears in the Spring 2014 issue of The Southampton Review. The story began with a conversation with my wife about language. We were discussing the lack of distinction between singular and plural second person in English and I told her that actually the English “you” is…
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Beautiful sentences
She looks down at the playbill. She looks down. Terese Svoboda, Bohemian Girl.