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On Maud Newton On David Foster Wallace
Maud Newton astutely considered the legacy of David Foster Wallace in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. I thought it was an exhilarating read. She begins with a quote from “Tense Present” and...
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Ayana Mathis On Joy
I often worry at how often my writing students seem focused on misery and pain. As if literature were a Victorian curio cabinet of suffering and the point of writing was to find the most interesting...
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I Love BOMB Reading + Like A Boss with Emily Books + Mentors in Paperback
It’s a busy time. First, this Monday, February 6th, I’m reading from a new short story, just finished, unpublished, not even under submission yet. The occasion is the BOMB Magazine I <3 BOMB...
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Advice for Young People and the Office-Bound (basically everyone)
After the Mentors panel Sunday, a friend who was there was sorry she hadn’t gotten a chance to ask her question. She wrote to ask of my opinion on Choire Sicha’s recent advice post for young people...
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On Distractions, Briefly
Nothing in this post explains your fascination with cats. Or does it? Last night at the One Story Debutante’s Ball, I was talking briefly to a friend who was complimenting me and Colson Whitehead on...
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In Which Blogging Teaches Me Something About Writing Novels
The other night I described this method to my friend Mike Albo and he said, “You jerk! Why didn’t you tell me about this ten years ago?”* So, I’m telling you now. I keep a journal of my novel that is...
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From Lydia Davis’“The Architecture of Thought”
Sometimes, after he’d been awake a few hours, though still in bed, Proust would decide on impulse to go out and see a friend. At ten or eleven at night in a dark bedroom, the only light comes from the...
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What I Did This Summer – A Very Partial Report
Two essays appeared this summer, at The Morning News and The LA Review of Books. Both began as blog posts here and had to, per the rules of this blog (any post extending over 800 words must be...
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On Lying to Yourself (and Others) and the Romney Campaign Lie Pattern
For months now we’ve been talking about “post-truth politics” because of the extent of Romney’s lies, and yet it was still uncanny to watch Romney lie on stage last night about his positions on...
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Hello from Leserland
Hello from Leipzig, Germany, a place that loved books so much it was nicknamed Leserland, or, Country of Readers. I’m writing to you from the apartment given to me by the University of Leipzig while I...
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On Reading The Great Gatsby Now
No one was more surprised than me, probably, when I began reading The Great Gatsby as an adult, first out of curiosity–what was that book I read as a child?–and then for pleasure–hey that book I didn’t...
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MacGuffins
The simplest definition of a MacGuffin is that it gives the characters something to do in such a way that the plot is made around it. The term comes from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, who defined it...
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Approaches to Autobiographical Fiction
You could call your storage stuff memorabilia, or, material. We will talk about ways of turning the one into the other. Over at the Center for Fiction, I’m offering a class in Autobiographical...
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Summer Study Abroad
Once back when I was a young writing student I wanted a little more than my own college experience was offering, and so I signed up for and took a summer writing workshop at Bennington College between...
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