July 2007
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"I guess it makes me nervous that people come to my readings and expect to laugh. That's not my main objective when I'm writing... I don't think about getting laughs. It's a side effect of the kind of situations and people and ideas I like to write about. But then, when I have to go read it out loud, I remember: 'Uh-oh. What do I have here that won't disappoint everybody?' Usually nothing!"
by
Weston Cutter
"Despite the chaos and the acquisitions, the money down the tubes, and the inordinate amount of time, energy, and tears spent on this publishing bankruptcy disaster, a phoenix does seem to be emerging from the fire. Publishers both large and small, non-profit and for-profit, express excitement, hope, and relief about the future with Perseus. Morgan Entrekin of Grove/Atlantic fairly gushes over the new alliance: 'We’ve now created the greatest option for independent publishing – and I’ve been in the independent publishing business for twenty-four years. We really have a better situation than I ever could have hoped for last fall.'"
by
Alexis Wiggins
"My brain was popping with all these crazy, improbable ideas, and I had a blast trying to string them all together in the same book. I wanted to recreate the experience of wanting to read a book over and over. And of course Nietzsche said famously 'God is dead,' but my book is much more in the spirit of a line from The Brothers Karamazov: 'If God is dead, then everything is permitted.' Now that’s a fun premise to work from."
by
Sarah Woehler Michaud
It’s a little odd having these three careers because I feel sometimes frustrated that I’m moving in slow motion in each of them. It’s like when a lot of people are on their book tour they are working on their next book, and it’s like I can’t even think of working on my next book until I finish this script. And I know no one’s really keeping track, but even for myself it’s like, “no, do not open a Word document and just start seeing if you can start writing a novel, you got to finish this movie and make it really good and keep with it,” because every other medium is more appealing than the one you’re working on.
by
Tony Dushane
"I’m always slightly rueful about the way things have happened, especially in a country like South Africa, where you have more than 100 years of institutional racism and a majority of the people, blacks, are oppressed. And then we say we’ve oppressed you, but now we’re going to send a lot of our best writers, the Athol Fugards and the Nadine Gordimers and in Zimbabwe’s case the Doris Lessings, who will now write about what it’s like to be you, to be black and oppressed. I’ve always been a little anxious about doing that."
by
John Zuarino
"I was very appalled by the way I was treated by [Ralph Ellison]. His hostility was evident from beginning to end. Even more disturbing was that he was very hostile to Langston Hughes. I had spent a long time delving into the private papers and public papers of Langston Hughes. I didn’t think he was a figure to be treated with contempt. But clearly Ellison felt contempt for him. Therefore my entire enterprise as I sat there talking to Ellison was being called into question. Its moral fiber, if you like."
by
Paul Morton
"O’Connell’s life in Africa, though, was far rougher than mine. In the Caprivi area, she joined with the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism to study elephant-human interactions, and tried to ameliorate cross-species tensions. No picnic, that job. The local farmers regarded the elephants, consummate crop-raiders, as pests. And there was human baggage too: '[The farmers] were a tough crowd, jaded by an ill-equipped ministry and a resignation to powerlessness. There were many arguments... An angry farmer even tried to light my truck on fire while I was installing an alarm in his field along the eastern floodplain.'"
by
Barbara J. King
I think, though, that the argument really began when, working at a bookstore right out of college, I kept seeing and reading bad debut story collections published by big houses -- bad collections that’d seemed really promising and interesting, full of stories by people I really wanted to get excited about and be a fan of -- and the thing all these disappointing people had in common was a chromosome. The argument is this: American women are better short story writers than American men.
by
Weston Cutter
"When people question sex workers it's always about sex. They ask, 'When you were raised were you molested? When did your parents educate you on sex?' People ask you shit like that all the time. But no one ever asks you how were you raised to think about money? How did your parents handle it?"
by
Joanne McNeil
Knitting (also known as: the charming practice of repetitively looping bits of yarn together with the object of adding more useless schwag to the gift economy) is on the wane, and as it slides into the cultural dustbin, several contenders jostle to replace it. Some say global warming could be the new knitting. Others say decoupage. Others say books by authentically dirty farmers are the new knitting, as every rock in the nearby vicinity is lifted in hopes of uncovering the Anthony Bourdain of farming. But I say "Why not China?"
by
Heather Smith
"That’s me. A former high school drop out, street kid from Brooklyn, and the Old West End of Toledo, Ohio, running through the alleys near Scott High with its legendary basketball team. I went to state schools. I worked in factories and warehouses for three years before I went to college, then loaded trucks in a union shop third shift throughout college. I consider my work exploratory, if not experimental, though I don’t feel close to a lot of experimental writers. A lot of so-called experimental writing leaves the world too much for my tastes."
by
D. Richard Scannell
