March 2011
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Different stories with the same ending -- a human being dies, and then no longer exists. But have the events of history changed what it means to die? Have they changed what it means to love?
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"I have tried to forget the past, forgive others, forgive something and someone in my past -- but that has been very painful. ... Every night, the pain comes to me. Every night I have to shrink it again and again. If I have to talk about the past, I don’t know if I will be able to shrink the pain."
by
Terry Hong
"My painting and drawing? I think they come from the same place mentally. It's the same creative muscle I'm flexing, but in a different way. It's the same sort of enjoyment, which is a weird enjoyment because you are on your own all the time. Most of the time I'm in this really cold room, painting away. Or I'm in my flat, writing away. So it's very antisocial. It's me talking to myself, obviously internally. It's a conversation between your own thoughts."
by
Andrew Stout
"The middles of novels are labyrinths and I learned early in my writing career that it’s too painful and too time-consuming to get stuck in them. Do you find interesting things that way? Wandering? Yes. But you also starve or get eaten by roving monsters. I have to plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, then write really fucking fast, and uninterrupted, once the planning is done."
by
Weston Cutter
"I think it wasn't until recently that I developed a healthy respect for memoir. When I was first becoming a writer, I valued fiction highly. Memoir felt like a lesser category ... But then I started reading memoirs and that's when things changed. I read a lot of memoirs and I realized that memoir is a fascinating genre, very intellectual, and it has a lot of creative energy behind it, a lot of potential, a lot of places it could go because it's a very new form. Artists have a chance to make a new sound by working in the memoir form."
by
Courtney Tenz
Writers who tackle societies where personal freedom has been destroyed -- writers like Müller and Orwell and Galeano and Atwood -- are especially valuable to us now, in this period of relative liberty. We need to read them and prepare. We need to get ready, I think, for a bit of a fight.
by
Pauls Toutonghi
One would think that such a land of dense pine forests, deep snows, and abundant reindeer would have a correspondingly quiet literary landscape. Three recent Finnish novels have challenged that notion by providing insight into their world through new English translations.
by
Bonnie B. Lee
"I rarely write directly about my own life. 'The Un-' may be the closest I've ever come to that. Of course, I have to pull the idea from personal events, but it's usually through a thick lens of narrative, in order to make the story work."
by
Laura Tharp
"I think the thing about 'rock 'n' roll' is I just can't take it seriously. You can guarantee that any band or person who considers themselves that these days is anything but. It seems to just mean wearing a bullet belt and getting really drunk, when really it should about freedom, non-conformity, anti-establishment attitudes, acts of sedition, the breaking down of racial/sexual boundaries, the constant risk of ridicule and -- perhaps most importantly -- individuality."
by
Chris Killen
"Your parents drop tidbits of information casually, and it might take years before you have enough data to piece together exactly what gravy has to do with why Aunt Mary doesn't speak to Uncle Dan anymore. I wanted to make that kind of broken narrative, one that would invite the reader to pay attention and refit the pieces into a whole as he or she went along."
by
Kate Greenstreet
"To me, Texas isn’t really 'The West' any more than it's 'The South.' It’s its own animal. But I wouldn’t want to be pigeonholed as a Texas writer either. Still, I am aware of the literary conversation and heritage of my home state, and it’s one I’m proud of."
by
Teresa Burns Gunther
"I think reality television, and the celebrity machinery more generally, are quasi-sacrificial systems. We are using that whole system to select, groom and elevate certain citizens that we then reserve the right to later discard, in sometimes brutal ways."
by
Heather Clitheroe
"I'd rather have a story be character-based, where it isn't tethered to any specific news story. Every story will age somewhat eventually, you can't help that. But you can certainly extend the story's life a bit."
by
Andrew Stout
