April 2011
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"Spinning in and out of fever dreams, I glimpse some secret past or future -- hiking through a parasite-filled jungle with the man I love most. Thousands of books I have never read, because they do not exist yet. Manuscripts I haven’t written, that might never exist, or that might exist because I write them."
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"The unique thing about fiction is that you don’t have a conversion experience, like, 'Ah ha! Now I know that I’m going to apply the lessons from this book into my life!' Really good fiction operates on you more like a slow poison -- in a good way. It enters your bloodstream and changes the way that you look at the world without your realizing it."
by
Lee Randall
"The difficulty of writing this book, one of the main experiments of it, is that I wanted to write a book that was basically about the process of learning language. The problem with that is that for the first half of the book, before Bruno learns language and he has to narrate his pre-linguistic mind using language, it’s kind of a weird pretzel of logic."
by
Barbara J. King
"Chapbooks were small, folded books of usually 12-24 pages sold door to door by chapmen in the 16th century. The chapmen sold other little objects too -- bottles and trinkets. Chapbooks formed the literature of the poor."
by
Jon Cotner
"Writing what 'happened' to you in your life without drifting away from the corporeal -- your actual body, not a fictionalized or idealized one -- fucks you up. I had nightmares for more than a year. I drank a ton. I upped my pharmaceutical intake. I didn’t sleep. I went for long swims, I went for long walks and cried oceans. It wasn’t just confronting demons from my past, or kicking their asses. It wasn’t just diving into the wreck. It was claiming the literary space and breaking its rules and standing up without apology."
by
Kris Saknussemm
"I could go story by story through
Volt and explain why I was preoccupied with that specific story. That's not to say that I always found answers to my questions. But I tried my best to glean any insights I could, to find any scrap of light in the darkness, often finding certain questions were unanswerable, and sometimes finding answers that shook me deeper than the questions themselves."
by
Weston Cutter
"Certainly that must be one of the writer's jobs: to transform all those experiences which are constantly disappearing out from under us into language and thereby grant them some small permanence."
by
Michele Filgate
"Finance itself, especially the lives of those obsessed with finance, or those who work in finance, remains startlingly absent from the canon of recent fiction ... We’re still celebrating these Updike-esque tales of well-off suburbanites and their neuroses, their family reunions and infidelities and conflicted feelings about the Bible, or whatever. Some of the writing is experimental, some is realistic, but so little of it demonstrates any recognition of the world we actually live in."
by
Raphaela Weissman
"I want to want to destroy something like myself. I have this feeling in me that comes, it’s out of nowhere, it’s from nothing, I don’t know why, I’ve always wanted to want to hurt something, and I can’t. I don’t have the heart. ... I feel this fury for nothing. I feel like I want to fight but I’ve never been in a fight and I don’t like violence on the world. But I want to. Is that American. Is that human. I don’t know. It seems everywhere."
by
Weston Cutter
"If I, because of the privilege of living and working in the West, have some freedom to shine a light in a hidden corner, I take it as my responsibility to do so, and do it responsibly."
by
Niranjana Iyer
"'Outlaw,' as in not prescribing to any set of rules. As in doing whatever I want and letting the poem escape itself. The poem declaring itself as the force-field. Maybe even taking on the role of the offender, due to the unwieldiness of my grammar; I would say that a serious grammarian would be very offended. A wild outlaw, as in lacking supervision, the poem destroying boundaries, forthcoming with great intensity, as in my personality contributing to the bending of time like Annie Oakley."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
"I suffer under the delusion that I understand [the past]. I have no idea what it is like to live in the present. I’ve never tried it. As for the future, good God, I would not know the future if it crawled in bed with me."
by
James Tate Hill
