Fiction Attic Press

Author: Editor

  • Writers on Writing: Joshilyn Jackson, in the carpool lane

    Roxanne Ravenel over at All Things Girl conducted a wonderful two-part interview with Joshilyn Jackson, whose new novel, Backseat Saints, will surely satisfy her fans and earn her many new ones. Joshilyn talks about her love-hate relationship with the South (“I am truly happy nowhere else, and yet I am angry with it, so I don’t imagine I am finished writing about it”), what she reads, and why she thinks writing groups are a good idea, among other things.

    My favorite bit of the interview involves Joshilyn’s writing process (or lack thereof). This pretty much sums my process up, too, sans ballet (my boy is more into ninjas).

    Backseat Saints, by Joshilyn JacksonOh Lord, I wish I had a process. It would be so much more efficient. I write on three different computers and mail the updated files to my g-mail account to download the latest every time I switch. I write at home in bed on my ancient craptoposaurus, at home in my office on my desktop, and I drag my little netbook everywhere to write in coffee shops and carpool lines and while waiting on a folding chair for my youngest to finish her ballet lesson. I do not have set working hours, either. I write in seizures, disappearing to borrowed vacation homes, off season, to draft twenty thousand words in four days, and then I don’t open a single file again for two weeks, then I’ll be up at three am for nine days in a row, revising. It’s a ridiculous, stupid way to work, and I cannot recommend it. It’s also the only way that works for me.

  • Jose Saramago quits blogging

    The AFP reports that Nobel prize-winning author Jose Saramago, known for his haunting novel Blindness, will say goodbye to the blog that he began writing last September. Why? He needs to finish his novel. Saramago was 85 when he started the blog with a love letter to Lisbon. In his last blog entry, Saramago writes:

    “It has always been convenient that goodbyes be brief…Goodbye therefore. Until another day? I sincerely don’t think so. I have started another book and want to dedicate all my time to it,” he wrote in his final blog entry.

    Good advice for all of us. Now, if only I could get this blog monkey off my back.

  • Readings for Writers

    The Kenyon Review has just published a new anthology of work culled from the magazine over the past seventy years. Editor David Lynn writes:

    Readings for Writers is a very different creature from your usual anthology…A different principle of selection comes into play: choosing stories, poems, and essays from across the decades to provoke lively responses from writers today, to inspire and challenge…the selections here are intended to inspire active response—pen to paper, fingers to keyboard.”

    All in all, it looks like a terrific volume for teachers of writing, not to mention anyone who is engaged in the practice of writing short stories, essays, and poems. Contributions are arranged chronologically, beginning with Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, and Dylan Thomas–all published in the magazine’s first year, 1939–and ending with Cara Blue Adams, whose essay appeared in 2009. Along the way areworks by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Sylvia Plath, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipul, Don DeLillo, Robert Haas, Annie Dillard, Billy Collins, Virgil Suarez, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, W.S. Merwin, and many others–82 selections in all.

    I was browsing the contents page when, quite by surprise, I came upon “A Life in Pods,” an essay of mine which appeared in the magazine in 2008. I’m thrilled to be included in such amazing company, and can’t wait to get my copy and dig in.

    You can order the issue here.

  • Two From the World of Ink

    I met Georges and Anne Borchardt at Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. The couple co-founded their literary agency in 1967, and are known for introducing American audiences to the work of Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Pierre Bourdieu, Marguerite Duras, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Eugene Ionesco, Jacques Lacan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Elie Wiesel.

    When we met, I’d just had my first novel published with San Francisco independent MacAdam/Cage (sans agent) and was looking for representation. Jill McCorkle, a faculty member at the conference, read a chapter of the novel I was working on and set up a meeting. Many of the other fellows were going spelunking, but I skipped the cave trip and met the Borchardts on the little patio behind the apartment where they were staying. We talked for a while–about books, writing, my background and interests, my novel-in-progress. I immediately felt a connection with them. I liked their calmness, their magnetic presence. One had the feeling of being in the company of extraordinarily sharp and sensitive literary minds (more…)

  • How Much Honesty Is Too Much?

    Over at right-reading, Tom Christensen shares a letter he received from a writer who says he met Tom years ago, and that Tom’s response to his work was so devastating that he stopped sharing his work for ten years. The letter-writer admits that he may have gotten Tom confused with someone else, and that, even if Tom was the editor he met with, his response might not have been as harsh as the writer remembers. Kind of makes me think of the hundreds of writing workshop sessions I’ve led, and what I said. As teacher and editors, we’re supposed to present the truth as we see it, no matter how harsh it might be, but it’s easy to forget that the person on the other side of the criticism might take our words too much to heart. While it’s important to point out strengths where they exist, and to be as encouraging as is possible in an honest way, the teacher or editor does no one any favors by heaping on undeserved praise.

    The question, then: how much honesty is too much?

  • Yes, Christine, you can begin writing at 60!

    A few days ago, a reader named Christine emailed me the following question: Do you think a person can begin being a writer at age 60? You’re so young and have such a solid educational background in literature. I know I want to write, and have a folder of snippets, unrelated, but think I’m crazy to start at this age!

    Well, I should admit, first off, that I’m not really that young. I grew up in the South, where a lady is never supposed to reveal her age, but since the publisher of my first novel decided to put my birthdate on the title page, it’s pretty much out there. Matters of youthfulness or lack thereof aside, I get a lot of questions from aspiring writers, frequently about publishing, sometimes of the “I want to write a book, and I’m sure it will be a bestseller if you introduce me to your agent” variety. I found Christine’s question particularly refreshing, because it wasn’t about the business of writing, but the process of writing, and, more specifically, the beginning of writing–you know, that thing you actually have to do before you go out in search of literary fame and fortune. So I thought I’d share my response here: (more…)

  • Writers Reflect

    Jason Roberts compiled writers’ reflections on John Updike today for The Rumpus. There are contributions by Andrew Sean Greer, Andrew Foster Altschul, Rick Moody, and yours truly, among others.

  • “A celebration of risk and failure”

    Elizabeth Stark, filmmaker and author of the award-winning novel Shy Girl, has written a great piece on redroom about why the “growth mindset” matters to writers. Read it here.

  • Good Reads

    Just out today, a new novel by Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share without Knowing. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this book, and, though I’ve never met the author in my life, this was an easy book to blurb: From the frantic streets of Tokyo to the surreal silence of rural Japan, Christopher Barzak spins the familiar yarn of the everyday world into a magical universe. Following in the themes of his stunning debut, One for Sorrow, Barzak once again tackles loneliness and longing, and elegantly blurs the divide between the living and the dead. The Love We Share Without Knowing is haunting, strange, and utterly surprising from the first page to the last.

    Sometimes you go through dry spells when it comes to reading–you know what I mean–those weeks, months even, when you open book after book, unable to find anything that really moves you. For some reason, the past two weeks have been the opposite of that. I keep finding books to love. Here are a couple of them.

    The Theory of Light and Matter: Stories by Andrew Porter.
    Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, this collection of ten tautly constructed stories is quiet, moving, sometimes funny, and marked again and again by genuine emotion. What impressed me most about these stories is the way they unfold at a casual, told-by-a-friend pace, very direct and simple, before hitting you straight on with some insight that they’ve been subtly working toward all along. From “Storms,” in which a young man watches his sister self-destruct:

    In the books the psychologists had given to Amy and me as children, I remembered reading stories about people who claimed that after one of their parents died they were just never happy again. I understood this to be the case with my sister and sometimes my mother. Life goes on, but it’s different now. It’s softer, duller. The highs are less high and the lows seem to have an endless depth to them, a depth you have to be wary of falling into…it occurred to me that Amy had probably spent most of her life on the edge of that depth, unwilling to let herself fall in, but frightened all the same by its presence.

    Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan
    One of the best books I’ve read this year. Although this is a story in which very little happens, one man’s struggle to end his years of service to The Red Lobster with dignity, and to be a decent human being in the process, kept me spellbound.

    Another story collection that I devoured with hardly a trip to the kitchen for coffee and Hydrox cookies was Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers.
    These stories are as seductive as their heroines, dripping with the mystique of New Orleans, tense with the characters’ often-failed attempts to rein in their larger-than-life desires. A spectacular Christmas gift for the Scorpio in your life, or for anyone to whom you want to send a message about infidelity, jealousy, or the perils of family.

  • What’s Borges Got to Do With It?

    Jeff VanderMeer recently interviewed me for Omnivoracious, the Amazon editors’ blog. VanderMeer peels back the cover for a look inside No One You Know. Subjects discussed: the influence of Borges and Paul Auster, math as a labyrinth, the joys of coffee and a blank page, the difficulty of getting the cornbread right, and what you can do to get yourself invited to dinner. Read the interview here.

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