“This is transformative prose at its best. . . . If you want an actual contemporary wordsmith who does not just tinker but thrives in the micro-worlds of Calvino and Borges, Walser and Perec, read Understories.”
To mark the release of The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde, edited by Lily Hoang and Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Nighboat Books, 2015), I answered some of Lily’s questions about innovative writing practices and the like, and the folks at The Volta were kind enough to publish it along with a bunch of others from the book itself. It features an incredible lineup of writers, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to throw my iron into the furnace of the possible.
My flash piece “The Other Work,” which I debuted live at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, found a home in Wigleaf, and can be read at http://wigleaf.com/201411work.htm.
And if you were on a quest for something else to nosh upon, I dispatched a postcard from a comet, yours truly at http://wigleaf.com/201411thdw.htm.
Thanks, as always, to editor Scott Garson for being such a great master of ceremonies.
The one, the only Nancy Pearl had some tremendously generous things to say about UNDERSTORIES in conversation with Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. Calling the book “her favorite short story collection in recent memory,” she went on to dub the work “elastic realism,” explaining that the book is “firmly grounded in realism,…[b]ut then…stretches that definition of realism into places that we might not think it would go.”
Plainly and simply, I love this characterization and broke into a rather elastic dance upon hearing her.
She also had kind words for Bellevue Literary Press on Seattle’s The Record, stating, “Their books are just gems. It’s hard to find a Bellevue Literary Press book that, for me, doesn’t work.”
Tomorrow, Saturday, March 16th, along with nine other writers from Grub Street, I’ll be participating in the live writing of a mystery as part of the #TwitterFiction Festival. Follow #grubmurder and watch it all unfold. 9 am EST is when the mayhem begins. Exquisite corpse, indeed…
I’m humbled and thrilled to announced that UNDERSTORIES has been chosen as the winner of the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Fiction. Congratulations again to all of the other nominees, and to the winners in other categories, many of whom I’m fortunate to have met: Andy Merton in Poetry, Terry Farish in the Young Adult category, Rebecca Rule for Children’s Literature, and Mary Johnson in Nonfiction. The awards were presented at New Hampshire Writers’ Day on March 22nd on the campus of Southern New Hampshire University. I can’t thank the Writers’ Project enough for all of their support over the years! http://www.nhwritersproject.org/
I’m not sure whether to call this a review or a grand tour; either way, it’s surely one of the most astoundingly in-depth explorations of UNDERSTORIES to date. And it’s also one of those reviews from which I really learned stuff–from the fact that Gauguin painted winter scenes (like the above) to less tangible things about my own stories. Thanks to Karen Carlson for taking it apart and putting it back together so elegantly and eloquently at her blog, A Just Recompense.
In one of those moments in which one is fully willing to question whether one’s faculties are deceiving one in some callous, sadistic way, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite writers and–why stop there–personal heroes, Norman Rush. I’ve learned so much from his work that I couldn’t possibly break it down, though I will say that if I believe literature should aim far, wide, and thick, should seek to tackle the whole planet, human and non-, sun and earth, the borders carved by water and those made and unmade by mind, desire, money, etcetera, it’s largely due to him. And I do believe it. And I got to talk with him. And it was published at the Tin House blog. https://www.tinhouse.com/blog/30521/subtle-bodies-an-interview-with-norman-rush.html
I just learned that my story “The Conversations,” published originally in The Collagist, was selected as a Special Mention in the 2014 Pushcart Prize Anthology. It’s a crazy humbling place to be and from it I am shouting thanks to Matt Bell for publishing it and nominating it and imbuing it with whatever globules of sanguinity and mojo-magic it took to land it there.
To mark the release of The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde, edited by Lily Hoang and Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Nighboat Books, 2015), I answered some of Lily’s questions about innovative writing practices and the like, and the folks at The Volta were kind enough to publish it along with a bunch of others from the book itself. It features an incredible lineup of writers, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to throw my iron into the furnace of the possible.
