In a Face­book mes­sage this week, a friend asked, “Do you buy that there are only two types of fic­tion sto­ries: a stranger comes to town and a hero goes on a jour­ney?” I wrote back, “Yes and no. But it will take me longer to explain.” This is my expla­na­tion. First of all, any […]

0 comments

I am not an elec­tronic artist. I can’t con­struct a poem that both com­ments on and is pre­sented through the tyranny of the com­puter screen, as Justin Katko does with “Up Against the Screen Mother Fuck­ers,” nor can I build a Google Map to tell the story of gen­tri­fac­tion, as J.R. Car­pen­ter does with “In […]

0 comments

Genre is, to my mind, the delin­eation of a bound­ary between and around lit­er­ary works deter­mined by the intellect’s instinct for per­ceiv­ing integri­tas and con­so­nan­tia, which I would do well to let James Joyce explain: — In order to see that bas­ket, said Stephen, your mind first of all sep­a­rates the bas­ket from the rest […]

0 comments

In a cou­ple of weeks, Lit­er­a­ture & Latte will release a major upgrade to Scrivener, a market-upending, writ­ing appli­ca­tion they first launched back in 2005/2006. The soft­ware has received incre­men­tal improve­ments through­out the inter­ven­ing years (includ­ing one major release at ver­sion 1.5), but this is the first upgrade the com­pany feels com­fort­able charg­ing its existing […]

0 comments

A piece of fic­tion writing—a short story, for example—has two dis­tinct ele­ments to it. The first we can call syn­chronic, which means exist­ing at one and the same time; the sec­ond is diachronic, which means exist­ing through time. <p>Or to put it another way, a piece of fic­tion writ­ing has both <em>structure</em> and <em>flow.</em></p> <p>Fiction […]

0 comments

If it is true that “only a fool believes what he reads in the news­pa­pers,” then the task of the cre­ative non­fic­tion writer is to accom­plish the same goal as news­pa­pers — i.e., to com­mu­ni­cate a par­tial, yet objec­tive truth — but to do so with a rich­ness that only a fool could deny.

0 comments

Jason looks down and finds that it is indeed his wife beneath him, but that she is rot­ting. Her eyes are open but glazed over, star­ing up at him, with­out mean­ing, but bulging as though in ter­ror of him. The flesh on her face is yel­low­ish and drawn back toward her ears. Her mouth is […]

0 comments