I love The Writer’s Chapbook. Compiled by the late, great George Plimpton from the Paris Review’s Writers at Work series, this volume is a collection of wisdom from 20th Century writers about anything and everything literary, from first efforts to children’s books, from sex to writers’ colonies (which often go hand-in-hand). The section on technique…
I started writing “Occupational Hazard” eight years ago, out at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. I had a bedroom/studio in an old house, former officer’s quarters, and I found myself sleepy all the time. It was so quiet, there—a break from my Tenderloin apartment in the city—and it was much easier to take…
I return to “Leg,” a short story by Steven Polansky, in large part because I enjoy the way he covers my material—that is to say, the lives of believers in Protestant evangelical communities. This is not to say it isn’t his material, too. We can all write about whatever we want. But I enjoy the…
I first read The Sun Also Rises in college, in a survey course of the American Novel. I don’t know if such survey courses even exist anymore, or if Hemingway is still taught to our undergraduates. But I took this class during springtime in Kentucky, which is long and warm, and I would read the…
This is a story I love because my grandmother might have loved it—though perhaps for some of the wrong reasons. Brodkey’s character (like Brodkey) is a high school boy born into a life of education and privilege but taken down a peg by the death of his father. He and his mother and beautiful older…
I came to Kate Braverman through her story “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” which appears in the collection Squandering the Blue and was chosen for the Best American Short Stories in 1991. In 1991 I was still in college, which is to say a tiny, evangelical college in a tiny, Protestant evangelical town in…
Many writers weigh in on the effect of today’s numerous MFA programs on the quality of contemporary fiction writing. Like others, I am—helpfully—100% ambivalent. The MFA served me well in many ways. After I graduated from college I went right into a full-time job editing sewage treatment reports for the state of Indiana. After a…
Robert Stone’s story, “Helping,” is told (mostly) from the point of view of Elliot. He’s a Vietnam vet and a recovering alcoholic social worker married to Grace, a lawyer who works for child protective services. Clearly these two share an occupational dedication to helping others. They also invest, gamely, in various methods of helping…
Widely read in English department post-colonial courses, Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the life of “the madwoman in the attic” of Jane Eyre and suggests the background of her madness. The book is divided into three parts, narrated by Antoinette Cosway (who becomes Bertha Mason) and Rochester. But the book also brings to life other voices—their…
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