2019

AVP 11: Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean is best known for her books The Orchid Thief, Saturday Night, Rin Tin Tin, and most recently, The Library Book, published in October, 2018. Now out in paperback, it’s a story she was compelled to tell about the largest library fire in US history and how it renewed a lifelong love and appreciation

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Jamey Bradbury | No Accounting for Taste: Finding Form in What You Like

What we like can do so much for our writing, including challenging us to come at our fiction in novel ways. So don’t segregate your likes into the “for fun” column and forget about them when you get down to work. Investigate your likes. Interrogate them. Ask yourself: Why do you like what you like—and how can it help you become a better writer?

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Andromeda Romano-Lax | Page One Rewrite, Part One

In August 2017, I had one of the strangest experiences of my writing life. I opened a file in a folder associated with a novel I’d given up on five years earlier, read a few unfamiliar paragraphs, What’s this?, and then a few pages more, I know I wrote it; I just don’t remember writing it. I kept going all the way to the end of the chapter, and found myself intrigued, What the heck is going to happen next?

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AVP 10: Annie Boochever

Author Annie Boochever on Fighter in Velvet Gloves: Alaska Civil Rights Hero Elizabeth Peratrovich. Boochever collaborated with this story of Elizabeth Peratrovich’s life for young readers with her son, Roy Peratrovich Jr. This highly recommended work arrives at a time when issues of race and racism are clearly unsettled.

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Andromeda Romano-Lax | “Portable Process” and “Scatterfocus”: How to write when you’re not writing

If you don’t have enough time to write—who does?—read this. Do you have a “portable process?” That’s what prolific author Julianna Baggott — twenty books published under three names — calls it. Her advice resonates with something I’ve done on and off for years but underutilized until I made the process more deliberate. “Portable process” doesn’t mean

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AVP 09: Pam Houston

When not spending time in endangered and beautiful places or teaching writing, Pam Houston lives with horses, goats and dogs in her cherished home of almost 30 years, an off the grid ranch in the high country of Colorado. In this episode, Pam tells host and producer Katie Bausler that it is metaphors that get her through

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