When I was in fourth grade, there was a fat girl in my class. She wore glasses that slid down her nose and hair that hung lank and she had breasts (breasts!) when the rest of the girls in the class wore undershirts with one pink flower embroidered in the middle (bought two for a […]
Guest Blogger Cinthia Ritchie | Dazzled by the Past Read More »
It is the day after the Women’s March and I am asking the question: Am I a well-balanced reader when it comes to the multiplicity of writers, especially that of women writers and characters? I sit down in my office this morning to take stock of all the books on my shelves. I want to
Guest Blogger Bryan Allen Fierro | Taking Stock Read More »
The one question I get more than any other regarding my new fiction collection, Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul, is Did all those stories actually happen? I usually respond with something about truth being no excuse for fiction, or some other defensive-ism that confirms a satisfying enough response for the reader/interrogator. I explain that
Guest Blogger Bryan Allen Fierro | Let Me Pin You Down Read More »
Fierro presents “Places and Images: Writing Home”, his 49 Writers Reading & Craft Talk Series presentation. Today in the mail I received my Alaska paramedic certification. It basically states that for the next two years, in the state of Alaska, I am allowed and deemed capable to perform very specific outlined duties under the guidance
Guest Blogger Bryan Allen Fierro | Palpate Read More »
My wife, a school counselor, came home from work this week with an anecdote about an event called The Battle of the Books, an oddly militaristic moniker for a reading activity, but an undertaking that has the students fired up about literature. She said one of the boys on her school’s team, a fourteen-year-old freshman,
Guest Blogger Rich Chiappone | Listen to this Sentence! Read More »
If I were asked to choose (hypothetically) one book to take with me into solitary exile on an island, I’d ask if I could bring my fishing tackle instead. But if that wasn’t allowed, I would choose the heaviest anthology of short stories I could find. Maybe The Story and its Writer edited by Ann
Guest Blogger Rich Chiappone | On Becoming a Short Story Junkie Read More »
A number of years ago in a fiction writing workshop, a student turned in the early chapters of a novel she’d been working on for some time. The writing was so good that when the class ended I asked her if I could see more of it. After reading it, I ventured an opinion that
Guest Blogger Rich Chiappone | Who’s Afraid of Revising Work? Read More »
That title is borrowed from an essay by venerable writer and publisher Nick Lyons that appeared in the New York Times Book Review some years ago. Lyons himself borrowed the title from a 1935 animated short film starring Betty Boop. In the cartoon, Betty wails those words to a villain trying to seduce her. But
Guest Blogger Rich Chiappone | No! No! A Thousand Times, No! Read More »
For the last few years, I’ve been conflicted about something integral to fiction: writing characters with different backgrounds and experiences from me. I am white, and though I now live in Alaska, my family has deep roots in the south. I have benefited in pretty major and obvious ways from white privilege. I don’t want
Mary Catharine Martin | On Writing Characters Who Don’t Look Like You Read More »
A delighted reader from the Loewen household “I leaf through now one book, now another, without order, and without plan, by disconnected fragments,” wrote Michel de Montaigne, father of the essay, claiming, “If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention.” Last week I made a similar admission, wondering
Guest Blogger Sara Loewen | Six Reading Tips for Writers Read More »
