Stone Age Flutes
Human beings seem to be inveterate makers of pattern, whether musical, visual, or verbal. The people who hollowed out the bird bones and cut holes at regular intervals were also making stunning pictures on the walls of caves and, I have no doubt, singing songs to their children and telling each other stories. All of [...]
Weather Report
Gardening: We’ve been having alternating days of sun and rain, which has been good for the stuff growing in the yard — both the stuff we want growing there and the stuff we don’t — but I’ve been finding the cool rainy weather a little depressing as I begin to recover from the Upper Respiratory [...]
Realism (VN Diary No. 35)
I’m not much of a Roger Cohen fan — he strikes me as an ideological opportunist, a flag blowing first one way then the other — but the dateline of this column attracted my attention, of course. The Quiet American is the best single piece of fiction about Vietnam you are likely to read (Tim [...]
Liberation Lit
Following a link from A Practical Policy, I read this story, “Segundo’s Revenge,” by Joe Emersberger, a writer unknown to me. I had read some other things at Liberation Lit, but nothing that carried out the LL mission to combine the political and the artistic quite so deftly. It’s a terrific story, though I wish [...]
More Books on Writing Fiction
A few more books for the beginning fiction writer — or for the poet long in the tooth who decides to give fiction writing a try — starting with a couple of good anthologies:
The Story Behind the Story – Andrea Barrett & Peter Turchi: This is a good anthology of short stories by many of [...]
Books on Writing Fiction
When I first began writing poetry as a teenager, I could not get enough of books like John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean? I was interested in the technical nuts and bolts of writing and at the time the Ciardi book and a couple of others were the only things available. As my competence [...]
Getting it Right by Breaking the Rules
All the books on how to write fiction tell you not to get hung up editing and polishing before you get to the end of the story. I’ve been working on a story for a month now that I don’t really have an ending for and the last couple of days I have been going [...]
Jean Stafford’s Rocky Mountain Stories
I’ve been reading the stories that fall in the middle of Jean Stafford’s Collected Stories, most of which are set in the Rocky Mountains. When I first began reading Stafford, I saw her as a specialist in the grim, a chronicler of the unloved or insufficiently loved. Those impressions are not untrue, but they fail [...]
Open Questions
In Vietnam, literary disputes are public disputes in a way that seems impossible in American literary culture. They show up in the newspaper. Literary questions remain open in a way that they do not in American public discourse, which largely ignores literary questions. In Vietnam, the stakes are higher. In the US, literary questions are, [...]
New Poem in The Sun
I have a new poem, “Ballad of Crows & God,” in The Sun, a magazine I rediscovered last summer & have been enjoying since subscribing. In many ways it’s an old-fashioned magazine, with its emphasis on autobiography, first person point of view, and direct expression of feeling; all of these characteristics are tempered with a [...]
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