By Alyson Mosquera Dutemple • In the very first line of his story “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” Edward P. Jones signals to readers to expect repetition and recurrence throughout the rest of the piece: “The first time…
By Mike Goodwin • In my brief career teaching fiction workshops, the bar story has appeared too often as a genre vying for literariness. Students have written about debauchery at house parties, barns, parks, cemeteries, and, of course, bars.…
By Mike Goodwin • I once earned a well-deserved reaming for my writing an awful story involving who I viewed as lower-class patrons inhabiting a dive bar. The narrative too often emphasized these characters giving each other the business…
“We want you to know how we lived. That we lived. That we were girls before we were game. That we were alive.” Essay by Melissa Benton Barker • Gayle Brandeis’s recent novel-in-verse, Many Restless Concerns (a testimony):…
Holly Root: Hi Barbara! So, you wrote a book. Congratulations! My memory, supported by reviewing our text threads and Gchats from the time this was going on, is that writing a book is, to use some official industry jargon,…
By Gerry Stanek • James Baldwin finds a unique way to interiority in “Sonny’s Blues,” which was first published in 1957. I say unique, because I’m not sure there’s another story like this; a character’s thoughts and perceptions are…
By Peter Selgin • The older I get, the less interested I am as both reader and writer in things are that—or that feel—“made up.” Put in positive terms, the more attracted I am to stories and novels that…
Essay by J. A. Tyler • Sure, 2019 gave us Greta Gerwig’s powerful Little Women and the heroine Rey dominating galactic folks in the final chapter of the Star Wars saga, but we’ve yet to see pay equalized between…
By Leena Soman Navani • Alice Mattison has published a poetry collection, seven novels, four short story collections, and a book about writing fiction. She began her writing career more than five decades ago. Professionally, perhaps the only thing…
By Kent Kosack • Prose shines, comes into its own as a medium, when writers make the internal conflicts we all suffer through, each and every second, external. I don’t mean simply dramatization in the form of scenes. I…
