Naming the World, Bret Anthony Johnston, editor Penguin Random House, 2007 Naming the World is a craft class in a book. Edited by the writer Bret Anthony Johnston, the book is broken into typical craft chapters: Plot and Narration, Dialogue…
Or, How Good Writing is Just Like Good Conversation By Natalie Serber Much to my delight, The New York Times Magazine recently published a feature on “The Art of the Dinner Party.” Along with recipes (try this one for my…
I have heard more than one writer say that they have created mixtapes while they were working on a story or novel and listening to that music, and that music alone, while they were writing was hugely helpful. If you’re…
Holly Willis: You are both a filmmaker and a fiction writer: how do those two very different vocations influence each other and in turn impact your work? Mary Kuryla: I started as an English major in college — though I…
Most of the time, our narrators are speaking directly to our readers. We may not do so as directly as Charlotte Bronte (“Reader, I married him.”) but it is implied, no matter the voice that we’re using. Second person can…
The tournament is the highlight of our year at the Simmler School, figuratively and literally: Abe Larson, math teacher and advisor to the tech club, uses acid-bright bulbs in the auditorium spotlights. He likes to make the contestants sweat. Abe…
On Ending Polyphonic Novels by Rachel King I write multivoiced fiction, a technique also known as writing polyphonically, from the musical technique polyphony, where two or more melodies are played at once. However, in writing, unlike in music, different voices…
Here’s a quick look at some of the great books out over the past two weeks. Happy pub day to all! Lizzy Attree, editor, THE GODDESS OF MTWARA AND OTHER STORIES The Caine Prize For African Writing 2017 Interlink…
On Crafting Suspense: Keep the Bodies Hidden By Dustin Heron Suspense is an important element of fiction—and not just for stories where things go bump in the night. Suspense is “the feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what might…
Be God. Step way back for a second. Imagine this folded earth as bed sheets dropped in heaps onto the floor. Now stick a steep winter light off to the east. Call this a landscape. Tall shadows form across the…
I’m in the middle of revamping (resuscitating?) a book of fiction. This book and its making have unfolded by way of the usual adjectives: messy and bewildering, to name a few. This book has been, most recently, a novel. But I never really called it that with much confidence (novel=air-quotes). In a prior failed form, it mirrored the exact time shifts in Per Peterson’s Out Stealing Horses. Currently, it’s what most resembles a book of vignettes, individually titled, linked by tone and place and speaker, but not necessarily by plot or linear thread. Through all this drudgery, one thing has remained a through-line, and it’s the piece here, “Be God.” It’s the first story in the book, and it establishes, I hope, a deep engagement with place and a mood of shiftiness and permeability. It feels, finally and importantly, like I wrote it. And now the rest of the book wants to feel that way, too. “Be God” is a purposeful echo of Ken Kesey’s opening imperative in Sometimes a Great Notion: “Look…” Look at this landscape until it becomes a character. I use the imperative as a way to hold up the self before a set of memories and histories, and to the perception and misperception of both. I have a lot of gods. Italo Calvino keeps finding his way to my nightstand, lurking about with Tove Jansson and Antonio Di Benedetto and Richard Brautigan. I listen to them listening to the world. “Be God” is some part of me listening to the place where I grew up, and answering back to those murky waters.
MICHAEL MCGRIFF’s recent books include the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object, 2014), which is co-authored with J.M. Tyree, and the poetry collections Early Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and Black Postcards (Willow Springs Books, 2017). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Narrative, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He serves on the creative writing faculty at the University of Idaho.
