Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
I wanted to re-name a character in a story, so off I went to the Social Security database for some era-appropriate information (commercial baby-naming sites are prettier if you want to graph your baby’s name, and more useful for selecting by ethnic or cultural background, but for snapshots of the U.S. back in time, I like SSA.gov). My character was born in the mid 1970s, but of course I had to check out last year first:
In which James Wood attacks convention and defends the conventional, and Alice Munro offers a way out
Beginning creative writing students are always told to show don’t tell (because we all remember show and tell!). If they veer into things like “he was tall” or “the wine was good,” or, shudder to think, “she was sad,” they’re told, show me this in a scene, or, use a gesture to convey this—“he bends to go through the doorway”; “the wine leaves a licorice taste on her tongue”; “she closed her notebook and held it there a minute, closed.” Better, but after a while don’t we know what to expect? Somewhere, aren’t some neurons going to sleep?
Read on →