Judgment Day: The Literary Contest
This week's Ploughshares post, 2.21.11: Last winter I was asked to judge two short-story contests, one for my graduate writing program and the other for a local chapter of a national arts organization....
View ArticleA Reader's Crush
This week's Ploughshares post, 2.28.11: Deborah Eisenberg. Martin Amis. Steve Almond. Alice Munro. Penelope Fitzgerald. Jim Harrison. Anne Carson. W.G. Sebald. Michael Ondaatje. John Updike....
View ArticleRated R for Racy
This week's Ploughshares' post, 3.7.11: In the mid-90s, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University and nervously facing my first class of undergraduate creative writing students, I understood...
View ArticleThe Vampire in the Ivory Tower: Genre Fiction
This week's Ploughshares post, 3.14.11: A year or so ago, a friend who teaches college English courses made a thought-provoking comment about the reality gap between MFA programs and the publishing...
View ArticleWhy Is It Taking So Friggin' Long?
This week's Ploughshares post, 3.21.11: It’s hard to dispute the omnipresent signs that we are a nation of strivers and slackers who have been told that we deserve immediate results, and if at all...
View ArticleWherefore and Why the MFA?
This week's Ploughshares' post, 3.28.11: I realize there is no shortage of essays justifying or vilifying the creative writing MFA degree, which some consider the educational equivalent of fool’s gold...
View ArticleThe Fine Art of Saying No
This week's Ploughshares post, 4.4.11: Whether I’m a spectator at a reading or taking part in one, two questions that I often hear during the Q & A session are “When do you get your writing done?”...
View ArticleRules, Shmules
My final post for Ploughshares, 4.11.11: Because several of my preceding posts have been very earnest, and also, possibly, a little depressing, I thought that it might be nice to end my tenure as a...
View ArticleTeaching in the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program
In case you’re not familiar with the term low-residency as it pertains to graduate creative writing programs, I’ll define it here: students who enroll in a low-residency MFA program, such as the...
View ArticleWhy a Novel About Hollywood?
My second book, Little Known Facts, is a novel about a family in Hollywood with a successful actor at its center. My primary interests as I wrote the book were the complex relationships between parent...
View ArticleThe Next Big Thing Questionnaire
At the end of this post, I've tagged a few other writers, Melissa Fraterrigo, Jessica Treadway, Tyler Mills, and Leigh Stein, who have also recently completed this questionnaire about new books or...
View ArticleiPhone, We Have a Problem
Much is made today of our inability to communicate with each other: men with women, Democrats with Republicans, city people with country people – despite the fact that there are a multitude of...
View ArticleQ & A with Laura Pritchett, author of the new novel Stars Go Blue
Laura Pritchett lives in Colorado and writes very fine fiction and nonfiction. I met her when we were both on the faculty for the Pacific University low-residency MFA program in Forest Grove, Oregon....
View ArticleQ and A with Megan Stielstra - Author of the essay collection Once I Was Cool
Tell us about your book. It’s a collection of personal essays about what comes after the coming-of-age. I was thinking about adulthood. When I was a kid, what did I think it would be like? I remember...
View ArticleQ and A with TaraShea Nesbit, author of the novel The Wives of Los Alamos
The Wives of Los Alamos is a lyrical, extraordinarily accomplished first novel that I zipped through in just a couple of days. From the book jacket: They arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or...
View ArticleQ and A with Eric Charles May, author of the new novel Bedrock Faith
Bedrock Faith is about a guy who’s terrorizing his neighbors with the Word of God. After fourteen years in prison, Gerald “Stew Pot” Reeves, age thirty-one, returns home to live with his widowed mom...
View ArticleQ & A with Phong Nguyen about his new story collection, Pages from the...
Tell us a little about your book: At critical moments in world history, every political, spiritual, and cultural leader foresaw a different destiny. Columbus had planned a Western sea route to Asia;...
View ArticleQ & A with Katey Schultz, author of Flashes of War, a short story collection
1. Tell us a little about your book. Sure, thanks for asking! Despite the title and the award, the first thing most of my fans tell me is they love my book because it isn’t about war—or at least, not...
View ArticleQ & A with Angela Pneuman, Author of the new novel Lay It On My Heart
Tell us about your new novel. Family past and present loom large in tiny East Winder, a strict evangelical community in rural Kentucky. And no family looms larger than that of thirteen-year-old...
View ArticleQ & A with Kevin Fenton, author of the new memoir Leaving Rollingstone
1. Tell us a little about your new book. On the one hand, it's a pretty straightforward story: I was born into a loving family on a working farm in a tight-knit village where life revolved around the...
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