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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....

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A 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....

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Rated 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...

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The 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...

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Why 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...

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Wherefore 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...

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The 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?”...

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Rules, 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...

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Teaching 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...

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Why 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...

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The 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...

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iPhone, 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...

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Q & 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....

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Q 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...

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Q 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...

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Q 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...

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Q & 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;...

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Q & 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...

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Q & 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...

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Q & 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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