Listening

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I’ve been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it’s just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one [...]

Support the Small Stuff: Juno

Brook Busey-Hunt went from working in a cubicle to stripping a la stage name Diablo Cody to blogging on The Pussy Ranch to writing a memoir called Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper all by the age of 28. It isn’t a traditional path for a screenwriter, but it’s the [...]

writing beyond the MFA

Before delving into the real topic of my post, I wanted to take a moment to join in the recent spate of holiday-gift-madness posts with some suggestions of my own. We are artists after all, aren’t we, writers? Why not make something for those you love? We owe it to ourselves and our careers to [...]

Breaking the Sequence

Has this ever happened to you: You come across a passage or line in a book and think it brilliant, and are thrilled that you’re the first one to discover it, only to find that people have been talking and writing about that exact thing for years? Much later than I should have, I read [...]

The First Page

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I’m reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I’d do a sequel. Here’s some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can tell from [...]

Lonely?

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he’s told he’s the only one who can’t go to the after-party. (That’s right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) Well, [...]

Blogging through the Culinary Underbelly

This year, for the second time in my writing life, I thought about participating in Nanowrimo. When I did Nano before, in 2003, I wrote an awful 50,000 word genre novel. I didn’t pretend it was serious work, but I was proud of the accomplishment. There’s something intimidating about a novel–all that time, and all [...]

Flannery O’Connor and Heroes

So this is my first blog attempt and I’m assuming it’s going to suck, but stick with me. Good intro, right? Now I’ll talk about what kind of food got stuck in my teeth this morning (cinnamon apple sauce) and my favorite kind of toilet paper (whatever that commercial is with those red bears!)…. I [...]

Robert Jordan Dies, Leaving Fans on the Edge

James Oliver Rigner Jr who wrote under the pen name Robert Jordan died yesterday of a rare blood disorder at 58. I discovered him through the Wheel of Time series in high school during my medieval fantasy phase, which I have still not outgrown. The series, originally meant to be a trilogy surrounding the lives [...]

One Year Later: Wendy Taylor Carlisle

We’re happy to present the first results from our One Year Later survey. We’ve been asking writers whose work appeared in Fringe a year ago or more to revisit that work and respond to some questions. Fittingly, our first writer’s work appeared in our first issue, back in February 2006. Here she is: Wendy Taylor [...]