The Rumpus Interview with Erik Kennedy
Poet Erik Kennedy discusses literary community and his formative years as a young writer in New Jersey, and shares two new prose poems. ...more
Posts Tagged: John McPhee
Structure as Lightning Rod
Writing for The Millions, M.C. Mah turns over all the cards in the deck on structure in storytelling. He gathers words of wisdom—and many metaphors—from luminaries like John McPhee, Borges, Vonnegut, and George Saunders, and then links the contemporary “horoscopic style” of structuring to an “anxiety about a better way to tell a story…” possibly “synonymous with aiming for the cheap seats of genre.”
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“Throw Something Down Hard Enough, You Discover Its Laws”
Maybe my faith that the profoundest feeling we're offered by art that really hits us deep in is a setting free, a series of screens or horizons obliterated somehow lovingly. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Chaitali Sen
Swati Khurana talks to the author of The Pathless Sky, a love story centered around place, the state’s authority, statelessness, and geology. ...more
Making the Cut
In writing, what is not said can be just as important as what is. Over at the New Yorker, John McPhee discusses the art of choosing what to include and what to omit from a piece:
...moreWriting is selection.
A Sincere Mustache
...moreIn some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of his office and down the hall to mine, as I had hoped it would.
The Fossils of Storytelling
For the New Yorker, John McPhee writes about our dwindling frames of references:
...moreFrames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a structure you can’t see.