They’re Both and They’re Neither: A Conversation with Robert Lunday
My stepfather would always tell me, “Don’t think, act. Follow orders.” For me, I want to stop to consider the different angles.
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Join NOW!My stepfather would always tell me, “Don’t think, act. Follow orders.” For me, I want to stop to consider the different angles.
...moreA reading list from India Adams, author of FOX WOMAN GET OUT!
...moreSeeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.
...moreWhat can we do to change this?
...moreTo be a mother is to have strength, resilience, and ferocity in the face of oppression. It is also to contain the magic and power of creating a new life, of bringing up children, of making a home and a legacy.
...moreTo some extent, I think I was also exploring how witnessing, absorbing, and listening are related to writing, and questioning whether this is a valuable way of approaching a life. I think it can be.
...moreBut neither of us has said what does matter, or what we want, only what we do not want, and there in his defensive stammering, I can play my final card: You don’t know anything about me.
...moreConsidered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.
...moreThe first thing I learn is that storytelling is a strange art. Listening to stories all my life has not, in any way, prepared me to tell my own.
...moreAs a poet, I’m constantly trying to make connections and see between and among things.
...moreNo one talked about what had happened to her. No one, at least in my hearing, asked her what she needed. What she wanted. Including me.
...moreLet’s just walk through the woods to see it / I whispered, in a flash forgetting the nature of guns
...moreWithin Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
...moreCompassion is a window, and ideally the reader feels that—even if they’re reading a character whom they don’t necessarily like—this person is a rounded character with good qualities, bad qualities, and in-between qualities.
...moreAnyhow, alas, thanks to my boundless, bottomless, boundaryless ignorance: goddamn and holy shit! Waxing and waning! Have you heard?!?!
...moreMemoir is less common territory for Darrieussecq, but with insomnia, she has found a real-world subject appropriate for her ongoing concerns about making sense of the absurd.
...moreI’ve always wanted to write plot-driven novels that borrow from a lot of different traditions and institutions. That’s something I like most to read, and whenever I write something, I try to write something that I enjoy reading too.
...moreAuthor Myriam Gurba on some of the books that fueled and shaped her new collection.
...moreI spilled blood. Which is to say I wrote. Not much. Just, you know, the text you are reading. Right now.”
...moreI’m sure you’ve seen your own versions of these stories. These truths, these stories, are everywhere. Quiet, but waiting.
...moreAll three poets contemplate the female body and the voice both literally and metaphorically, appealing to outside powers as they ponder how much a person can bear.
...moreAs fiction writers, we’re always saying that what we write is not “real,” but as soon as we write it, it becomes a part of the world.
...moreThere is impressive control in the deployment of these mind spirals, with Morrison integrating link after link into a narrative that grows more complex but keeps all its many balls in the air, the kind of juggler who satisfies and surprises with what he is able to toss into the mix.
...moreWhen you’re writing about family, there’s what’s really relevant and has meaning to you. And then there’s what has meaning to the audience.
...moreBy practicing grief, much like one might develop a creative or meditation practice, I found wonder everywhere and in everything.
...moreOracle for the End of the World Furrows in a Fallow Field *** Author photo courtesy of the author
...more. . . the process of writing really was a devotion. It gave me a reason to keep going. And because I’m interested in formal problems, it was the crafting of sentences, finding rhythms, shaping my material that helped me to get hold of it.
...moreI read in the kitchen after dinner, after the dishes were washed and put away and everyone crowded into the living room to watch the Twilight Zone or Bonanza. There was a light over the table, and I’d dissolve into the stories.
...more“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again,” recalls Officer Munson. And on this fateful night, he wants Carney to play again, this time with deadly stakes.
...moreWhile I do see there is importance in recognizing identity, I also want there to be a broader field to go beyond the identity itself, the identities that were forced upon us, in addition to what we continue to reinforce and agree upon as identity.
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