Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
-
Love Letters and the Long Con
This is a story is about a con that unfolded very slowly over two decades. When the con was finally exposed, some of the victims defended the people who had been fooling them. They preferred to believe the lie. NPR’s…
-
Oh, Canada
“I love that Justin Trudeau has a literature degree,” says Heather O’Neill. “We need a literary imagination to run the country.” In a conversation with Lit Hub, Montreal-based writer Heather O’Neill, author of a new short story collection titled Daydreams of…
-
Literary Fashion
“We’re so lonely in our processes,” July laughs of the plight of so many creative types, “that it’s just fun—like, ‘Wow, we get to email with each other!’ when usually for both of us it’s a very solitary process from…
-
Quoting Cheryl Strayed
And now I look back and think I’m so glad that I was brave enough to break my own heart—and I wish that I had been braver sooner because maybe I would have broken his a little less. Over at…
-
Visceral Vignettes
I sort of just follow the impulse to go there and to sit with an uncomfortable emotion or an uncomfortable physical thing. In conversation with radio host David Naimon, writer Amelia Gray talks about her new short story collection, Gutshot;…
-
The Skeleton of a Story
Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, author Janice Gary talks about how to structure a nonfiction story: Fiction writers start with nothing and create a world. Memoirists start with an entire universe that already exists. We are more like sculptors than…
-
Paperback Writer
The goal of the paperback is therefore to reposition a book, capture a wider audience, or target a new market. We give books a second chance. In an essay at Lit Hub, Linda Huang, a graphic designer at Vintage & Anchor…
-
Writing about Humans
I don’t trust any writer who takes himself seriously. It’s all kind of ridiculous. Our job is to write about humans, and humans are funny. Over at BOMB Magazine, J.T. Price talks with Rebecca Makkai about her first collection of short stories,…
-
Shakespeare Reprised
When a piece of art inspires you, it literally in-spires, breaths into you. It makes us want to create new art. Or, maybe it’s a more basic instinct. From the beginning of our lives, when we hear a good story,…
-
Water and Wanting
Writing about a water shortage is handy for a writer like me who loves, when reading, to be swept away in plot but whose characters seem to prefer to sit in one place. Thirst gives the characters something to want,…
-
Music in a Flash
Very cool, artsy things are happening in Austin. Together with the literary journal NANO Fiction, Austin-based composer Russell Podgorsek and collaborators have created music to accompany the journal’s fall issue.
-
Writing in Denmark
If a writer isn’t familiar with the literature of her own country as it unfolds in her own time, she misses out on dialogue, on contact with the path. She must dare to measure herself against the best! In an…