Short story
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A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #7 – The Keyboard
Every kid in school was afraid of the music teacher. The grownups didn’t understand this. Miss Steiner had been teaching forever – she had taught the grandparents of some of my classmates – and when she had been young she had apparently been kind and patient and not yet disillusioned. To us, though, she was impossibly old. And worse than Continue reading
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Killer Stories
Yesterday we talked about George Carlin and training your brain to be your creative partner. Which got me to thinking about the new novella I’m working on, which starts out bleak and just gets darker and darker. It felt good to write it – not unlike the purgation of negativity I recently attempted on this Continue reading
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The Writer’s Mind: Sharing the Creative Experience
I’ve been following the many discussions recently of why we like long novels. And while those are interesting and fun, I think they’ve missed something important about the length of the creative work and its impact on the reader. My moment of truth was handed to me by that fabulous liar, Edgar Allan Poe. I’ll Continue reading
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Fighting Discouragement: You Are New!
In an interview with Tinhouse’s J.C. Hallman, Walter Kirn refers to a common anxiety among writers: J.C. Hallman: Do creative writers have an obligation to act as critics, to offer up alternatives to traditional critical methodologies and assumptions? Walter Kirn: Creative writers have no obligation do anything, including their own creative work. That’s what makes Continue reading
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Parks v. Sacks: Can A Novelist Make Magic?
Tim Parks is a novelist and critic. (The distinction is important.) Recently he wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books blog about the current state of novels, and what it means for today’s novelist. Parks’s essay, worth reading in its entirety, starts out slowly. Parks apparently feels compelled to describe (only to Continue reading
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Self-Publishing: On the Dignity of Small Audiences, Part II
Previously we wrote about the small readership Alice Munro had for the first fifteen years of her publishing career. Next up: William Carlos Williams (of “The Red Wheelbarrow” fame) whose 1935 collection of poems An Early Martyr sold just eight copies its first year. Recall my modest goal for my novella (available now!): just ten copies Continue reading
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Great Novella Tournament of Champions: Interim Update
Readers, rest assured! I’m busy working on the next installment of The Great Novella Tournament of Champions. A sneak preview: two more heavyweights, a German vs. a Russian. You. Will. Not. Be. Disappointed. And after that: Will the brilliant protege knock off the Old Master? We shall see. In my Alice Munro Nobel afterglow (evidenced Continue reading
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Self-Publishing: On the Respectability of Small Audiences
I was still feeling the afterglow of the Alice Munro announcement, so I headed over to Munro’s Paris Review interview. One of the things I was struck by was her description of the first fifteen years or so of her career: MUNRO I was about thirty-six [when my first book came out]. I’d been writing Continue reading
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Congratulations, Alice Munro!
Munro is a very deserving author indeed, who has not only given great insight and pleasure to her readers, but has been a model and inspiration for so many authors, perhaps especially those of shorter-form fiction. Like Borges, she has shown that rich fictional worlds can be created in the span of a few pages. Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 