I don’t feel like I’m very good at writing a serious story with super realistic violence and human emotion. I feel like it has to be filtered through some kind of absurd or weird lens. 

Two writers in conversation.

"I’m always looking for ways to pay more attention. I thought maybe I could be a better writer if I knew what private investigators knew, if I could see a clue for what it was. I’m still learning."  

Every writer knows the rule of ‘write what you know,’ but the interesting thing is that you don’t really know what you know until you write it.

I based the Australian on a man I met in a coffee shop when I was 19. We went back to his place and did coke together, and he told me all about himself...

It's work that I want to do, and then sometimes it's just fun, and then sometimes it's a pain in the ass.

I think the dominator model will always exist in each person, just like each person has partnership qualities. After learning more about history, it does seem to me now that humans are in a process, however inconsistent and drawn-out, of recovering from extreme sexism—which reached absurd levels when people started promoting Yahweh ~3500 years ago, culminating maybe with Christianity around the first century—over millennia.

If I could purchase a lifetime subscription to a living author’s work, I’d subscribe to John McNally. His fiction is engaging and funny, his books on craft are illuminating, and his recent memoir—The

Kentucky is chill and for the most part, doesn't try to be something it's not. I feel that way abt myself tbh.

When I was twelve or thirteen my grandmother gave me a book by art historian and occultist Fred Gettings about the tarot. My grandmother really helped foster my imagination about magic.

Most of the time, I am skeptical of the notion that a writer can find his or her voice.  I warn my first-year students against believing the maxim because, to me, it presupposes that every writer

An interview with Anna Noyes

For instance, I had the line “But I was talking about lightning” in my head for the first line of an essay, but I had no idea what that essay was about. So I started to write about lightning and do some Wikipedia-ing, and eventually the idea of looking at trauma and human relationships through the metaphor of lightning started to emerge. From there, I just followed my brain around as the essay started to form.

Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.”  I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity.  I

Toronto-based writer Sennah Yee’s first collection, How Do I Look?, is quick-witted, lucid, observant and constantly rewarding. Though her book is technically classified as poetry, her pieces feel more like vignettes to me, mini-stories and personal anecdotes that seem to be examining their feelings in real time, tackling in the process a wide range of topics such as mythological figures, the movie Mulan, The Sims, sexual awakenings, microaggressions, Grand Theft Auto 5, being Chinese-Canadian and much more.

Introductions are stupid. Mostly they get in the way. Probably you have skipped ahead to read the actual interview. That's what I would have done by now. If you're still here, this is what you need

Roxane Gay took me out to dinner five years ago. It was Roxane, Ashley C. Ford and me. We were in Indianapolis and it was the first time I'd met either of them. I remember thinking wow this is one

Southerners think that West Virginia is the north, and northerners think West Virginia is the south. 

The term “unreliable narrator” was first coined in 1961 by the critic Wayne C. Booth, and since then it has become one of fiction’s most recognizable elements. While initially viewed as something

The book reveals as much about the reader’s psyche, about the self and the readers’ reaction to reading it, as it does about the author— this deeply personal thing, a dream, so full of symbols we imbue with our own shared and cultural meanings.

As far as structure goes, I’ve always been interested in the way fragments of narrative can play off one another. All of my novels have been puzzles—games—that I’ve created for myself. 

I think everyone has heard this a lot but it’s still true — read with curiosity and hunger — reading is as important as writing, more important, probably, when you’re first starting to write.

I don’t have any goals except to make the reader think and feel. What they think and feel is up to them. 

I read the first half of Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017) at a party, while I was sober. Men were playing darts, making tiny dart holes in the rented apartment walls. I watched them throw darts and cheer and try to teach me how to play, and then drunkenly play with the dogs in the house and then went back to my reading.

What I like most about the story is that the grossness makes way for the sadness.