A recent collaboration I was commissioned by Mark DeCarteret to do for his as-yet-unpublished novel, Off-Season. This extraordinary novel, set in the gaudy squalor of Seatown, can be found excerpted at Word Riot.  Where are the brave publishers out there willing to take on literature that does more than attempt a “deceptive simplicity?”   Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio...

My grandfather is a published writer of mystery novels, and he once gave me a bit of advice that is something special to me: when a story has a twist ending, the twist has to make everything make more sense, rather than less. We call him Bampa in our family because of a mispronunciation of his name by my oldest sibling. Bampa taught me something else, for better or worse. He taught me that the life of a writer is best lived so as to make...

For a semester I took a class from a man who seemed to dislike me on sight, the writer Colson Whitehead. I was told he had  MacArthur genius grant and so I had high expectations going in.  Such status is almost on the level of Nobel prize and I came in thinking highly of man knowing only his writing. The first session we had with him, he started off by saying he would tell us something about himself, and then it would go the next person,...

When living in New York City, I met many writers. Some came into my MFA program, some I already knew, and some I just happened to meet. Advice of theirs sticks to me, all of it, but there are certain bits that haunt me. Two of these persistent thoughts came when I did not expect them. Through friends and friends of friends, I ended up going out to breakfast with a screenwriter. He looked young, was no more than thirty, but seemed to be...

Sometimes a writer comes to a crossroads that causes her to pose a question she never really asked before. Until that moment the answer was assumed, implied in the act of writing. Thus, the asking must indicate an interruption, however brief. Pause gives space to deem it—a thought bubble tossing on an opalescent sea. Writing is an act and a meditation—the friction that not only the product of writing differs, but both means and agent,...

It’s after a couple sets of tennis. My friend Peter says he believes that Big Foot exists, something about how Jane Goodall thought so too. We’re sitting down on a bench, and I’m not ready for this. He hates the middle class. That’s his big one. That and physics. How everything is motion and anyone who says otherwise is full of crap. Anyway, the Big Foot thing caught me a little. Something keeps me from asking if he’s...

I’m writing jokes these days, as in: How many Lutherans does it take to change a lightbulb? Lutherans don’t change lightbulbs; they reform them. I started writing them after we read Mimi Schwartz’s essay “Elegy for an Optimist” in my Intro. to Creative Writing Class. It’s an illuminating downer–about Schwartz’s father-in-law who suffered too much and too long due to those dogged physicians who...

I received Hannah Tinti’s gem of a novel, The Good Thief, in the mail as a free gift from the literary journal One Story, along with an invitation to what sounded like a really awesome AWP Conference event. (If you aren’t a One Story subscriber, do it. They’re great, and every three weeks you’ll get a single excellent story in chapbook form sent to you in the mail.) Having finished Tinti’s novel several days...

It starts at the local Walgreens. I am buying toothpaste and some bottled water to drink on my walk home. Waiting in line, I see these mini-pens, the kind that would fit perfectly in a shirt pocket with a small notepad, a little writerly touch to make me feel better about things. I put it on the counter with the water and toothpaste. “Oops, someone left a pen,” the cashier says. “Oh no,” I say. “I intend to make that mine.” ...

I should write short stories. I keep at this novel ambition while I have yet to produce anything other than pieces of one that please me.  Walk to run to fly. That kind of thing. I haven’t written one in some time. When I did, it was from the perspective of a young black man. I am not joking. It all started when a teacher at grad school, the estimable Colum McCann, gave me one of his savory, lilting maxims. He said something like,...