I've posted the PDF version of my essay from Missouri Review earlier this year, "Put on the Petty." The link is on the left hand side of the blog under the recent publications list.

those damn internets

An article from the L.A. Times about the destructive influence of the internet on fiction writing. So true. Most pernicious is the way it disguises itself as an amazing research tool. How else could I have found, in less than fifteen minutes, the perfect one and a half story Queen Anne style home, built in Brooklyn in 1901, for a scene in Sandusky, Ohio set in 1934?

Yet I also googled a dozen other topics, answered FB notes, checked scores, and read the opinions of most columnists in North America on the financial crisis.

Not good.

Kenyon Review Writers Workshop

I've been selected as a fellow for the 2009 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, which runs from June 20 to June 27. The workshop is an intensive, seven day writing "boot camp" that focuses on participants generating new work each day and sharing it with the group. Should be a blast and the campus looks amazing.

her majesty's a pretty nice girl

I have one scene left to write in this manuscript. It's weird writing this close to the end because I'm well past what might count as a "climax," and the emotional resonance of the story (he hopes) is already installed and running, and all this is to say that if I've fucked it up there's nothing to be done about it in this final, relatively quiet scene. I can't save myself now.

I always enjoy reading final pages (as opposed to "endings" in terms of the final movement) because the language seems amplified and elevated, but the truth is that when that's literally the case it's probably bad. Rather the language should feel astonishingly rich because of everything that's come before.