Author Archive
What You Can Learn About Writing from Children’s Books
I’ve spent the last year and a half brushing up on reading that for the last three decades or so I’ve been neglecting. Since my daughter was born, I’ve been diving deep into the literary canon, paging through tens or hundreds (well, some days it feels like hundreds) of
Writing is Like Mixing a Drink
Mixing a drink is seductive in a way writing will never be. The ice sweating in the glass. The chucka, chucka of the metal shaker growing cold in your hands. The invisible melding going on inside that shaker, alcohols blending to become something all together new. The nifty
Riding In Cars With Words
On long car rides with my father, you could count on hearing three questions: What kind of cow is that? What kind of roof is that? Is the moon waxing or waning? My answers were always as follows: a Holstein, a mansard, and waxing? (I never did work out which was which.)
Writing Is Like Baseball
Every March my eyes turn south toward spring training. The sunburned announcers report from director’s chairs on games that don’t count. The players work on their autographs and perfect their sunflower seed spits. Teenagers called up from the lowercase “a” team —hardly more than little leaguers—pitch, bat, and field,
Writing is Like Cooking
As someone who has outlined two novels, and then written two totally different books than the ones I’d so carefully plotted, I can testify that simply writing down the journey of characters from point a to point b is not the same thing as storytelling—just as tossing the ingredients
Writing is Like Walking
Writing is a mysterious task. Unlike changing a tire or tying your shoelaces, there is no prescribed list of steps that must be undertaken to succeed. Which is why I often find myself comparing the act of writing to different daily activities. Writing is like cooking, cleaning, sleeping,
The Immanence of God in the Tropics
The Immanence of God in the Tropics George Rosen Leapfrog Press, September 2012 167 pages $15.95 George Rosen performs a neat, almost anachronistic trick in his new book of seven stories, The Immanence of God in the Tropics: he plays it straight. When writing about exotic locales, the temptation is to mimic
Canada
Canada Richard Ford Ecco, May 2012 432 pages $27.99 I found myself humming Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” while reading Richard Ford’s Canada—only instead of “Joe Diamaggio,” I sang “Frank Bascombe,” the hero of the Ford Trilogy that began with the Sportswriter, peaked with Independence Day, and closed with
In-Flight Entertainment
In-Flight Entertainment Helen Simpson Alfred A. Knopf, February 2012 176 pages $24 This post was written by Caitlin O’Neil. Waiting for a Helen Simpson short story collection is like waiting for a teenager to open up; it’s going to be a while. Yet even though she puts out a
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