I can’t even begin to express the awe and great satisfaction seeing undergrads I work with on Honors Theses and in classes fly off to places like New York University or Emerson and to have them keep in touch with me about their accomplishments, or to work with grad students on wonderful books.

When I’m stuck, I just try to write through it. I force myself to do the terrible awful miserable version of whatever I’m writing, and usually the horror that results from knowing that someone else eventually will be reading it makes me find a thread I can pull to make it better, and then better again, until I either rewrite into a good version, or stumble on a whole new angle that works.

Recently:
   Editor’s Eye: Frances Lefkowitz
   Monday Chat with Danny Goodman

Think of the rewards for writing as air, as rich and limitless as what we breathe—or as oceans. Jean Rhys reputedly said that she was one more drop in the ocean of literature. Because someone’s up, it doesn’t mean you are down. Writers can help each other by being ready with a compliment.

Recently:
   Front Page: May
   Books at Fictionaut: Giraffes in Hiding
   Fictionaut Five: Jürgen Fauth
   Monday Chat with Gloria Mindock

I’m keeping a tumblr with images, text, and video from the world of Kino called Tulpendiebe – things I found researching the book, things that inspired me. One of the themes of the book is how art inspires more art, and how it wants to be shared in order to be able do that – the idea of the creative commons. So it seemed like an obvious thing to turn Kino and my research over to anybody who’d like to participate.

Recently:
   Monday Chat with Gloria Mindock

Word prompts work really well for my particular brain. Give me a list of random words and I will turn it into a story. The process of creating story while working in every word is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle and a bit like taking an acid trip.

I would say that the written creation of a character in a novel really shouldn’t differ from the way a friendship is formed. When you meet someone for the first time, they don’t normally spill out all their backstory and how it’s relevant to the moment you both find yourselves in, not unless they’re on the way to the electric chair.

My dad once said, “If the flame burns, the writer will out,” and I believe it was George Clinton of P-Funk who said “If it don’t fit, don’t force it.” I think that somewhere between my dad’s Irish romanticism and the bottomless groove of George’s cosmo-funk there lies a kind of universal creative truth: you can’t make it happen unless you’re driven to try, but trying too hard usually isn’t the best way to make it happen.

Unlike a sighted person, I do not have the ability to skim or scan text, neither can I easily play with formatting or spacing or see how a piece lays on a page. Proofreading is also challenging as I can’t pick up things like extra spaces or punctuation errors because the speech program does not read these. The best way to imagine this is to think of holding a powerful magnifying glass over a page – you can read the print, but only a small chunk at a time.

Don’t over-privilege literal adventure in your life, such as drugs, war, and the wild side. Remember Eudora Welty’s: “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Bobbie Ann Mason‘s short stories, first published in The New Yorker, were included in her first collection of fiction, Shiloh & Other Stories which won the PEN/​Hemingway Award. Two of her books, Feather Crowns and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs: A Family Story, was a finalist for [...]