Issue #32

You can call it soul, or outlook on life, but whatever it is, it’s a certain aura about your writing that’s a result of every experience you’ve ever had, every emotion you’ve ever felt. And that aura, that insight, is the most important thing you have to offer.—Mary Yukari Waters, interviewed by Sherry Ellis

Vladimir Nabokov said that a writer who didn’t spend time just paging through a dictionary looking for good words was not a real writer.—Charles Baxter, interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies

I couldn’t see it, until the man behind me said, “You have to turn your head slightly and see it in your peripheral vision.” When I did, I could see the comet and its movement across the sky. Stories are like that. Love and hope and hate and fear are best seen in this peripheral vision, and if you talk about them directly you can miss them. –Elizabeth Cox, interviewed by Sarah Ann Johnson

A writer engaged upon a novel is a happy person, because once you figure out what you are doing—once you have characters and they start taking on flesh and saying things you don’t expect them to say—it is a lovely thing to go on and write the book. –Alice Mattison, Interviewed by Barbara Brooks