Issue #4

Issue Four highlights these topics: Character, Writing Workshops/Programs/Groups, Naming.

Some excerpts from Issue Four:

He was a very generous teacher. On the other hand, he made it clear that there was a point that you either got what he had to say or didn’t get it. —Philip Levine, interviewed by Jim Schumock

Many groups are primarily social in nature and would probably not be satisfactory for someone who is looking for an in-depth critique of his or her story. Attend a meeting or two to sample what goes on before you commit yourself. —Gary Wilson

This idea which we now have that people ought to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college?— Jamaica Kincaid

He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back. —Carolyn Kizer, interviewed by Jim Schumock

Binzer is the name of someone I have known for years, but suddenly I noticed the name, jotted it down, and it became the name of the main character in my next story, about a man residing in a kind of bin of spiritual strangulation, name and story seeming to come together in a kind of spontaneous combustion.
—Thomas E. Kennedy

She is as fully aware of her limitations brought on by her emotional instability as she is of the normal life that goes on around her—but she can’t change either one. She can’t make herself "normal" no matter how hard she tries, and she can’t make people like her. —Mary McGarry Morris

He’s a loathsome character, a monster of the ego, but he is, I hope, interesting. And he has reasons for being who he is and thinking as he does.
—Charles Johnson

I read obituaries just for the names. I was very glad and felt vindicated when I saw that Henry James did that—and I’m no Henry James, we know that.
—Paul Theroux, interviewed by Michael Upchurch