Some excerpts from Issue Five:

A woman came up to me at a reading and she said, “You know, I would love to write about my past, but I don’t remember anything.” I told her that if she sat down and started to write, it would all come back, but she said that she had a feeling that if she did that she would just naturally start inventing. And I said, “Exactly! And this is how novels are born.—Sigrid Nunez

I have made a conscious effort not to get tagged “regional writer.” There are great regional writers—fine, extraordinary regional writers who are trapped under the banner, or the rubber hood, of being a regional writer. And I think that limits one.
—E. Annie Proulx, interviewed by Michael Upchurch

I’m a Vietnam novelist the way Monet is a lily-pad painter…The regionalism, the settings, the kind of characters I use are simply vehicles into some deeper concerns about the human condition.—Robert Olen Butler, interviewed by Jim Schumock

You have to read and write on a daily basis. You have to be utterly vulnerable on the page, and utterly ruthless in revision. To white something good, you have to want it so bad that nothing else matters.—Chris Offutt, interviewed by Rob Trucks

That’s something you’ve got to be real careful about when you go to a publishing house. You have to find someone who likes the kind of books that you write.
—Ethan Canin, interviewed by Jim Schumock

Issue #5 WA5$6.00