Issue #7

Some Excerpts from Issue 7

There’s always that place in a manuscript, when you’re working on it, where things can just fall in and become part of the batter, so to speak.—Lorrie Moore, interviewed by Jim Schumock

Malcolm Cowley was teaching at Stanford that year, and he told me, “One Faulkner’s enough in this world.” So from then on I thought, Let’s leave those long, convoluted sentences alone and stick to what you can do best.—Ernest Gaines, interviewed by Michael Upchurch

Flannery O’Connor is amazing, especially in terms of content. She can take a fairly simple situation and complicate it and complicate it and complicate it until you think you’ve read a story about the whole world all balled up in one place.—Jim Grimsley, interviewed by Jim Schumock

When you throw out syntax, you’ve thrown out the skeleton and you’re left with a pile of flesh.—Carolyn Kizer, interviewed by Jim Schumock

Give your story a voice. Make it talk to us; don’t let it be routine stuff anybody could have written. Give it an attitude, and let that attitude saturate every part of it.—David Long, interviewed by Linda Davies

A writer should always read a lot—and forget a lot. If he’s unable to do that, he will become a prisoner of a certain writer or a certain style.—Abdelrahman Munif, interviewed by Michael Upchurch

Ideally, the reader thinks about things—the issues, the predicaments and possibilities—identifies with a whole smorgasbord of characters, and in the process finds that an issue that might have seemed simple on the surface becomes a whole lot more complicated...That little disruption in the psyche is what I’m after.—Antonya Nelson, interviewed by Susan McInnis

Not everyone would agree with me, but I think that every story has a unique voice. Every writer has a unique aesthetic. These are complementary but not exactly the same thing.—Joyce Thompson