Alan Ackmann

July 2008

1. The Master Butcher's Singing Club

   I’m working on a novel right now dealing heavily with music, and was originally attracted to Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butcher’s Singing Club based on its content—I wanted to see how another writer handled music, in both its description and technical aspects.

   Monday July 21, 2008

June 2008

1. It Smells Like Noise in Here . . .

   Thursday June 26, 2008

1. AP Reading Two: Once More Unto the Beach, Dear Friends

   Wednesday June 11, 2008

1. A One-Hour Tour

   Sunday June 1, 2008

May 2008

1. I have a Facebook Page Now

   In keeping with my pattern of catching up to trends about six months after they hit their peak, I started a Facebook page yesterday.

   Saturday May 24, 2008

1. Andrea Lunsford's Talk at DePaul

   Last Friday, as part of an on-going program for professional development, made possible by a shiny new departmental budget, DePaul University’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Department hosted Andrea Lunsford, author of (among other things) The St. Martin’s Handbook for Writing.

   Tuesday May 20, 2008

1. Smell Dictionary

   This is one of the website’s more distinctive features: a dictionary of smells that serves as one of my ongoing projects…

   Monday May 19, 2008

April 2008

1. Calvin College Catch-Up

   I’ve now returned from Calvin Festival of Faith in Writing held in Grand Rapids Michigan, which I found to be a pleasant little town about the size of Evansville, Indiana, only without the funny smell and economic desperation.

   Tuesday April 22, 2008

1. Madcap Michigan Mayhem

   For any parties interested, let it be known that on the back end of this week I will be attending the Calvin Festival of Faith in Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

   Monday April 14, 2008

1. Fast Food Nation

   I don’t usually focus on non-fiction, just like I don’t usually mention million-seller books. But Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, warrants an exception.

   Wednesday April 9, 2008

1. Puzzled Writers, Dramatic Situations

   I recently spent the night at a friend’s house, and since I’m almost always the first to get up in the morning I ended up killing a few hours by raiding his library. After browsing the shelves of anthologies, journals, and short story collections—several of which were wayward sons and daughters from my own library—I settled on Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schmidt.

   Thursday April 3, 2008

March 2008

1. AWP Conference Follow-Up

   After a lengthy hiatus, owing mostly to end of the term papers it is time for an update from the now month-past AWP convention in New York City.

   Tuesday March 25, 2008

January 2008

1. Start Spreading the News . . .

   In just under one week my wife and I will be heading to New York for the annual AWP convention. As you might imagine, this is the source of two very distinct types of anxiety.

   Saturday January 26, 2008

December 2007

1. Promising Up-and-Comers

   There’s nothing fancy about this entry; I just have a handful of fun tidbits to report:

   Thursday December 27, 2007

1. The Medici Effect

   While riding a commuter train from Chicago to St. Louis earlier today (the train being a new addition to my annual Christmas migration back to my hometown) I read The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson, which claims that creativity, while to some extent random, can be harnessed and directed by recognizing certain qualities about its nature—specifically that creativity is frequently triggered when individuals examine the intersection of disciplines, and that the overlapping or divergent qualities within these disciplines exponentially increases the number of variables available for combination, which consequently increases the number of ways that innovators can solve problems or initiate ideas. True creativity, according to Johansson, rarely occurs when problem-solvers or inventors reside entirely within one discipline, where creativity is generally a process of refining existing ideas rather than generating new ones…

   Saturday December 22, 2007

October 2007

1. Another Glorious Return

   As you might guess from my lengthy absence from cyber-space, the fall semester is in full swing, so much so that my students and I have just about reached the mid-way point. I am therefore taking advantage of a forty-eight hour hiatus from grading and other work to get reacquainted with you, the readers. There’s lots to cover, so let’s get to it!

   Wednesday October 10, 2007

September 2007

1. It's That Time of Year Again . . .

   Ah, early September! The time of year where the the leaves change color, Chicago heat becomes slightly less stultifying, and the construction season begins a final push towards completion before the onset of snowfall. It is a time of new beginnings. In my case, the beginnings of two things I have been anticipating eagerly: The academic year and football season.

   Friday September 7, 2007

August 2007

1. Wherefore art thou, Alison?

   Alison Lurie’s lecture, which I almost didn’t attend on account of fatigue, was a basically insightful lecture focusing on an often neglected element of fiction: setting.

   Friday August 31, 2007

1. Publishing Panel Number Three

   Mid-way through the conference, Sewanee played host to a pair of book publishers, who balanced out the magazine folk from earlier in the week.

   Thursday August 16, 2007

1. Reverend Richard's Sunday Sermon

   Richard Bausch . . . gave a lecture on Sunday, July 22 at Sewanee that he claimed “would focus on the life of writing, as much as on the craft.”

   Tuesday August 7, 2007

1. Welcome!

   Tuesday August 7, 2007

1. Poachers

   I learned a lot at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. One thing I learned, for example, is that apparently everyone—at some point in their writing career—will meet and like Tom Franklin.

   Tuesday August 7, 2007

July 2007

1. Editors Panel Number Two

   On July 23 the Sewanee Writers conference hosted another set of editors—those from Blackbird, Southwest Review, New Criteria, Kenyon Review, and Epoch...

   Tuesday July 31, 2007

1. Not So Secret Agent Man

   On July 21, the Sewanee Writers conference was visited by George Borchardt of the Borchardt Inc. agenting house. I admit that I looked forward to this panel, since prior to the conference I had only a peripheral idea of what book publishing entailed—and I was not disappointed…

   Friday July 27, 2007

1. Sewanee Publishing Panel

   On Friday morning, James Wood moderated a panel that included the poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly, the fiction editor for The New Yorker, and the managing editor for The American Scholar.

   Thursday July 26, 2007

1. He's Not Flat, He's Just a Character

   On Thursday afternoon, James Wood—noted essayist/critic and senior editor of The New Republic—gave a discussion he claimed might well be titled, “In Defense of Flat Characters.”

   Thursday July 26, 2007

1. Sex and Politics (well, perhaps just sex)

   The first lecture at Sewanee was by John Casey, and centered around sex in literature—how it is handled, when it is worth writing about, and what about it is worth fixating upon.

   Thursday July 26, 2007

1. More Than Meets the Eye . .

   I’d like to diverge from the world of literature and solipsism for a moment and enter the world of cinema. Specifically, I saw a movie last weekend I enjoyed very much…

   Tuesday July 10, 2007

1. A Feast of Snakes

   This one was so tonally divergent from what I’ve been reading that it took me awhile to wrap my mind around it, but I ultimately decided that the book succeeds on a variety of levels.

   Friday July 6, 2007

June 2007

1. A Well-Rested Return

   The summer has officially begun! At great sacrifice to my interal sense of time (ending term in late June instead of early May is more than a little disorienting) I have now submitted final grades for DePaul and can enoy a respite from teaching until early September.

   Friday June 29, 2007

1. The Hunters

   Another Sewanee writer (once the conference is over I’ll go back to reading non-Sewanee folks, I swear), Claire Messud has written an understated, deceptively simple pair of novellas entitled The Hunters, and while each story is strong individually, they…

   Friday June 29, 2007

1. Let the Dead Bury Their Dead

   Kennan is another Sewanee Writer, and several stories in this collection—which focuses on African American culture in the fictional town of Tims Creek, South Carolina—were very well done.

   Sunday June 24, 2007

1. Update from Daytona

   Hello loyal readers/intrepid first-timers/random browsers! I just wanted to give a quick update from Daytona Beach, where (as my calendar indicates) I am grading AP English exams with 800 other high school and college instructors as we plow through a whopping 250,000+ essays.

   Thursday June 14, 2007

1. Alan's Contact Page

   Sunday June 10, 2007

1. "Academic" vs. "Creative" Writing: Hidden Parallels

   As I mentioned, I teach First Year Writing — a variation on your standard university course, emphasizing research, argumentation, audience awareness, etc — at DePaul University . The goal for the course is to write an 8-10 page term paper, and since most students major in things other than English there is a wide berth of skill level and interest. This term, however, I wound up with some students for whom writing—specifically creative writing—is an avowed interest. After a brief conversation with one student about what he learned, I began thinking about the things that composition classes, which feature so-called “academic” pursuits, might teach us about writing fiction. And I came to some interesting conclusions, which boil down to the following.

   Saturday June 9, 2007

1. Alan's First Reading

   This Friday I had my first public reading since graduating from Arkansas, which makes it my first reading at DePaul University, my first in Chicago, my first since having actual publications, etc. Of course, I was nervous. I’ve been told I give a good reading—its the theater background, I think, and the pleasant benefit of a dozen on-stage appearances in high school—but that doesn’t make much difference when scaled against the awareness that a room full of people, who you’ve never met, will be hearing and evaluating your work for the first time and—lucky you—you get to watch them do it. That’s a nerve-wracking thing in principle, much less in practice, and I spent most of Friday trying to cut “The Night Comes in A Falling”, my most consistent crowd-pleaser, down to a twenty-minute read, rather than its twenty-six minute full version…

   Sunday June 3, 2007

1. Jim the Boy

   Earley, who teaches out of Vanderbilt, is attending this year’s Sewenee conference, and his debut novel Jim the Boy (which focuses on a young boy’s coming of age in a small, turn of the century Carolina town) impressed me…

   Sunday June 3, 2007

May 2007

1. Send Alan an email

   Thursday May 17, 2007

1. In Persuasion Nation

   I’ve spent some time recently figuring out how to assemble a collection (how pieces fit together; whether there should be a chronological/ thematic progression) and Saunders’ book is a fine example of stories reinforcing one another. For In Persuasion Nation, Saunders uses passages from a fictional political tract by Bernard “Ed” Alton entitled Tastebook for the New Nation to introduce the book’s four sections, which are loosely themed around resistance to indoctrination, the risks of imposing/denying individual rights, the consequences of dissent, and the mercurial nature of personal truths…

   Tuesday May 15, 2007

1. Straight Man

   Tuesday May 15, 2007

March 2007

1. Publications

   Tuesday March 27, 2007

1. About Alan

   Saturday March 24, 2007