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. I quickly discovered, however, that MBSC was only about music on the surface; [...]
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. I’ve used the SMH for about six years now (editions four through six are on [...]
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 killed a few hours 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 [...]
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 [...]
Alison Lurie’s lecture, which I almost didn’t attend on account of fatigue–similar to the kind you might feel from so many Sewanee updates–was a basically insightful lecture focusing on an often neglected element of fiction: setting. I admit that I approached this topic cautiously. Some of my early fiction was overly reliant on setting, using [...]
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. He mentioned, by introduction, that Updike said he enjoys writing his own sex scenes much more than reading sex scenes of others, because [...]
Continue reading about Sex and Politics (well, perhaps just sex)
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.” It is difficult to summarize because it was essentially an upcoming book chapter, and admittedly free-associative and structureless. Wood opened with an observation that beginning novelists seem drawn to [...]
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 [...]
Continue reading about “Academic” vs. “Creative” Writing: Hidden Parallels
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