There’s nothing fancy about this entry; I just have a handful of fun tidbits to report: A good friend of mine from Sewanee named Matthew Pitt was recently notified that one of his short stories will appear in The Oxford American, which hails from my old state of Arkansas. Even more impressively, a short story [...]
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 [...]
And we’ve returned after a brief hiatus! Sorry about the mild delay in posting. I’ve been back from Sewanee for two weeks, and all that real life stuff I’d been neglecting (household chores; work that results in income; connection with loved ones, etc) caught up with me. But we now return to regularly scheduled programming. [...]
Dick Bausch (I had him for workshop and sang off-key Ray Charles with him on a Tennessee front porch at two in the morning, which I assume means I can call him Dick) gave a craft lecture on Sunday, July 22 that he claimed “would focus on the life of writing, as much as on [...]
31 Jul 2007 On July 23 the Sewanee Writers conference hosted another set of editors–those from Blackbird, Southwest Review, New Criteria, Kenyon Review, and Epoch. Edward Hower, who works with Epoch was ostensibly the panel’s moderator, but in reality this was a group effort. Rather than embellishing questions one by one, I decided to break [...]
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. Though Borchardt Inc. is small–six total employees–they manage [...]
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 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. Much of the material was familiar (“getting published is hard, but keep at it”; “We’re excited when we discover something good”; “We don’t [...]
by Claire Messud 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 are even stronger paired with one another. The first piece, “A Simple Tale”, [...]
by Randall Kennan 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. One of my favorites included The Foundations of the Earth, which dramatizes a grieving mother’s attempts to forge a relationship with her dead son’s [...]
Facebook
Twitter