Draft No. 4

Review: Annie Dillard’s ‘The Maytrees’

October 20, 2011 | 15 Comments

Guest Post By Olga Khotiashova The golden rule of software engineering says that perfect code must be simple; it shyly omits though that one must be a professional to understand and appreciate such code. When I, a non-native English speaker, began reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, I was struck by a feeling, keen and simple like a death sentence: When will I understand American literature – NEVER. The crash of one more childish illusion. Then what made me keep …

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Flannery O’Connor’s scary scowl

October 17, 2011 | 3 Comments

While searching for something else entirely, I came across this remarkable interview on Vimeo with Flannery O’Connor’s good friend Louise Abbot, who discusses O’Connor’s disdain for fame, among other things. The unusual, very occasional blog where I found the interview link is The Role of Imagination in Literary Nonfiction, worth a visit. This quiet blog is about, according to its author, Colin Foote Burch: • About the value of the nonfiction narrator’s subjective internal experience: real events that happen in …

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Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Walker Percy, Fannie Flagg

October 12, 2011 | 11 Comments

My southern fiction orgy last summer started with Flannery O’Connor. Since I often dip into her stories, I bought and read the latest bio of her, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. I hoped to learn how she got so wise, and so dark. Apparently, her mother and their ouchy relationship. And Flannery’s imaginings: she seemingly nudged her own prickly ways a bit to depict sullen grown children like the nasty daughter-with-PhD in “Good Country People”; she …

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4 writers on their messy process

October 4, 2011 | 8 Comments

Bill Roorbach has instituted a new feature over at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, an author interview. The first, with John J. Clayton, marking the appearance of his new novel, Mitzvah Man, is remarkable for being done all in scene—Bill interviewed him at his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts—and for Clayton’s thoughts on just what God truly is. Or may be. On his laborious daily struggle to write:  I do what I can to avoid writing fiction, because writing fiction is …

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Bret Lott’s ‘Against Technique’

September 29, 2011 | 7 Comments

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.—Bret Lott This blog has been mostly about craft, even though I know craft isn’t the most important thing about writing. Not by far. A paradox about writing—maybe any art—is that craft, or call it technique, is what …

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Searching for Dinty Moore

September 24, 2011 | 3 Comments

Recently someone was directed to my blog by googling my favorite lines from one of my favorite essays, by Eudora Welty, “The Little Store,” which I’ve discussed twice on this blog:  setting out on the world, a child feels so indelible. he only comes to find out later that it’s all the others along the way who are making themselves indelible to him  The punctuation is the searcher’s of course, but s/he got the lines right. A WordPress feature allows …

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Another bill that’s overdue

September 19, 2011 | 12 Comments

I. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.—Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community Westerville, Ohio, has a tasty new Mexican-food place, a dime a dozen in my native Florida and many other areas but rare here in Yankee land. So last Tuesday I was at the pick-up window waiting for Kathy’s taco salad—I’d gotten my tacos but the kitchen was slammed …

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