from the “Letters to a Young Writer” series in Narrative Magazine “I am socially engaged, unlike many of my contemporaries, and I take on a whole variety of issues, yes, but increasingly I have found myself coming back to the central one of the environment, and, by extension, the meaning of our lives in the face of an indifferent universe. How and why do we master the other species? How long will our tenure be? Why have we evolved the …
The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity by Richard Todd. Riverhead. 272 pages. &16.47 Probing inner truth in this edgy moment, Richard Todd finds much that feels inauthentic, empty, drained of meaning. Once executive editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Todd’s been paying attention a long time and he lives in a place reeking with history, western Massachusetts. He wants to know the source of this malaise and why we hunger after authenticity—and what is that, anyway? In our neighborhoods …
Interviewed for The Paris Review, Fall 2008, by Sarah Fay. “I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of the story lies. I don’t see any reason for fine-tuning something that’s essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they’re putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, …
The King James Bible’s stories and ancient words and lovely turns of phrase have influenced legions of writers. I’m charmed by its liberal use of sobering colons: like so. And by the nonsensical italics. And there’s Jesus: talk about someone who works on multiple levels. He’s always getting thronged and spied upon—What’s he gonna do now?—and he delights in flummoxing. He speaks in riddles to the dumbfounded masses, though perhaps his rhetorical strategy is to intrigue them and, by using …
“Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.”—Rainer Maria Rilke Whether composing a poem, struggling with a memoir’s narrative structure, or trying to depict a city’s homelessness problem through one family’s struggle, a writer can be trying to offer a gift to the world. Therefore it’s fitting that an insightful essay on revision in …