Fictionaut Blog

One exercise I’ve used in class to great effect is to have people map their home ground, or even just a place they remember well. Take 20 minutes to a half hour and draw out everything you can remember about your home when you were a child. Keep going into further detail, or do maps of every place you’ve ever lived, then start associating people with these places. Sooner or later, usually sooner, you’ll find your way into a story or poem.

Recently:
   Front Page: June
   Monday Chat with Meg Tuite
   Checking in with Couples

Ramshackle Review’s latest issue spreads the love with work by Jen Knox, Jack Swenson, xTx, Danny Goodman, Bill Yarrow, Darryl Price, and many more. MaryAnne Kolton’s poem “Sex with Strangers” and “The Love Tap” are forthcoming from Toucan Magazine. Doug Bond reads Ramon Collins’ story “Things That Go Poink!” here. Steve Himmer’s novel The Bee-Loud Glade gets a shout-out from NPR.

Recently:
   Monday Chat with Meg Tuite
   Checking in with Couples
   Fictionaut Five: Roddy Doyle

This kind of guy is insecure, always tucks his shirt in and wears his pants on the high-side. He parts his hair to the right and has had the same haircut since he was five, although the bald spot growing in the middle of his head disturbs him deeply. He likes to experiment with moustaches.

Recently:
   Checking in with Couples
   Fictionaut Five: Roddy Doyle

I think every relationship dynamic is to some extent strange and that is why they’re so much fun to write about.

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Roddy Doyle

Mobile phones are fiction hell. Not because they go off as I work - that’s fine; the distraction is often welcome. It’s the fact of them, that virtually everyone has one, that no one has to go searching for a working pay phone, that meetings don’t have to happen anymore - it’s taking the mobility out of contemporary stories. It’s a challenge. I’m glad I don’t write crime fiction - too much technology.

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Robin Black
   Monday Chat with Matt Potter

I spent close to forty years being an obsessive noticer of how people interact, a private theorist about human behavior and also a collector of the sorts of metaphors that occur in daily life, the way our lived lives seem to run parallel with a kind of naturally occurring symbolic scheme - and suddenly I knew how to convey all of this stored up information.

Recently:
   Monday Chat with Matt Potter
   Checking In With Narrative Medicine

With flash I think you have to jump right in - BANG! - yet still retain some mystery so it propels the reader through your story.

Recently:
   Checking In With Narrative Medicine
   Fictionaut Five: George Singleton

Writing is like surgery, but it takes more than the knife to heal.

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: George Singleton

Get your work done. Richard Yates, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, Raymond Carver: All of them had addictions of one form or another, but it didn’t stop them from working hard and fast.

Recently:
   Checking in with The Carnage Conservatory

We couldn’t be the first who got a kick out of writing sadistic horror stories. What turns us on to the really dark stuff?

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Giancarlo DiTrapano
   Fictionaut Front Page
   Monday Chat with Jane Hammons