“A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.” — Henry James

Raold Dahl's writing hut (from: hermastersvoice)

"Is there something frankly embarrassing or shameful about being a 'writer'?

The public identification does seem just a bit self-conscious, at times. Like identifying oneself as a 'poet,' 'artist,' 'seer,' 'visionary.'

Yet you are, are you not, a 'writer'? After all these years?

If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write 'teacher.' I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. [Pause.] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes — or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage.

A curious and unconvincing sort of modesty! Your name is on your book covers, after all.

But my name is not me."

— Joyce Carol Oates, The Washington Post
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"Because your beauty seduced you, and made of you a prankster. Because the prankster always goes too far, that is the essence of prank." — Joyce Carol Oates

Peter Manso's
Brando: The Biography (1994)

Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.

Because you made of our adoration, mockery.
Because you were the predator male, without remorse.

Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away greatness like trash.
Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.
Because in this you made mockery of our lives […]
— Joyce Carol Oates, Port

Read all of "To Brando in Hell" here…

"The phrase 'beyond words' does not roll lightly from the lips of Joyce Carol Oates. In fact, it lands on the table between us like a brick.
     This is not because the expression, which the 74-year-old author has just used to describe the experience of coming to terms with her late husband Raymond Smith’s sudden death in 2008, is insincere. It’s because if anyone knows about words, if anyone has generated an incredible number of them, it’s the wraithlike woman who now sits in front of me, solemnly sipping from a large cup of herbal tea.
     Oates is the legendarily prolific author of more than 50 books of fiction, non-fiction and now memoir. For her to describe anything as beyond words is, well, beyond comprehension."
— Jeff Pevere, The Star
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Buy Manso's Brando and all of Joyce Carol Oates' books here...

“[...] let the soda crackers be soda crackers” [which] “are mysterious enough as it is.” — Saul Bellow

For the nineteenth time in nineteen years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to a writer outside of the US. As with most people in this country, the members of Still Eating Oranges were previously unfamiliar with the work of Chinese author Mo Yan. If he is as talented as last year’s winner, Tomas Tranströmer, then we have reason to be excited. As usual, though, a certain group (comprised mostly of Americans) has come out to criticize the Nobel committee for snubbing Cormac McCarthy or Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth. Those familiar with this annual tradition will remember that Roth, in particular, has become the cause célèbre for angry American pundits. The US has not had a laureate since Toni Morrison, the logic goes; and so there must be bias afoot. […]

     A certain literary culture dominates contemporary American schools and publications. In the past, we have considered a few of the effects—brutish, ironic and conflict-based stories—of this establishment. Its heroes and models are the world’s Roths, Raymond Carvers, John Updikes and Jonathan Franzens; its laws are 'subtext over surface,' 'sincerity kills' and 'realism trumps exaggeration.' It began to take off in and around the 1950s, popularized by the writing of Norman Mailer, Roth and others. It took root irrevocably in the following decades. This coincided with the rise of ever-more-unavoidable, ever-more-strict MFA programs and writers’ workshops, which indoctrinated at least two generations of writers into the same mentality.
     Today, peer pressure, school curricula, editorial taste and online writing guides ensure that new American writers all feed from the same trough."
— still eating oranges
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Block/Flow/Flood

"Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia — the overwhelming urge to write — and its dreaded opposite, writer's block. The result is an innovative contribution to our understanding of creative drive, one that throws new light on the work of some of our greatest writers."

— Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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"Isaac Asimov, who wrote nearly 500 books, is a classic example. He would sit down and compose 90 words a minute on his typewriter and reportedly never suffered a blocked moment. Everyone thinks of Proust as hypergraphic because he wrote such a long novel over such an extended time. Other writers often described as hypergraphic include Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Agatha Christie, Anthony Trollope, John Updike, Herman Melville, and Joyce Carol Oates. [...]
     Certain brain conditions can trigger it [hypergraphia], and they all seem to involve the temporal lobes. It was Norman Geschwind [’51] and colleagues who first showed an association between temporal lobe epilepsy and hypergraphia. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s temporal lobe epilepsy almost certainly caused his prolific writing. Just before his seizures, he would enter a state of religious ecstasy in which his world was flooded with meaning. Between seizures, he wrote hypergraphically, often about his struggle with the fact that the periods in which he seemed to experience the highest truths were also the product of a disease."
— Alice Flaherty, in conversation with Paula Byron (Harvard Medical Alumni Journal)
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Buy this book here...

A Rose By Any Other Name

"Patricia O’Brien had five novels to her name when her agent, Esther Newberg, set out last year to shop her sixth one, a work of historical fiction called The Dressmaker.
     A cascade of painful rejections began. Ms. O’Brien’s longtime editor at Simon & Schuster passed on it, saying that her previous novel, Harriet and Isabella, hadn’t sold well enough.
     One by one, 12 more publishing houses saw the novel. They all said no.
     Just when Ms. O’Brien began to fear that The Dressmaker would be relegated to a bottom desk drawer like so many rejected novels, Ms. Newberg came up with a different proposal: Try to sell it under a pen name.
      Written by Kate Alcott, the pseudonym Ms. O’Brien dreamed up, it sold in three days."
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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Buy all the books by Patrica O'Brien/Kate Alcott here...

Tension and Compression

"The short story is an amuse-bouche: luscious, glittering, to be consumed in a single bite. It should be artfully conceived, but not so dainty that you can’t sink your teeth into it. It should restrain itself to the confines of its setup rather than spilling out messily over the edge of the page. Most important, it should satisfy the reader’s immediate appetites while making him or her hope for more. What it is not, in other words, is a shrunken novel. The story seizes a moment of emotion and captures it under a bell jar. The novel takes the long view, working extended magic through patterning and repetition, more like a multi-course meal: formal or informal, paced leisurely or at a rapid clip, but always exhaustive.
     Chefs, painters, and jewellers all attest to how hard it is to work in miniature. Yet the short story is often mistakenly thought of as a beginner’s form—a literary way-station en route to bigger endeavours. Get your first story collection out of the way quickly, one imagines creative writing students are told, so you can move on to the novel as soon as possible. From John Cheever and Philip Roth to Ian McEwan and Jhumpa Lahiri, writers typically use the short story to cut their teeth before trying their hand at longer fiction.
     But not always. In November Don DeLillo, at the age of 74, published his firstever short story collection. Adam Ross has followed his well-regarded first novel, Mr. Peanut, with a book of short fiction rather than a second novel. And at least half the writers in 2011’s Best American Short Stories anthology—among them Joyce Carol Oates and Richard Powers—are better known for their novels, often significant ones. Many of the contributors’ notes mention that the stories were years or even decades in gestation. Rebecca Makkai writes that her story of an actor whose life is derailed by stage fright took five years to finish. Sam Lipsyte’s contribution took him 20."
— Ruth Franklin, Prospect Magazine
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