December 2014 Cover Image

Name Game: Creating Character in Nonfiction

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Lacey Schultz
The writer exists in a place that is not solid. There is no creed of ethics by which writers may determine what can and should be written, with particular regards to other people’s lives, their secrets.
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An Interview with Maxine Kumin

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Christian McEwen
I still reread Auden with enjoyment. And I still have my little breviary-shaped A Shropshire Lad of Housman’s that I take everywhere with me. I find now that I’m old, I have to fight to retain the poems that are in my memory bank.
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Love, Death, and Books

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Audrey Ferber
With surprisingly little manipulation, the titles formed a story I wanted to tell.
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Two Modes of Disclosure: A Meditation on the Craft of Poetry

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H.L. Hix
Placement of the synoptic moment—its location in or distribution through the poem—operates as one element of craft.
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How to Tell a True Resistance Story: Fiction and History

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Hillary Moses Mohaupt
Just as the writing of history molds what documentary and other recorded evidence suggests occurred in a previous time, so too does the writing of fiction shape invented experiences into a story to create meaning.
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Pull Any String of the Spider Web and the Whole Thing Vibrates: An Argument/Conversation

David Shields and Davis Schneiderman
I am pulling on a tradition: Heraclitus. Rousseau. Pascal. Petronius, to an extent (going backward there, for a moment.) Catullus (same). Pessoa. Cioran. Nietzsche. Montaigne. Sterne. Melville. Proust. The analyzers. The contemplators, the meditators. The accidental philosophers...
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Framing the Global Moment: A 21st-Century Writer’s Approach to Narrative Craft

Robert Powers
A Global novel written in the 21st century will need to accommodate chaos, disorder, the transcending of boundaries, and will require a narrative shape most conducive to encompassing the myriad literary traditions of all cultures.
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