Category Archives: Guest Bloggers

Preview of March 1 Guest Blogger Barbara Westwood Diehl

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2/28/14 – PREVIEW OF MARCH 1 GUEST BLOGGER BARBARA WESTWOOD DIEHL

barbara_diehl3When short-story writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, she said it was a “wonderful thing” for the short story, which she hoped “would come to the fore.”

No one would agree more than Barbara Westwood Diehl, who, as managing editor of The Baltimore Review, reads more short stories in a month than most people read in a lifetime. Find out what that’s like–and how she explains the enduring allure of the short story–when her guest blog appears in this space tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

2/1/14 – I CAN’T KEEP FICTION WRITING IN THE CORNER

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1 FEBRUARY 2014 2/1/14 – I CAN’T KEEP FICTION WRITING IN THE CORNER

2/1/14 – I CAN’T KEEP FICTION WRITING IN THE CORNER

When I open my laptop to write fiction, I have the odd sensation that the screen is something of a mirror — a magical, looking glass through which I stepinto another world. First, I can see a shadowy version of myself on the screen. A few seconds later a stronger light begins to shine, my shadow disappears, and the magic takes over.

December Guest Blogger John Beckman, author of NYT notable novel The Winder Zoo and of the forthcoming American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt

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THAT PRIVATE AND TYPICALLY UNCOMFORTABLE FEELING–IT’S A DIRTY FEELING–THAT SOMEONE IS READING OVER YOUR SHOULDER

Never once having blogged before, and writing on an Olivetti version of Word that does not recognize “blogging” as a verb (its two iterations already in this text have been underscored with disapproving red squiggles), I find myself, even now as I blog, seeking a heritage style of composition that may slide smoothly into this more recent convention,

PREVIEWING OUR 12/1/13 GUEST BLOGGER JOHN BECKMAN, WHOSE FIRST NOVEL THE WINTER ZOO WAS A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2002

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BeckmanPHOTO211/29/13 PREVIEWING OUR 12/1/13 GUEST BLOGGER JOHN BECKMAN, WHOSE FIRST NOVEL THE WINTER ZOO WAS A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2002 AND WHOSE FORTHCOMING AMERICAN FUN: FOUR CENTURIES OF JOYOUS REVOLT IS ALREADY HIGHLY PRAISED

Kirkus Reviews said The Winter Zoo was “potent and deeply disturbing…the work of a most ambitious and unquestionably gifted writer.”

The New York Times said: “The hero of this first novel, a young man newly arrived in Poland from Iowa, trades his naivety for lessons in youthfulness; Beckman captures the rush of freshly liberated desires in post-Communist Europe.” Beckman taught literature in Poland and France before becoming a professor of English at the United States Naval Academy.

Guest blogger Ron Cooper, author of Purple Jesus

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1 NOVEMBER 2013 Guest blogger Ron Cooper, author of Purple Jesus

I fell in love with literature when I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The backwoods Bundren family—some hard-working and honorable, some shiftless and depraved, and all dirt poor—were my people. I had never imagined that penniless and often clueless clodhoppers could be proper subjects for respectable art. I found that such characters surfaced in the work of other, usually Southern, authors, like Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Erskine Caldwell. The fictive world occupied by O’Connor’s and Welty’s characters were familiar to me, but they were not the destitute and often violent milieu of Faulkner and especially Caldwell. These authors all understood something about poor people, although only Caldwell seemed especially to care for them. In the years after being awakened to literature by Faulkner, I discovered many writers I admired, but I wondered why nearly all of them wrote only about socio-economically privileged characters.

GUEST BLOGGER RON COOPER

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10/29/13, INTRODUCING 11/1/13 GUEST BLOGGER, RON COOPER, AUTHOR OF PURPLE JESUS, PROCLAIMED “SO PERFECTLY WRITTEN, IT’S EXHILARATING TO READ” IN A WASHINGTON POST REVIEW

“You just don’t know. She’s just that. Everything about her. She looks at me—a look that could worm a dog. And her mouth. Lips like corn.”–from Purple Jesus

A look that could worm a dog? Lips like corn? Did I read that right?roncooper

Who puts words like these in their characters’ minds and mouths? A philosophy professor and novelist named Ron Cooper, raised in South Carolina and noted in the French magazine Transfuge as one of a group of writers who focus on poor people living desperate lives. B.A., College of Charleston, M.A., University of South Carolina, Ph.D.

Washington Independent Review of Books’ Carolyn Sienkiewicz, Guest Blogger

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1 OCTOBER 2013 Washington Independent Review of Books’ Carolyn Sienkiewicz, Guest Blogger

First, let’s get this out the way: Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson. There, I have evoked his name so no one can say I overlooked him.

Mr. Larsson’s successful works notwithstanding, everyone loves a good mystery and I’m no exception. Humans are hard-wired to try to solve puzzles and problems, a survival skill basic to understanding one another and trying to get along so we don’t kill each other.