Alix Ohlin on Synesthesia

Faculty member Alix Ohlin discusses seeing books in color at Small Demons:

I’ve always had a mild case of it: the presence of color in places it doesn’t belong.  It was strongest in childhood.  I often saw colored shapes when listening to music, and the days of the week were firmly associated with various hues—Tuesdays were blue, Wednesdays green, Thursdays red.

I didn’t choose what I saw, and the images were often as perplexing to me as they’d be to the next person.  This, for example, is what the sound of a siren looked like to me as a kid.  If I was walking around my neighborhood and heard a fire engine in the distance, a black keyhole would hover before my eyes:

Maybe (probably) this makes me sound insane.  If so, don’t worry.  Most of my synesthesia is gone now; I understand that this fading away is normal in adults.

Where it remains is in my writing.  My books have colors to me, even though while I’m writing them they only exist, in a literal sense, as black Times New Roman on a white MS Word background.  Often the colors guide me toward the finished version...[Keep Reading]…

Alix is the author of Inside (2012, Knopf).

/by

Dean Bakopoulos on American Unhappiness

Faculty member Dean Bakopoulos was recently interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio about his new book, My American Unhappiness (2012, Mariner Books).

Listen to the full interview here

/by

How Literature Saved My Life

Faculty member David Shields’ new book How Literature Saved My Life is now available for pre-order.  The book will be released February 5, 2013 from Knopf.

/by

Sarah Stone at Why There are Words

Faculty member Sarah Stone will read Thursday,September 13th at the Why There are Words Literary Reading Series.  The reading will take place from 7:00 – 9:00 pm at Studio 333 in Sausalito, CA.  Visit Why There are Words for more information.

In the meantime, you can read Sarah’s interview for the series:

Your use of colors in your writing is so powerful. What is your philosophy behind how and why you use color?

SS:  Like you, I’m both a visual artist and a writer. My undergraduate degree is in painting, and I’m still fascinated by color and shape. My paintings were primarily huge and full of animals: peacocks, aardvarks, poison arrow frogs, wild pigs who’d thought they were rocks until they woke up. They became more and more narrative as I went on. Finally I just began to write. My early drafts aren’t visual at all though. And they don’t have any plot worth mentioning. It’s all people eating, having sex, and talking about politics. Worse, agreeing about politics. Full of exposition and explanation. I’m doing it again in my new book. This very morning, the characters were in a giant industrial kitchen, ostensibly working to solve the problems of world hunger, actually setting the scene for sexual intrigue and betrayal and braising vegetables. Sooner or later, these people are going to have to stop cooking and talking and do something. If this were someone else’s draft, I might say, “These characters are in a situation, but they’re not yet in a predicament.” When I was a brand-new writer, I wrote gleefully; now I see all the problems as I work. Nonetheless, my early drafts are intractable. I have to follow them through anyway. Maybe in the third or eighth draft, something will happen. Meanwhile, no clock is ticking. My characters are making ratatouille...[Keep Reading]…

Sarah is the author of The True Sources of the Nile: A Novel (2002, Doubleday) and coauthor of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (2004, Longman) with Ron Nyren.


/by

Reading Announcement

Faculty members Martha Rhodes and Daniel Tobin will read Thursday, August 23rd, from 5:00 – 6:30 pm at The Highlands Coffee House, 189 Main Street, Thomaston, Maine.  Warren Wilson alumna Christine Casson (poetry, ’05), author of After The First World (2008, Star Cloud Press) will also read.

Martha is the author of the poetry collection The Beds (2012, Autumn House Press).

Daniel is the author of the collection Belated Heavens (2010, Four Way).

/by

Rick Barot at Verse Daily

Faculty member Rick Barot’s poem “Wright Park” appears in the August 14th installment of Verse Daily:

Wright Park

There must be drugs in the backpack
lying on the grass. One cop is leading away
the bicycle, while the other cops stand around
the man handcuffed on the ground,
not moving but clearly not hurt, waiting
like everyone else for what will happen next.
It’s just one faggot on a bicycle,
says the old man standing near me,
why so many cops?

...[Keep Reading]…

Rick is the author of Want: Poems (2008, Sarabande).

/by

Oranges

Faculty member Anthony Doerr‘s short story “Oranges” appears in the current issue of r.kv.ry Quarterly:

He’s in 13C. She’s in 13B. He’s moving west to take a job teaching history to seventh graders. She’s heading home from a nursing conference. He’s gangly, earnest, and scared. She has brick-red hair and eyes shaped like daisy petals.

After takeoff she produces two oranges from a monstrous purple handbag and offers him one. He tears off the peel into a hundred tiny pieces. When he looks over she has somehow unzipped her orange and her peel sits on the tray table in a single, mesmerizing spiral.

“How did you—?”

“You’re cute,” she says.

She eats it as if it were an apple: huge bites. Threads of juice spill down her chin. The flight attendant brings napkins. The cabin lights dim. She leans across him to look out the window at stars and he smells cloves, ocean wind, orange blossoms...[Keep Reading]…

Anthony is the author of The Shell Collector: Stories (2011, Scribner).

/by

Interview with Alix Ohlin

Faculty member Dean Bakopoulos recently interviewed fellow faculty Alix Ohlin for Fiction Writers Review:

There are for me, very occasionally, stories that arrive as gifts from the universe, almost whole and complete in the early drafts. I emphasize that this happens rarely. I like to believe these are rewards for all the hours otherwise spent slogging through drafts. I do think these tend to be my best stories and in this collection, the title story “Signs and Wonders” came like that. I had been collecting and saving various elements of it in my head for years like a magpie—an anecdote told to me by my hairdresser, a brief news story about a car jacking I read in an obscure newspaper, a line of description I’d thought of but never used—and suddenly they all clicked together in my mind...[Keep Reading]…

/by

19th & Minnesota

Faculty member Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy’s short story “19th and Minnesota” appears in the August issue of pif magazine.

He was seeing things.  His speech was incoherent.  The spans, the beams, the eyebars of memory had weakened, and he had forgotten most of the crucial components of lying down, waking up, walking out, coming home. He and his grandchild wobbled up the street of cars parked nose-down by the tens of thousands, their auto-asses going right up the sky over the bay. Tens and tens of thousands of hills, and, clearing the hilltops, throngs of dog-owners, two by two, holding Starbucks under their chins and bagged dog-shit mid-chest, short nylon leashes on their wrists.  Broom-sweep gusts of wind made the pavement shimmers jitter, and creased the dogs in their stylish coats.

When he saw, when she saw the cuffs of his pants float back, they both pitched forward. She felt, he thought a bird calling in the trees resembled something gone that had returned. He thought, she felt the sleepy drooliness of having a head as soft as the places upon which it rested...[Keep Reading]…

Mc is the author of the story collection The Complete History of New Mexico (2004, Graywolf Press).

/by

C.J. Hribal at Why There are Words

Faculty member C.J. Hribal will read Thursday, August 9th at the Why There are Words Literary Reading Series.  The reading will take place from 7:00 – 9:00 pm at Studio 333 in Sausalito, CA.  Visit Why There are Words for more information.

In the meantime, you can read his interview for the series:

I think the hardest and most important thing I can do when I write is work with an empathetic imagination. I don’t know when I get into a character’s head and heart what I’m going to find there. I certainly don’t have a road map for where I want to get to.  It’s an exploration, and when I delve deep into a character’s voice and thoughts I try to lose myself, to become them as much as possible. I don’t worry about the philosophy of what they’re expressing, I just want to get at the expression itself. As a person I’ve blundered through most of my life, and my characters often blunder through theirs. Maybe that’s what helps me get at their fear and their grief as well as their joy. Life overwhelms us from time to time, and into the darkness we jump, feet first. That’s what I try to do when I’m writing, catch my characters mid-jump, while they’re still howling on the way down,  before they know if the parachute is going to open or not...[Keep Reading]…

C.J. is the author of the novel, The Company Car (2006, Random House).

/by

FOW FORUM

Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

VIEW ALL POSTS  |  SUBMIT YOUR WORK