An Index of 2017 Author Guest Posts

Posts with the most: Karen Shepard, Louise Marburg, Geeta Kothari

Last year, for the sixth straight year, we invited every author of a book entered for The Story Prize to contribute a guest post to this blog. Forty-seven of them chose to participate. Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 499 guest posts from 482 different writers (some have contributed in more than one year).

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2017 author guest posts received 400 or more page views. The most popular post, "Karen Shepard: How to Make Intermittent and Erratic Progress as a Writer, in Twenty-Eight Easy Steps," has so far drawn more than 4,500 page views—the sixth most of any TSP blog post. "Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules," the post with the most all-time views, currently has more than 14,000 of them.

The 2017 author contributions with the second and third most hits were "Louise Marburg Offers Ten Pieces of Writing Advice," with nearly 1,200 page views, and "Geeta Kothari Takes Her Time," with more than 1,000 page views to date.

The two posts with the largest Facebook reach were "Edie Meidav Urges You to Fail" and "Describe Your Reading Habits: An Interview with Deb Olin Unferth."

Many of these offer insights into the writing process or practical advice, serving as mini craft talks. Others get more personal. And several are simply very funny. Here then is this year's complete index, in alphabetical order by last name.

A-C

Frederick Luis Aldama and the Active Transformation of Culture
Henry Alley Finds Inspiration in His Archives

Jacob M. Appel on Being a Good Literary Citizen
Josh Barkan Starts with Oddities
Emily Bieniek's New Year’s Resolution: To Devalue the Hero’s Journey
Jennifer Caloyeras Reluctantly Joins the Family Business
Olivia Clare on Accountability
Lee Conell on Spotting the Extraordinary Among the Ordinary

D-K
Rob Davidson Finds Inspiration in Images
What Cynthia Flood Has Learned
Tim Gautreaux's Ten Pieces of Writing Advice
Terry Griggs on the Little and the Large

Daisy Johnson Plows Ahead
Jeffrey N. Johnson Builds on His Training
Siel Ju and the Suitable State of Mind
Michael Knight on a Literary Touchstone
Geeta Kothari Takes Her Time

L-O
Matthew Lansburgh Finds Time to Feed His Soul
Peter LaSalle: The Short Story vs. the Novel
Becky Mandelbaum's Four Simple Pieces of Advice
Louise Marburg Offers Ten Pieces of Writing Advice
The Drawings on Juan Martinez's Office Door
Edie Meidav Urges You to Fail
Timothy O'Leary Weaves Fact Into Fiction
Adam O'Riordan and the Impulse to Write Prose
Orlando Ortega-Medina Taps Into His Subconscious

P-S
KL Pereira on Lost and Missing Mothers
Matthew Pitt on Making a Memorable Impression
Zach Powers' Thoughts on (In)visible Prose
Bill Roorbach's Freaky Fridays
Michelle Ross Asks: Is a Story Ever Finished?
David Rutschman on Moving Between Distance and Intimacy

Sofia Samatar’s Ten Favorite "Quotes" About Writing

Scott Loring Sanders Pulls Flotsam from the Ether
Joseph Scapellato and the Story’s Intention
John Shea Gets Started
Karen Shepard: How to Make Intermittent and Erratic Progress as a Writer, in Twenty-Eight Easy Steps
Caitlin Hamilton Summie's Office with No Door


T-Y
Susan Tepper Keeps At It
Douglas Trevor on Toni Morrison and Subjective Histories
Describe Your Reading Habits: An Interview with Deb Olin Unferth
Samrat Upadhyay: Doctor or Engineer? Neither!

Lee Upton on Obsession, Denial, and No-Guilt Naps
Anthony Varallo's First Story

Katherine Vaz on Taking Notes and Making Box Art
Tim Weed and the Ecstasy of Influence
Josh Weil and the Scent of Sagebrush


Past indexes of guest posts:
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012

Describe Your Reading Habits: An Interview with Deb Olin Unferth

In the ninth in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Deb Olin Unferth, author of Wait Till You See Me Dance (Graywolf Press), answers questions about what and how she reads.

Q:
Unferth: Well, I have a fairly complex system for reading. This may surprise you to learn, but I keep a list of every book I’ve read or listened to for thirteen years now. I also count every hour I read.

Q:
Unferth: No, alas, half-read books do not count as read books. If I read a few stories from a volume, I don’t get to list it as a book I’ve read. I have to read all the stories. If a book is incredibly long and I only make it three-quarters through, too bad for me. In December I am often hurrying through a few books I tossed aside months before in order to make my goal by the December 31 deadline.

Q:
Unferth: I never reach my annual goal. Or I should say I have never reached my annual goal. I may yet.

Q:
Unferth: Yes, well, I have other goals, rules, and suggested guidelines for reading too.

Q:
Unferth: A guideline is different from a rule in that I don’t absolutely have to follow it. There is some flexibility there. For example, I keep the books I’ve read separated from the ones I haven’t read. That part is a hard and fast rule. The guideline part is that if I haven’t read a book, it’s not supposed to go on my nice bookshelves in my office. It’s supposed to go out on one of the hallway bookshelves. But that part is merely a guideline, you see, because I do have books on my office shelves that I haven’t fully read, only I keep them on a different shelf. These are dictionaries, reference books.

Pictured: (left) an Unferth office bookshelf,
(right) a pile of rule-satisfying books

Q:
Unferth: Sure, some people read whole dictionaries.

Q:
Unferth: I do have a dictionary system, but that’s a different topic. Beyond our scope here.

Q:
Unferth: Yes, I count audiobooks as books I’ve read, though they don’t go on a shelf, but I am nervous about it. I had never thought much about it until my colleague, Lisa Olstein, pointed out to me that I do not read the audiobooks, but rather they are read to me. It was a good point, and disturbing, but I have not stopped counting them.

Q:
Unferth: Yes, I did say that I also count the number of hours I read. And I count the number of hours I write. And the number of hours I exercise, do school work, volunteer, clean, and several other activities. I keep it all arranged in Word docs and I keep printouts on my desk in a folder. I review it every day.

Q: 
Unferth: Correct. Every day I read over how many hours I’ve read since 2004.

Q:
Unferth: Correct. And how many hours I’ve cleaned.

Q:
Unferth: In all recorded categories I’ve gotten a little worse as I’ve grown older.

Q: 
Unferth: Well, I feel a bit foolish to reveal all the rules on my list of rules for reading. I will say that I have two rules designed to keep me from reading more than 25% white men. That percentage has lowered by about 5% per year for many years. Other rules have to do with when books are written (it’s easy to be too contemporary top-heavy), what kind of books they are (I have several categories and subcategories here), and rereads (I require myself to reread a certain number of books each year—I believe there’s value in it).

Q:
Unferth: Absolutely it’s confusing. I spend a significant amount of time arranging piles of books and figuring out which requirements they fill.

Q:
Unferth: No, not enough time that it warrants its own category but enough time that I sometimes feel like I should be getting “credit” for it in some category or other, though I’m not sure which.

Q:
Unferth: Don’t be cute. There is no “waste of time” category. 

Courage and Prose: A Night with McSweeney’s at the Housing Works Bookstore Café

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Writing prose requires courage, and reading prose equips us with bravery. Three McSweeney’s authors conveyed this at “McSweeney’s Presents: Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Deb Olin Unferth,” held at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York, on the evening of March 12. The message is appropriate, given Housing Works’s efforts to foster a healing community for those afflicted by the dual scourges of HIV/AIDS and homelessness. Amanda Bullock, the Bookstore Café’s events director, spoke briefly about Housing Works and its mission before introducing each of the evening’s readers; the publishers, Bullock said, had donated the books being sold at the event.

At the podium: Deb Olin Unferth, Ben Marcus, and Diane Williams

Unferth, the first to take to the podium, read from her memoir Revolution (Henry Holt 2011). The bright and candid sound of Unferth’s voice amplified the sarcasm murmuring throughout her prose.  Unferth shared an excerpt from a section entitled “Good Ideas,” which related her flirtation with Christianity—a conversion spurred by her then-boyfriend, George. This riled Unferth’s Jewish family, which retaliated in kind: with devout Judaism. Exasperated at the family’s desperate affair with faith, Unferth’s sister lamented the costs of an imposed religious education: “Three days a week I had to go.  While everyone else was having fun. One day you and your God will pay.” Writing of this kind requires soul and bravery because the material is personal, but this sort of prose needs to be open enough that its inherent irony resonates. The audience’s laughter confirmed the power of Unferth’s understated irony.

Ben Marcus, the evening’s second reader, redirected the evening from soulful nonfiction toward relentless fiction. Marcus read from his novel The Flame Alphabet (Knopf 2012), set in an alternate reality where children’s toxic language literally sickens adults. The novel is a parable for how society collapses when we cannot stomach others’ attitudes, and Marcus couches this dramatic tension in Sam and Claire’s struggles with their daughter Esther. But Marcus is not without sensitivity: Sam and Claire yearn to communicate with Esther, to celebrate her birthday and express their love with such endearments as “Sweetie”—even if Esther retaliates that such an appellation is “a word used for pets” and is like her parents “throwing up on” her. What Marcus generates, here, is the reciprocal danger of language: Words can poison, and a response can further toxify a relationship. But this novel is courageous in its adamant belief that we must try to communicate, to find a cure for sickening rhetoric.

Ironically, only words can grant that solace. Diane Williams, the last of the evening’s three readers, took to the podium and read selections from her new collection of flash fictions, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (McSweeney’s 2012). She prefaced her reading by noting that she finds courage in short stories.  Williams demonstrated that short stories do embolden us against the catastrophes of daily life through the pieces “The Emporium,” “On the Job,” “Arm under the Soil,” “Enormously Pleased,” and “Lord of the Face.” “On the Job,” for instance, transforms a man’s decision to buy a belt buckle into an instructive moment through an extended horseracing metaphor. The protagonist resembles “a man whose leader has failed him time after time,” who simply wants to find a way back into the race of life, so he buys a snazzy belt buckle and goes home to his wife. The man needs this woman and her support—he is like “a horse that could not ever get out of its neck-high stall on its own”—and yet he cannot make himself sincere with his wife. The stories in Vicky Swanky revel in this kind of deceptive simplicity: plots that appear linear, brief encounters, chance observations, a looming image or metaphor. Yet, Williams manages to contrive a hinge in each of these stories, images like the belt buckle in “On the Job,” which open the pieces to reveal how Williams’s characters survive in this world.

Prose, no matter how simple or straightforward it seems at first, requires writers with bravery and soul enough to address the ironies of daily life. Because of this, however, writing at its best rewards readers by supplying them with courage, with the knowledge of how to face an increasingly complex world.