I think I’ve always read like a copyeditor, even way back before I knew what a copyeditor was. One of my favorite authors is Proust, and when I was young I would read some of his sentences over and over trying to make sure I understood how every word related to the other words and just to make sure I understood what he was saying.
A lot of young writers don’t have a lot of empathy, and I don’t think I did. But that’s just part of growing up. If you still have the knives out when you’re my age, it’s time to put them away.
I wanted the reader to feel like they were in some awful, horrendous dive bar in a tremendously deranged Irish city in the middle of the 21st century and there’s some crazy old fucking whisky-drunk nut alongside them whispering this demented tall tale into their ears.
No matter how people approach loneliness or solitude or community, we all do. We’re not that different from each other. The way we experience it is different, but we all experience love, pain, loneliness.
Obama’s administration has been a devastating disappointment, in so many different ways. Fanatical secrecy, the persecution of whistleblowers, foreign interventions and arms shipments that make things worse, the quintupling of drone killings -- it just has to be said.
Initially I had a blog because everyone told me to have a blog. And when I started, I thought what can I regularly blog about that feels like a deep enough well? And the answer was: the process of writing. The creative process itself. What it takes to do the work, what are the pitfalls and the joys, the struggles and the privileges. We do what we do alone in a room. Yet we’re struggling with the blank pages.
Meloy made an unexpected foray into middle grade fiction with a 2011 book about 14-year-olds and a magic book that falls into the hands of Russian spies. Despite being a reader in lockstep with this writer, I have absolutely no idea where she's going. It seemed time to query the writer herself.
The first thing to remember is that the government has never, ever respected your privacy. At least not since post-WWI and the Communist threat in America. They’ve been opening your mail for years. They’ve been wire-tapping without warrants for years. The only difference is that it’s easier now.
I'd just gone through this break-up and was feeling crushed and heartbroken. I had quit my salaried staff job in advertising and I was running out of money/time. So I said, that's it. I have to do this. I have nothing else. I have to give it my all and actually finish this novel.
Why is it that now that I’m a writer I can get a job teaching? My resume as an indie rocker completely dwarfs my resume as a writer — very impressive, lots of press from fancy places and citations and awards and things. But there’s no job for that. How come that is less valid an American art form than writing poetry and saying, "I published a chapbook with 500 copies on some little press that some guy runs"?
I set up a tripod and posed for every panel. I was drawing myself crying and lying. I got a chair that looked like my psychiatrist’s chair. I posed like my mother. I posed like my psychiatrist. And really, literally embodying these other characters, me and people who were around me, thoroughly immersing myself in that world and that time.
We are not choosing between a world without exploitation and a world without culture. They are not in a direct competition with each other, where one must be prioritized, and the other overshadowed or shamed for its insignificance.
If people want to call my novel a literary horror novel, that’s fine. I know it makes them feel better in a neat-freaky sort of way. Like balling their socks and organizing them in a drawer according to color. But really, people, it doesn’t matter.
Until recently most people knew Orson Scott Card as the author of Ender’s Game, a beloved modern science fiction classic. Of late, however, Card’s opposition to gay marriage has led to widespread media excoriation and intense scrutiny of his politics. In an effort to nuance current coverage, I chose to ask Card questions about writing and his identity as a writer.