At Guernica, Hala Alyan discusses her new novel, The Arsonists’ City, and how her work as a clinical psychologist informs her writing. “I find the two practices are quite compatible,” Halyan says. “There’s a seamlessness in going from working with someone else’s narrative, and the fragments of their life, and trying to make it all cohere and figure out where things went awry, and then puzzling through a writing project. A lot of similar questions regarding intention, desire, and fear. Something I love about being a clinician is that I’m always thinking about how someone’s story is unfolding, and what might be getting in the way.”
Fitting Together Fragments of Narrative with Hala Alyan
Writing Mirrors
“Here is the trouble with looking for ourselves in the writers whose works we admire, at least if we are proposing to be their biographers. For if we are in search of ourselves, or in this case our own troubled teenaged selves roaming New York, then we are apt to downplay those parts of the life that don’t correspond with that need for recognition.” Anne Boyd Rioux writes about biography and the distance, good or bad, between subject and biographer for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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We’ll Find Ourselves
New Peter Gizzi poems about touchscreens and Instagram? Yes, please.
Hilary Mantel’s Hospital Diary
“In the days after the procedure I was sometimes so exhausted by movement that I would wait patiently for someone to come in and give me a paper cup of pills that was almost, not quite, out of my reach. But somehow, I would always contrive to get my pen in my hand, however far it had rolled… When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?” Hilary Mantel writes a diary on hospitalization for the London Review of Books.
In Response to Rejections
At the Electric Literature blog, Judson Merrill responds to his many rejection letters: “If you were that excited about my submission, I’m concerned you may have read it with unfair expectations… I’ve reattached my submission under the new title ‘Eight Pages of Tripe’…”
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