Category: fiction
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Book Club Suggestions : How To Run One
Often people will search for book club suggestions online looking for lists of suggested reading, but really what they’re looking for is guidance for how to run a book club well. This particular post will offer book club suggestions in the realm of how to talk through the books you’ve read: specifically what do they mean?…
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Liberal Arts Definition and the Role of Literature
Today’s guest post working towards a Liberal Arts Definition as regards The Role of Literature comes from the ever-brilliant, ever-humble Dr. Anthony Cirilla, The Boethian Acolyte. I can remember asking some very awful English teachers (and some very good ones) not only for a liberal arts definition, but also “when am I going to use this in real life?”…
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Sitting at the Feet of the Hogwarts Headmaster
Sgt. John Granger of the United States Marine Corps (stationed in Japan) was proud to say that he was perfectly normal, thank you very much. He was the last person you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious — especially invocational magic — and the last person you would expect to become a Hogwarts headmaster…
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Palliative Care for Imprisonism Literature
In the last few decades it grew popular for critics to predict and mourn the death of the novel. The death of the novel is really the death of their particular kind of novel: imprisonism literature. It’s as if someone said at their father’s funeral: “Fatherhood is dead to me” or before their own suicide…
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Introducing the Vale Megacosm : The Universe in which I Write
I’m writing this post about the Vale Megacosm for those of you that have followed me from the beginning. I mean the very beginning. As a beta reader myself for a handful of authors — and as someone well familiar with the slow output of many epic writers — I know it can take forever…
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Brand Story : My Love-Hate with “Story”
It took talking with two self-proclaimed “story marketers,” a bombardment of “brand story” during the superbowl, and a self-proclaimed (though unordained) “pastor” who said, “It’s all about stories, man, just stories,” for me to realize how fully I had fallen out of love with the word “story.” It also helped that three different large organizations…
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Of Making Many Books There is No End ?
I grew up in a fairly conservative religious community that abhorred study and praised ignorance, in a way. They believed along with what Asimov said of many Americans: that my ignorance is as good as anyone else’s knowledge. I understand that the rational capacity of any given person is up to the task of puzzling…
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Writing Tools VS. Story Craft
In June I will again join the Ozark Creative Arts Academy for high schoolers to teach some writing tools and story craft seminars. This year I plan to shape my talk out of the overflow of a conversation I had last year with Dr. Giltner and Dr. Cirilla at the Niagra Falls retreat. It goes something…
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Sense of Wonder : Awaken and Enliven
As I’ve now said in Art and Fear, in Carefree Art, and in The Hipster Fallacies (and as was implied in the quote on Science and Agnosticism) it is the job of the artist to awaken the sense of wonder in the world, to use their imagination as the organ of meaning and connect the…
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Sound of Silence : Doors of Stone Prep
Apologies for delaying this reread of Kingkiller since OCTOBER. Still anxious to get it all read in preparation for whenever Doors of Stone comes out in the distant future (don’t want my intentions to get misconstrued again). But I’m mainly anxious to get it reread because rereading books we love is fun. To explain the delay:…
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Felling and Man Waiting to Die : The Name of the Wind Prologue
We’re reading The Name of the Wind for the 10th Anniversary Edition in preparations for Doors of Stone. Today we’re focused on the prologue’s use of Felling and a man waiting to die — if you haven’t grabbed ahold of my 13 assumptions for any Kingkiller Reread, you might want to do that. Spoilers inside, of course, but as…
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The Name of the Wind Tenth Anniversary Reread : Appendices and Details
Well the last post on my The Name of the Wind Tenth Anniversary Reread accidentally blew up Google Alerts for some folk but it also got John Granger (the literary critic) to buy a copy of The Name of the Wind, so I consider it a net good. This one will focus on some new…