Andrew Roe

Really like this quote from a Fictionaut Five interview with Sara Lippman:

“Dani Shapiro once told me that when Grace Paley was her teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Paley said she wrote in the bath. Of course, Paley didn’t mean she was soaking in the tub with dripping wet pages. What she was referring to — and what Dani passed along to me — is the space around the work. The time that you’re not physically writing, that’s all part of it, and as writers, we need to grant and honor that, too, as part of the process.

“Right now, it’s enough of a trick to secure time to write, let alone carve out space around it, but I have this time each day when I walk to pick up my kids from school. Roughly twenty minutes there, and – depending on whether or not my daughter conks out in the stroller – another twenty minutes to get my son. I’ve ‘written’ a whole bunch of stuff during these quiet, uninterrupted spells through my neighborhood.”

You can read the entire interview here.

You can do that here.

The issue includes my story “The Big Empty,” which begins like so:

“We took the kid. And I know how bad that sounds, really, I do, but believe me: He was sitting by himself at the gas station, out in the back, by the bathrooms and dumpsters and greasy cardboard boxes, and when Jim came out of the men’s room, all sweaty, looking like he might hurl (he didn’t), and we started heading back to the car, there he was—this kid, by himself, sitting with his knees tucked up tight against his chest and his head leaning sideways, cheek resting on his knees like he was trying to fall asleep and dream his way out where he was. I remember thinking: Am I seeing what I’m seeing? There was no one there with him. No sign of parents or brothers or sisters or anybody. He was alone, forgotten, and seemed like he was used to it.”

And here’s a list of all the contributors:

Gregory Sherl, Peter Schwartz, Brad Green, Pacze Moj, Samantha Ducas, Howard C. Mueller IV, Ali Abdolrezaei, b.l. pawelek, Shaindel Beers, Neila Mezynski, Amanda Deo, Nathan Graziano, Jessica Anya Blau, Ethel Rohan, Josh Goller, Janey Smith, Meg Tuite, Timmy Waldron, Michael Pollock, Claire Foster, Nate House, Scott McClanahan, Ken Sparling, Robert Lopez, Christian TeBordo, Roxane Gay, and Barry Graham.

“There is such a thing as a passionate amateur. By strict definition I am a professional novelist. But I don’t ever feel like a professional when I sit down to do the work. I feel, with each book, like I’ve never written a book before and I have to figure it out… It never seems to get easy.”

Jonathan Franzen, in an interview with the Guardian

So I’ve been revising my short story collection. Again. Putting in newer stories. Taking out other stories. Tinkering (improving, I hope) stories that have already been published. Catching typos and repetitions and writerly tics.

This is the sixth official revision. At least there are six versions of the Word doc that contains the manuscript. The truer number is probably more like 20-25. Something like that.

And this time I did a little something different.

I wrote out all the story titles on 3 x 5 index cards. Then I spread the cards out on the floor. Arranged. Rearranged.

This really helped me “see” the collection as a whole (vs. scrolling through the Word doc).

At one point, my five-year-old son Ethan came into the room.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “I’m trying to see which order I want to put the stories in my book. To see which one should go first and then second and then third and on and on. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

He looked down at all the index cards, all the individual stories that hopefully come together as something more, something greater.

“You should put the best story first,” he said.

• Tuesday’s Literary Death Match in San Diego was a blast. I bow to Jim Ruland’s greatness. And Todd Zuniga is one of three people in the universe who can get away with wearing a white suit. You can see some photos here.

• Best novel first lines? Here’s a list of 100. What’s missing? DeLillo’s Underworld: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”

• New books I want to read ASAP: Bruce Machart’s The Wake of Forgiveness, Ethel Rohan’s Cut Through the Bone (available for preorder starting today!), and Matt Bell’s How They Were Found.

• Salinger bio due in January. Galleycat has the scoop: “[It] provides a tremendous amount of new information, shedding light for the first time on many unknown events in Salinger’s life: his wartime romance; the inspiration behind The Catcher in the Rye; the impact of his experience fighting in the D-Day landings; the true story behind Franny and Zooey; full details on his romance with Oona O’Neill (later Mrs. Charlie Chaplin); his office intrigues with famous New Yorker editors and writers; his friendship with Ernest Hemingway; surprising evidence that he intended to continue publishing after his last story appeared in l965, and much more.”