Write The Book: Conversations on Craft
Arts:Books
Author Maggie Kast, whose 2015 novel, A Free Unsullied Land (Fomite Press), recently won a Wordwrite Book Award.
This week’s Write the Book Prompt is generously suggested by Maggie Kast, who uses it when she teaches workshops on "Writing Your Family Story." Identify an object that was important in your family (either your family of origin, or the family you’ve since come to be a part of), and then contemplate that object, draw it if you want to, identify sensory details connected with it (looks, smells, feels, tastes, makes sounds?) and then put that object into a scene--into a place--if you want, draw that place. And then ask yourself what happened in that place that made the object so important. Did it involve something contentious, nostalgic. Was there a fearful memory, or did the object get broken, perhaps? Write as you remember.
Good luck with your work in the coming week, and please listen next week for another prompt or suggestion.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students).
N.B. Maggie wrote to offer the precise William Gass quote she tried to recall when we spoke. Here's her follow-up: ... a quote from William Gass' wonderful book, On Being Blue. Subtitled "a philosophical inquiry," it deals mostly with writing about sex. The passage I was attempting to quote is: "I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing." It's on page 20 of the edition brought out by New York Review of Books in 2014, with introduction by Michael Gorra. Original publication was 1976, and that's when I first encountered it. - MK
Rebecca Valley - 10/24/22
Stephen Kurkjian - Archive Interview (10/17/22)
Editors of Vermont Almanac - 10/10/22
Kim MacQueen Interviews John Killacky and Mark Redmond - 9/26/22
Kimberly Garrett Brown - 9/19/22
Doug Wilhelm - 9/12/22
Angela Palm and Malisa Garlieb - Archive Interviews (8/5/22)
Daniel Lusk - 8/29/22
Fiona Barton - 8/15/22
Stephen Cramer - Archive Interview (8/8/22)
Mohsin Hamid - 8/1/22
Laura Budofsky Wisniewski - 7/25/22
Shanta Lee Gander - 7/18/22
Archive Interview - J Robert Lennon (7/11/22)
Wendy Call - Archive Interview (7/4/22)
Jennifer Egan - 6/27/22
Carlos Allende - 6/20/22
Jori Lewis - 6/13/22
Meg Wolitzer - Archive Interview (6/6/22)
Lois Eby and Nadine Budbill - 6/1/22
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Lit Society: Books and Drama
Ex Libris
Fresh Air
Just So Stories
Anne of Green Gables
Myths and Legends
What Should I Read Next?