Cross-post from Antonio Dias Fiction, Inspiration and Accumulation

JDG: I wonder if you could say more about how you see this process of how smaller stories grow into a larger, coherent narrative? SB: I’m not sure it can be very simply defined. But to me it’s predominantly about inspiration, and a process of accumulation. This exchange comes from Jeppe Dyrendom Graugaard’s interview with

A cross post from A D Fiction

A few thoughts on plot… As an introduction to my new site, a home for my Fiction, Short Stories, Memoir, and Writing on Writing; I urge you to follow the link to read my first post of “Writing On Writing.” You might want to look around at the rest while you’re there.

Stray thoughts on the purpose of gatekeepers

I’ve had difficulty dealing with the disruption in publishing over the last decade or so. I was unlucky to find myself entering the lists just as the publishing world began to fall apart. Those fragments of an old guard I was fortunate enough to encounter showed enthusiasm for my fiction, though in trying to find

Maintaining the Lie of Invulnerablity

Strength versus power. We tend to see them as synonyms. Or that strength is a measure of the power available to us. In a Newtonian sense this may be true, but what if we go beyond reduction? Let’s start by asking, “Who’s strength and who’s power?”

“Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality…”

Sentiment takes any criticism, real or only inferred, and turns it into an excuse for a reaction, anything to return the focus where we demand it belongs.

Digested by the Spectacle

Once again violence breaks the surface in a way that brings it home even to those of us far removed from the incident. The shootings in Tuscon have joined the list of assassinations that have punctuated my life time. In all that time I can think of only two “Right Wing” victims, – George Wallace

Mourning for the World, Part 2

“With a tow, you often know with sharp certainty that disaster is coming, inexorable and unavoidable – Let’s say an engine failure on the tug while towing an immense fuel barge. – yet there’s nothing to be done.”

War of the Worlds

In the past we had place. Now we don’t. In the future place may re-assert itself – at least I hope so…. Any search for a carving out of our own agency soon comes to the absolute necessity for a place on which to stand. Most fundamentally that distills down to a physical place upon

Cross-post from Antonio Dias, adw

On the eve of leaving for the upcoming Dark Mountain Festival in Llangollen, Wales I’m adding another short story to this constellation of sites. I wrote The Island last September. While I think all of my fiction, as well as my other writing, comes out of a sensibility I share with other Dark Mountain writing,

the Mainstream’s Misunderstanding

This is where art comes in. It’s not in essays or speeches, all of which are so hard to distinguish from polemic by their very form, that minds can be affected. In fiction, in visual art, in poetry we have the best means of establishing a body of shareable “experiences” that begin to forge a new way of being in the world. These can have the effect of drawing people to them as opposed to simply setting up their defenses to resist new ideas. In an eagerness to misunderstand whenever someone hears that “poetry is the answer,” they will only see whatever form of art they personally dislike and find easy to discount. Probe a little deeper and there isn’t anyone who isn’t affected by poetry, of the kind they do open themselves to, by whatever name it goes by.

The Scheme

I’ve been putting most of my efforts lately into setting up and expanding a net of sites that I hope will consolidate my production and place it where it can find an audience, where I can find collaborators, patrons? I have two interwoven tasks, to inventory what I’ve done and explore where it’s taking me;

Introduction to Shoal Hope

Introduction to Shoal Hope Last night I watched Bill Moyers delve into a chapter of his own history that has been central to the shaping of all our histories.  He went through Lyndon Johnson’s Oval Office tapes as if through a scrapbook of his own youth.  In it he found snapshots of what it was