Present Tense

"Because flashbacks, summaries, and other techniques that allow us to manipulate the order and duration of time often destroy the illusion of presentness, most writers of present-tense fiction use them sparingly. . ."

ON THE OTHER HAND

"To the philosopher Mary Warnock, the principal consequence [of thesubordination of history] is the diminishment of the imagination. "The greatest enemy of imagination," she says," is to be locked in the present," for the imagination's primary purpose is to make connections between past,present, and future."

FROM Jauss' Remeberence of Things Present in the WRITER'S CHRONICAL (vol. 34, #5)

One of My Favorite Books: Walking Across Egypt

Walking Across Egypt (Clyde Edgerton)

Mattie Rigsby is another independent, strong willed senior citizen (this one as southern as the day is long) and her attempt to do something good is the grist of this hilarious, poignant novel.

Even now, as I write this, each of the books speak to me from the shelf and call out to me reminding me of roads traveled, experiences shared, and characters encountered.

O'Connor and Fanatics

About the fanatics. People make a judgment of fanaticism by what they are themselves. To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on your head . . . . If I set myself to write about a socially desirable Christianity, all the life would go out of what I do. And if I set myself to write about the essence of Christianity, I would have to quite writing fiction, or either become another person.

from Flannery O'Connor's THE HABIT OF BEING letter to Sister Mariella Gable, 4 May 1963

History is Not Truth

"History is not truth. Truth is in the telling." (Robert Penn Warren)

Great Writers are Either Husbands or Lovers

Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. (Susan Sontag)

Fiction Must Tell the Ineffable Truth

. . . Art, by its very nature, cannot be written for the purpose of demonstrating a preconceived idea, even a religious or spiritual one. It must tell the ineffable truth about the human experience. The artist therefore has to be willing to go into that place in her soul which is so deep and so dark that she can't see her way around, where she can't rely on traditional knowledge or conventional ways of knowing, and she has to open her eyes to whatever's there.

Writing is an act of compassion, of empathy, of generosity of spirit, both from writer to character and writer to reader, and reading is the reader's act of reciprocal compassion. Writing is an act of faith, faith that if I tell a story honestly enough it will resonate in to the loves of people who haven't lived these things, faith that if I listen closely.

From a talk by Elizabeth Dewberry, novelist Many Things Have Happened Since He Died and Sacrement of Lies.

The Best Criticism

"The best criticism conveys not only what is good or bad about a film--and why it's good or bad--but also why these distinctions are important.

From the WALL STREET JOURNAL"Pick Your Biopic" by Jason L. Riley.