Writer’s Life « Ruelle Electrique. Friend and inspiration Emily Breunig has initiated a new shared online writer’s space called The Loyalty of Writers, featuring women on writing by writing women. Treat yourself and take a […] Read Article → Excerpt from Post MFA: Covering Residencies on November 20, 2:35-3:35 at Saint Mary’s College of CA originally posted here. Mansfield Studio in the mist at MacDowell Colony On Wednesday, November 20, […] Read Article → By Your Salonniere Teaching in a sense can ruin reading.
Read Article → In the middle of a fantasy come true, your salonniere is almost at the mid-way point of a three- week fellowship at MacDowell Colony for the Arts, the oldest artist’s […] Read Article → Theory Book. Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur. 1916. On the Art of Writing. 73, John Gardner. The following interview incorporates three done with John Gardner over the last decade of his life. After interviewing him in 1971, Frank McConnell wrote of the thirty-nine-year-old author as one of the most original and promising younger American novelists. His first four novels—The Resurrection (1966), The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), Grendel (1971), and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972)—represented, in the eyes of many critics and reviewers, a new and exhilarating phase in the enterprise of modern writing, a consolidation of the resources of the contemporary novel and a leap forward—or backward—into a reestablished humanism.
One finds in his books elements of the three major strains of current fiction: the elegant narrative gamesmanship of Barth or Pynchon, the hyperrealistic gothicism of Joyce Carol Oates and Stanley Elkin, and the cultural, intellectual history of Saul Bellow. “It's as if God put me on earth to write,” Gardner observed once. But why specifically Beowulf? Oh, sure.