The year of the bison followed the year of the bat. The year of the bat followed the year of the unborn. The year of the unborn robbed the year of the precipice. The year of the precipice turned to face the year of kindness, clasped her forearm, too hard, he clasped too hard. The…

FOR YEARS I WORKED on a manuscript of poems called That Honorary Coxswain of the Heart. I either couldn’t let it be or it wouldn’t let me go. When I started work on it, I wrote in a purple notebook consisting of 150 9.5” x 6” college-ruled sheets, a notebook that also contained addresses, phone…

Susan Stinson, a Northampton writer who hosted me at the town’s local library in March 2011, wrote me about an interview I did for a radio show in neighboring Amherst when I was visiting for that reading. I grew up in Northampton, and my most recent novel The River Gods is set there. Susan wrote:…

[Brian Kiteley’s note: This is a poem by Seth Landman done under the constraint of the Bridge exercise I talked about in the post A Book of Quotes. The first section, Seth says, up until the first “//” is from Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield.” The last section is from Moby Dick. And there’s a bit in…

This is from the novel I’m working on, which is set in Crete in 1988. It’s about love, sun, sex, and the CIA, with cameos by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Antikythera We took a taxi to the ferry in Kissamos, on the island of Crete, at four-thirty in the morning. We lay down on the…

For about three years I’ve been copying and pasting (and sometimes typing up) quotations from book reviews, blogs, obituaries, on-line journal articles, as well as from the books I’m reading. My computer file is simply titled Book of Quotes. This thing — a 230-page loose and baggy monster if ever there was one — grew…

This piece of fiction is something cast off from my third novel The River Gods. I won’t explain its sources, except to say that a good deal of this was not originally my own writing. At this point, it is now much more my own writing than anyone else’s. The Hampshire Gazette this story speaks…

Thank you, Steve Himmer, for giving me this platform. I plan to write this month about fiction. I will also present a few pieces of my own fiction and other people’s fiction as examples of some of the problems I’m talking about. In the introduction to my second book of fiction exercises, The 4 A.M.…

“It was all about money. Since high school. Not money in terms of what is in a wallet or a pocketbook. Not what it could buy. Not really. Just escalating numbers on a computer screen that referred to the contents of a series of accounts.” A slim man in a Nehru jacket deferentially filled the…

To begin with, none of that “Nevermore” kaka. That’s the last time you’ll hear me say that word, and strike me down if it’s otherwise. If it starts to slip out while I’m snoozing, it means my subconscious ain’t getting with the program, is being one of those spitball-spewers when the teacher is laying down…

First: A body in motion will stay in motion, and a body at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external force. He sits across from Tabitha on the metro, not next to her, since she purposely chose the seats farthest from the door. This is their last night in Prague, the…

Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories (Belknap 2009) is a book that deserves to be read by anyone who marvels at the pervasiveness and power of fiction, and by writers especially. Steeped in the sciences, particularly evolutionary biology, the book is nonetheless eminently readable and lucid. He’s especially tuned in to the concept of…