Did you ever feel you were smaller than your life? Quite ridiculously small. And yet at the same time too big? Did you ever feel that the fit, at any rate, was wrong? I am too small for how big I’ve become. Talk about diet: that’s a laugh when I’m fifty feet top to toe.…

No need to go obscure here. The films of Antonioni are what get me going and have inspired my own work for years. When I think about his films, namely L’Eclisse and La Notte, I have memories of sitting alone in the darkness, reduced to tears in the soft glow grey of a TV screen.…

It’s the short man who holds the camera, the tall man who gives the orders. The tall one tells me to stand by the chickens, to scatter cracked corn so the birds will scratch and peck around my feet. Red, those birds. Brick-red feathers and candy-red combs on their heads like blistered knuckles. They make…

When we watched it, on basement televisions after parents had gone to sleep or on a high school monitor after classes had ended, we were never less than convinced that it had been made locally. The hotel where most of it was set, we believed, looked like a place that had burned down on Route…

And so it was and so it is. A folding in of folds. An origami of the mind. Anna finds herself, once more, at the black door of the warehouse. Again, the palm of her hand pushing against the cold steel until it gives. But gives into what? And for whom? Who is she? A…

Who are you? You are a detective. What does it mean to speak of writing that is haunted by cinema? Of writing that is, say, Lynchian, or widescreen in its vision? Of writing that somehow captures or is inspired by the fleeting urgency of the screen image, in all its varieties? This month, as writer-in-residence,…

Writing about family (while they’re alive) can eat you up inside with guilt. It took me a long time to understand that loving someone well doesn’t mean stunting your work or your story. I try to write the truth. This essay originally appeared on The Rumpus in April of 2012. + It took my mother…

Below is a GChat conversation/interview conducted with Daniel José Older. I RePrinted his story “Victory Music”, and you can read that here. + Ashley Ford Okay, Daniel First of all, thanks for doing this for me Daniel José Older it is truly my pleasure Ashley Ford So, I’m RePrinting your story “Victory Music” which originally…

It’s odd what you can believe to be true about yourself, only to have one encounter change that for good. I used to believe that I didn’t care for stories that weren’t based in reality, or at least, a realistic version of imagined events. Then I read “Salsa Nocturna” by Daniel José Older. That’s how…

I wrote this essay in 2009 for a group blog I shared with five other women writers from college. It was first published in PANK 6 and it was the first time I wrote about my father. This is the essay that started the journey toward writing my book. Thank you for reading with me.…

First of all, thank you to Steve Himmer for the opportunity to serve as the November Writer-In-Residence for Necessary Fiction. The opportunity to share the work of writers I admire is greatly appreciated. At times, I’ve described myself as a literary fangirl. I’m certain that could be taken in a number of unintended ways, but…

It’s the final day of October and so ends my residency at Necessary Fiction. For the past 31 days I’ve posted essays by fiction writers exploring the Other Things We Do to keep ourselves whole as writers. What I learned is that the creative process is a tricky thing. We need to leave it to…