I announced in my first post as writer-in-residence here at Necessary Fiction that I wanted to focus this month on global fiction. Today I’m going to explore why this subject has been on my mind the last few years. In my early twenties I spent several years living in Chile and Ecuador; soon those places…

With the tumultuous events currently underway in Cairo, today’s post couldn’t be more timely. I am very excited to present the elegant and powerful prose of Egyptian-American writer Dalia Azim, whose novel-in-progress brings us the compelling saga of an Egyptian family, with drama set in both Egypt and the United States. Behold the first chapter…

First, some confessions: I don’t blog or tweet or tumble, and very rarely post on Facebook; my professional website hasn’t been updated in three years. The emails I send, even to friends, tend to be curt, slapdash, sometimes riddled with errors. I’m just not the kind of person who likes to put myself out there,…

1. Someone asked me, how do you become a writer. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I felt her question invested me with an authority I didn’t believe in. Was this my own fear of calling myself A Writer? Was it my reluctance to be pigeonholed, or, equally, to speak in general for something I…

The earliest memories I have of writing take place in the kitchen of my parents’ house, at a pine-topped table with blue legs, now painted green, sometimes with my brothers there, too. The lamp over the table has a design of stars punched into the metal shade, and it’s been there since before my parents…

Woolf’s diary, 24 June, 1918: “Before tea this afternoon I finished setting up the last words of Katherine [Mansfield]‘s stories—68 pages.” + In 2004 I walked into a large room on the ground floor of a university building, a humid day, August, the river rising with mist, the bright blue of the sky signaling autumn…

Notes on process Woolf, December 7, 1918: “But this sort of writing is always done against time; however much time I have”. 1. I approached the novel (the long piece of fiction) with certain assumptions. For instance that its primary considerations are (‘should be’) character and plot. I have no knack for either and I…

(On two themes) (A) As I sat down to write this piece (again and again attempting to begin and failing, taking each failure to heart so that the next time I sat to write it was harder to even think of writing and instead I wasted time reading articles on the internet or just used…