#robert boswell

[superstitionrev]

Guest Post, Elizabeth Frankie Rollins: I Am an Animal Text

Guest Post, Elizabeth @frankie_rollins : I Am an Animal Text http://wp.me/p6jBdc-3nj

My writing study has become a lair. I have allowed two stray cats to take over the room, and there have been live lizards, fleas, decapitated birds, a wing with a gristled knob at one end, feathers stuck to the wall, smears of blood on the floor. One morning, I found two little objects on my desk chair: a tiny yellow-beaked baby finch head and a small, dark, licked-clean organ, possibly a gall…

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[nickelnovel-blog]

Funny, suspenseful, and alive with the most vivid adolescent characters you’ll ever read, Nickel is a wonderful novel and Rob Wilder is a masterful writer.

ROBERT BOSWELL, award-winning author of Tumbledown, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, Crooked Hearts, and Mystery Ride

[let-me-know-when-they-leave]

Wednesday, December 2

Dear, About to go back into 5-GULCH after a 6-week break. I’ve been watching and rewatching good movies and reading and rereading good books and letting my mind wander on long walks and doing holiday stuff. I’ve also been working on an essay, uniting bits and pieces of things I’ve been working on over the last few years and trying to weave them together. I don’t really notice that I’m not working a job right now, since I feel busy and I’m tired every night, but I realize it’s weird to be unemployed by choice when most people I know are working two or three jobs or raising kids. I’d feel okay saying I was self-employed if I made any money. I don’t make money. I’m not going to school. I’m just hanging out, spending time with Ryan during his off-season, going outside, writing, thinking, and I don’t know if that makes me lazy or unambitious but when I don’t feel guilty I mostly feel fine about it. I’m working. This is work. But eventually I’ll need something else, just to spin my tires against or to have something to tell people and myself. I read TUMBLEDOWN by Robert Boswell a few years ago and really liked it; it’s been coming to mind a lot while I’ve been taking a break from my novel, and I’m planning to read it again soon. Boswell had some great things to say about the revision process in an interview with Tin House:  The linear brain—the bossy, critical side that permits you to operate the coffeemaker, figure out the remote on the DVR, drive across town, and do other undeniably useful things—doesn’t like to give up its authority, but it tends to build merely logical or mechanical narratives. The narrative brain slips in whenever the linear brain is distracted or bored, and it’s the narrative brain that understands the value of surprise and strangeness and humor. Of course, it also tends to fall in love with its ideas, and that’s when linear brain takes the wheel again. It loves to run down the excesses. One of the tricky parts about being a writer is this switching back and forth. I think the reason some people end up with writer’s block is that they can’t turn off the linear brain’s constant evaluations. That sentence, really? That’s the sentence you want to open with? Would Faulkner like that sentence? What would Katherine Mansfield think of that sentence? You’ve got to turn off that critical voice, give yourself permission to write bad sentences if you need to. You can fix them later.

The trick is to be able to go back and forth between the linear and the narrative without permitting one side to interfere with the other.

[booksonthepark-blog]

Peter Turchi, author of A Muse and a Maze and Maps of the Imagination, recommends Robert Boswell's Tumbledown (Graywolf Press): "Tumbledown has a large cast of characters, all of whom are working to make their way through the world as well as they can. Some of the characters are counselors, some are "clients" (patients), but the line between them isn't as clear as the reader might imagine--in fact, it might be more accurate to say that there isn't a line between them, but a line running through each of them. While some might act in ways more socially acceptable than others, they're all vulnerable, all sympathetic, all trying to decide how to make good choices. The book is unusual in several ways, but also richly rewarding, offering the sort of insight into human nature that reminds us why novels can feel important to us."

[electronoyoungremora]

Can a creature as bound to words as man apprehend a thing beyond words and understand without words that this commodity of the exalted has meaning?

Robert Boswell, Supreme Beings

[upenderfeed]

To Capture this Diversity: A Conversation with Shane R. Collins

To Capture this Diversity: A Conversation with Shane R. Collins

By T.C. Porter

Last week, we had privilege to publish “The Naked Mattress,” by Shane R. Collins. He handled difficult scenes with grace, stitched together a story I will remember for a long time, as if I have been there myself. Great writing, description. Compelling central character with an enviable name (Amanda Funk). A setting (the freshman dorm) common to many of us.  And  … yes … sex! Not…

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[mentorpubliclibrary]

The heart was a tyrant, like a child demanding ice cream instead of broccoli and throwing a fit to get its way.

Robert Boswell, Tumbledown

[therumpus]

From that point forward I changed the way I wrote my reports and how I made recommendations. I hid scores or failed to report them if I thought they might carry too much weight with counselors. Or I might include the scores sheets from one of the measurements, but I’d omit the score from my report. Understand, all of my evasions worked to the client’s advantage, but in trying to correct one problem I almost certainly created another. I became a spin-doctor, more of agent for the client than an evaluator. If the reports were initially a problem because the tests were treated as they were omniscient, now the reports became even more unreliable because I was fiddling with them to avoid repeating mistakes. And the reports were still treated as if the deity Science was speaking through my oracular pages. My reports were a form of unreliable omniscience.

The Rumpus Interview with Robert Boswell