Contributors to Illuminating Fiction

Start: 01/26/2010 7:00 pm

Join Porter Square Books for an evening with contributors to Illuminating Fiction: Today's Best Writers of Fiction, Author Interviews by Sherry Ellis.

The interviews contained in Illuminating Fiction include unique questions drawn from the text of the authors' work, questions about narrative voice, character, place, point of view, plot, revision, questions about the arc of the story/novel, questions about writing process, questions about the trajectory of the writer's career, and questions about the role and importance of writing courses and mentoring. Interviewed authors also provided their opinions of quotes about writing and creativity by other authors and artists, and they respond to questions about the challenges they face in developing their craft. The reader is thereby able to gain an intimate and specific understanding of the writer's words and craft, and what was going on in the author's mind as they created their novels, short stories, and poems.

The readers for this event will be:

Steve Almond is the author of two short story collections; My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book Candyfreak, and the novel Which Brings Me to You, co-authored by Julianna Baggot. His short stories have appeared in Tin House, Zoetrope, McSweeney's, Ploughshares and others, and his other work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Believer, and Boston Magazine.

Sherry Ellis' interviews have previously appeared in Kenyon Review, The Writer's Chronicle, Glimmer Train, AGNI, and other publications. In 2006 Ellis' first book on writing, NOW WRITE! Fiction Writing Exercises From Today's Best Teachers and Writers, was selected as one of the best writing books of the year by The Writer magazine. Her second book of writing exercises NOW WRITE! Non-Fiction is forthcoming in 2009. Ellis has recently completed writing The Goode Books, a novel, and she is at work on NOW WRITE! Screenwriting. Ellis previously taught writing in Concord, Massachusetts.

Lise Haines is the author of three novels, Girl in the Aren a, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity and In My Sister's Country, and a chapbook of poetry, Thin Scars/Purple Leaves. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Agni, and Post Road. Haines has been a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Fiction Award. Haines is a Visiting Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University and was Writer in Residence at Emerson College for four years.

Elizabeth Searle's most recent work is the libretto for Tonya & Nancy: The Opera, an original opera based on the infamous Harding/Kerrigan ice skating scandal. She is also the author of Celebrities in Disgrace, a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, A Four Sided Bed wich was nominated for an American Library Association Award, and the short story collection My Body to You, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has also been published in Michigan Quarterly, Agni, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of six books of prose and poetry. Her most recent book is The Moments of Past Happiness. Essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, The Harvard Review, the Virginia Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and in many anthologies. Ms. Spivack is currently working on a personal literary memoir about Robert Lowell and his circle: Sexton, Bishop, Plath etc. She teaches in Boston and in Paris.