Blog Posts for Sarah Stone

Gold Leaf (A.S. Byatt, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, The Arabian Nights, and the tyranny of “fast-paced” fiction)

Sarah Stone — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:19:31 -0800

A.S. Byatt, in her delicious, capacious, didactic, magical, magisterial new novel, The Children’s Book, both makes/recreates a world and tells a long, rich story. I confess that, though I love many minimalist works, this is the kind of writing that brought me into a life of reading and writing stories, helping other writers figure out how to tell their stories, spending many evenings in ...

LitCrawl

Sarah Stone — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:35:32 -0700

One of my favorite parties of the year is always LitCrawl -- how fabulous to be a writer and reader in a community of writers and readers! LitCrawl, Phase 2: Saturday, Oct. 17 , Phase 2: 7:15-8:15 pmHer Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper, 3520 20thEast-Meets-West “Be”-In: Faculty & Friends of the Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry MFA Program at the California Institute of Integral ...

Aesthetic Distance by Carolyn Cooke

Sarah Stone — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:22:07 -0700

Today all I want to do is to include a link to a brilliant story, "Aesthetic Discipline," by Carolyn Cooke, a part of the series "Fifty-two Stories with Cal Morgan." I don't want to give away too much but will just let anyone coming across this inhabit the story directly. Here's the description from the site: Here is another brand-new story—this one from the acclaimed ...

Finding Your Inner Compass

Sarah Stone — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:49:42 -0700

We live in a noisy culture -- deliciously, horribly, overwhelmingly, fascinatingly noisy. The kind of work we do as writers and artists both arises from our lives and has to resist those circumstances, in order to happen at all. How is it possible to write poetry or fiction, to create a performance, to make a song, painting, sculpture, or collage? All day long, our email dings, our friends invite ...

Some favorite art/craft books for writers (and teachers of writing)

Sarah Stone — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:29:57 -0800

This is a very short list -- it could easily be twice as long -- just a few of the books that my students and friends and I have found useful and illuminating. Some of the books on this list move into the territory of theory. A few of these are “career” books, though I include them with some trepidation and the desire to give advice (wait as long as possible before publishing the first time ...

Bisexuality and Existence

Sarah Stone — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:41:51 -0700

When I was young, I thought everyone was bi, and that anyone who said otherwise was lying, either to themselves or to the rest of us -- that all those straight/gay people were ambivalent/confused/on the fence…It surprised me then how often bisexuals met with anger, a sense of betrayal, annoyed amusement, judgment. We were told that we were too cowardly to admit our real identity or were ...

indelible images

Sarah Stone — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:05:56 -0800

A friend drove across the country to her teaching job in another state, a toilet and bathtub in the back of her car. I never saw that, but I "remember" it, just as I remember the flooded house in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: "If we opened or closed a door, a wave swept through the house, and chairs tottered, and bottles and pots clinked and clunked in the bottoms of the ...

Rough drafts

Sarah Stone — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:13:24 -0800

Revision is when it all becomes possible; when you're writing a rough draft again, after you've been in the final stages of finishing a long work -- it's impossible to remember just what that's like until you're there again. I don't mean the exhilarating moment when you suddenly have a new group of people show up in your head, but the moment just before that, when your brain is like a ...