CRAFT
Fiction at the Sentence Level
Elements of Craft in John Updike's “The Happiest I've Been”
by Sean Madden
I first read John Updike while standing at a crowded, downtown Los Angeles bus stop in November 2011. The story was “Natural Color,” a selection from Richard Ford’s Granta Book of the American Short Story: Volume Two.
At that time, I was busy reorienting my life around one particular ambition. I’d graduated from UC Berkeley in the spring of 2010 determined to become a professional fiction writer. Now I was ready to dedicate myself to the task.
Between graduation and the fall of 2011, I’d given up. I’d given up after getting ahead of myself and failing to achieve what I’d set out to do. I’d let the publication of the first short story I’d ever written, in the University of California’s student-run literary arts magazine, convince me that any top-tier Master of Fine Arts program would be thrilled to accept my application. When this fantasy didn’t play out—I applied to programs in the fall of 2010, and was rejected by them all—I felt like the butt of a cruel joke. I was so heartbroken, actually, and disappointed in myself, that I quit writing. I quit reading fiction, too. I no longer believed I had what it took to succeed as a writer. I came to regard the publication of my story in Matchbox Magazine as a fluke. My professors and peers at Berkeley who’d acknowledged my talent were guilty of mere flattery.
FEATURED | CREATIVE NONFICTION
Diamonds in the Light
by Eddie P. Gomez
Florence, Italy • Summer 2013
Somewhere over Spain, I’m sitting between two fascinating young people on a plane ride home from Italy. I'd call them kids, but they’re both adults living in the real world. The three of us struck up a conversation spontaneously as soon as the plane taxied toward the runway. We were laughing comfortably within minutes of meeting each other, sharing quick versions of our personal stories in that uninhibited way strangers do when they know they’ll never see each other again.
Boogaloo Too
by Matthew James Babcock
In the high school cafeteria, I body-locked and sugar-popped to the gap Band’s “Party Train,” whipping up a whooping hullabaloo…
Robert J. Sawyer
Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer Shares His Process and Writerly Wisdom Interviewed by Gene Wilburn
“…the tiny, character-driven bits,
the quieter scenes, the epiphanies,
are often what the reader remembers most;
they’re the heart and soul of your writing…”
—Robert J. Sawyer
Creative Catalyst:
NaNoWriMo founder
Chris Baty talks to SPM
...the impulse to create...waits, patiently, for us to find a way back...For me, it was through NaNoWriMo. However you get back there, it just feels pretty incredible when you arrive.
—Chris Baty
A Wee Bit Supernatural:
Scottish Novelist Regi Claire
Interviewed by Ann Cefola
I tend not to analyze my work because I am a bit superstitious: too much awareness might interfere with my imagination, kill it stone-dead.
—Regi Claire
FEATURED | FICTION
Chesterton
by Timothy Boudreau
Chesterton was my aunt Lucy’s gentleman friend. “Well, Nicky, I just call him my gentleman friend”—that’s what she used to say to me, with a certain special emphasis that made him sound like a rare creature imported from old-world Europe, the kind of person you might order from the same catalog where you ordered a porcelain English tea set, or a tin of butter cookies baked in Denmark or Holland.
—SIX SMALL POEMS—
After Alexej Jawlensky
by Karen Holden
Young Girl, 1915 by Karen Holden There are eyes upside down behind my mouth, another brow beneath my chin. We are all like this: who we are painted over who we were Speech silenced, dead to smell they could not take away our eyes those reflecting pools in our faces: dark mud, red blood, blue sky Or those curtained, but open still, inside
RALPH
(Random Alpha Logic PHilosopher)
OpenAI-Generated poetry prompted by Gene Wilburn, created by RALPH
READ RALPH's POEM→
