If I Had More Time, It Would Have Been Shorter…

/in

My new essay is up at Sundayed.com, the side project I’m contributing to with a few friends including Jason Moriber from Wise Elephant who helps me run this site.

This weekend I’m talking about the “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40” issue of The New Yorker.   The fiction I read is varied, but I’m not much for the new style a la the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  It all seems to follow a strict formula and that’s not my style.

“One of my all time favorite short story writers, John Cheever, had an alternative philosophy for making short stories strong and bittersweet.  Cheever drank much too much, had a troubled home life including repressed bisexuality and no successful formal education to speak of.  Was he ambitious? Cheever sacrificed everything in service to his craft, his obsessions, his compulsions, the greatest of which was his writing.

Can any of these prodigies say the same?”

I hope you can take a look, enjoy some of the other contributors and leave a comment!

Happy 4th of July.