Despite two and a half years in a top-ranked MFA program, nobody told me anything about what the writing life was like—especially outside the shelter of academia. In our writing workshops we analyzed the short stories everyone was writing in…
May 2024 National Short Story Month Prompts
We had a blast inspiring you to write short stories this month and we hope you did too! Below is a compiled list of the prompts we posted on our Instagram page throughout the month of May. Feel free to…
As I Loved You by Kris Faatz
Winner of the Fox Tales “Music” Contest Dad’s guitar bites back. That’s why Grace never could play it, even when Dad tried to teach her before he left for France, so you can play for me when I come home,…
A Conversation with Jarret Keene
Jarret Keene earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at Florida State University. A beloved and highly sought after professor, Dr. Keene is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he teaches…
Hemingway Looks at Himself by David Massey
Ernest Hemingway led a famously adventurous life, going to wars when he did not have to, hunting big game (and getting a great nonfiction novel, Green Hills of Africa, out of it), becoming an afficionado of bullfighting, boxing in his…
Book Review by Angela Mitchell: “Thank Your Lucky Stars” by Sherrie Flick
Reading Sherrie Flick’s new collection of short fiction, Thank Your Lucky Stars (Autumn House, 2018), is a kind of literary feast, with its gathering of characters, all hungering for love and connection and a desire to better nourish both their…
After Turning the Graduation Cap Tassel to the Other Side by Alan Ferland
I didn’t go for my MFA after graduating from college almost seven years ago. A handful of my classmates went down that path with heads held high and the talent they’d developed during our times together. I didn’t follow them,…
More on the Suspension of Disbelief by David Massey
I previously wrote a few words on the importance to the writer of the suspension of disbelief. I would like to say a little more because I did not say all that I feel on that topic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge…
Discontinuity in Fiction by David Massey
Morse Peckham, a professor under whom I took a class in graduate school, had a theory that the role of the arts in a complex, stressful society is to provide discontinuity, so that people might rehearse the experience of it…
More on the Senses by David Massey
I want to say a few more words about the senses in literature. So much can be accomplished through visceral detail. Consider the first paragraph of Anton Chekhov’s “The Beauties”: I remember, when I was a high-school boy in the…
On Method by David Massey
I read a statement by an author recently that if one does not follow a regular regimen of daily composition, one is not a serious writer. This was a fairly vain statement, it seemed to me, because it relegates the…
On Style by David Massey
Katherine Anne Porter said as true a thing as there is to say about style: “You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.” When I began writing seriously,…