Nicola Mason, Editor of Acre Books, interviews Jenn Scott, author of Her Adult LifeNicola Mason: Some might characterize the stories in Her Adult Life as grim, yet I find them hopeful, largely because characters who are trapped, either by mindset or circumstance or...
Acre Books Blog
Heraclitus and Hummer: An Interview
Double Blind InterviewBy prior arrangement, I met the poet T. R. Hummer at a place where three roads converged in a yellow wood midway in life’s journey. On the cusp of publishing his twelfth book of poetry, After the Afterlife, he was feeling cocky, and so he was...
The Calomel Question
Nicola Mason: Decades ago I went into publishing, not just because I love literature, but because I love copyediting. There’s a special pleasure in immersing myself in a writer’s style and syntax, the world of their story, essay, poem, or novel. My enjoyment is...
Andrew Hudgins on “Katie Dammit”
When I was asked to write about an angry baby, I thought of an act of toddler ferocity I’d witnessed when a colleague brought her son to work at the University of Cincinnati. The kid was screaming his guts out in the English Department mail room, and when she leaned...
Margaret Luongo on “Functional Aesthetics”
Though my first thoughts when approached with [the Very Angry Baby] assignment were “kitten” and “cancer,” in that order, it’s the mother’s voice that came through the strongest, after I’d written the initial boy-and-kitten caper that opens the story. Every chance we...
Craig McDaniel on “Play Acting”
“Play Acting” aims to balance several obsessions. Firstly, I am a writer who enjoys experimenting with language as meaning (i.e., narrative, character development, etcetera), language as code (let’s get a beer and talk about semiotics!), and language as art (a.k.a.,...
Ricardo Almonte on “Babyproof”
I wrote the first draft of “Babyproof” eleven years ago, in a single six-hour sitting, as an attempt to make sense of several previous relationships and friendships that did not involve babies or car accidents or infidelity at all. The story’s mischievous “very angry”...
Tania Hershman on “War Games” (or The Failure to Plot)
My very angry baby story, “War Games,” emerged during a writing workshop being given by my co-tutor on one of the Arvon foundation’s five-day residential writing courses. Adam Marek, writer of fantastic and fantastical short stories, was talking about plotting. He...
Jamie Quatro on “First Song”
“First Song” (titled after the Galway Kinnell poem) is a much-revised version of one of the first stories I ever wrote. I was twenty-four and pregnant and had just quit the doctoral program in English at Princeton. My husband’s consulting job was taking him west, and...
On Structure
In our final installment of video clips from “The Engines of Fiction” panel last month at the 7th Annual Robert and Adele Schiff Fiction Festival, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho and Elizabeth McKenzie share their approaches to thinking about structure in fiction.