Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. This is actually a grammatical sentence, featuring Buffalo the city, the animal the buffalo, and an obscure verb, to buffalo, meaning to intimidate or bully. Substituting different words for each of these parts we can hear the structure of the sentence better, as in, “Cincinnati bison Cincinnati bison intimidate intimidate Cincinnati bison.” It is perhaps coincidental, but as a student, fiction writer, and professor ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
Things American: An Introduction to Buffalo
This week for Things American, we're excited to share the work of Kim Chinquee, Brian Mihok, and Ted Pelton, who are writers and/or artists and/or publishers based in Buffalo, New York. I asked them to contribute and share their experience of the city because it has been on my mind lately, what with the bankruptcy of Detroit; and because I'm from Western New York, although I haven't been to Buffalo since the &Now conference in 2009; and because it's hot every day here in Austin, and I've ... [READ MORE]
Camera-Flash Contest Winners
We are pleased to announce the contest winner and finalists from our Camera-Flash Fiction Contest. This spring, we invited you to write quick fiction based on one of eight vintage photographs we handed out at the AWP conference. After many hard decisions, here, in order, are our winners: ASF CAMERA-FLASH FICTION CONTEST FIRST-PLACE WINNER: After Taking on the Milk Challenge the Earth Bear Learns Something About the Nature of Human Experience by Caleb Curtiss Life gives us moments, ... [READ MORE]
Things American: Yeah Science Breaking Bad!
Like many, many others, we dived into the k-hole that is breaking down Breaking Bad. What follows is a series of gchat conversations between Jess Stoner and Carmiel Banasky about the show, its fiction connections, and our obsession. [We start from the very first scene of "Blood Money"] CB: I love this intro (I'm rewatching as we chat). It keeps with the pool motif. The pool has become a way to track the passage of time in the series. JS: I know! It brings you right back to the first ... [READ MORE]
If You Lived Here: An Interview with Danielle Evans
I’m always thinking about place in fiction. I happen to write about a particular place, an Alaska laden with myth and personal and familial history. And I want to know, while reading, how other authors capture the nuances, the sounds, the smells, the senses of a place. What types of spaces do characters occupy, what spaces exist between characters, even spaces between the words on a page? At what moments does an outer landscape become an internal and psychological landscape? There have been ... [READ MORE]
What We’re Reading
When our website was still incubating, we used our Tumblr to share what members of our staff had been reading lately. Now that we're up and running in the world, we thought we'd share a few of their summer reads here. Except to change it up a bit, we asked our them to include a GIF that corresponded with their read, in whatever way they wanted. As you can see, the results are surprisingly expressive. Happy reading, pals. Bluets by Maggie Nelson Don't Kiss Me by Lindsay ... [READ MORE]