I hope you enjoyed the essays I posted this week focused on Dorothy Parker’s classic story, You Were Perfectly Fine. Based on the blog traffic, you did, in fact, enjoy these posts. That makes me happy. Not because blog stats matter in the long run, but because I feel like the bigger piece of information here is that these essays were helpful and interesting. That’s all a blogger can hope for, really. In case you missed any of this week’s discussion (or if you are looking for

Ginger Pinholster is a writer and fellow graduate of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. You can connect with her on Twitter. (Or, leave her a message here in the comments section, too!) *** “When you’re 18, they call it partying. When you’re 40, they call it, like, alcoholism.” This truism, borrowed from a comedian whose name I can’t remember, seems lost on the “pale young man” at the center of Dorothy Parker’s iconic short story, You Were Perfectly Fine. Her

Belinda Nicoll is the author of the memoir, Out of Sync, as well as a writing and life coach. (You can read an earlier interview I did with Belinda about her book, Out of Sync.) Check out her website at: www.myriteofpassage.com Belinda blogs on the topics of writing, creativity coaching, and expatriation – http://myriteofpassage.wordpress.com/ I asked Belinda to contribute to this week’s discussion of Dorothy Parker’s short story, You Were Perfectly Fine, which I kicked off

Earlier today I kicked off my December guest blog blizzard which will focus on Dorothy Parker’s short story, You Were Perfectly Fine. In November, I hosted several of my favorite writer friends in a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Just in case you missed some of the posts, I’ve collected them all below, with links. A brief introduction and links to A Good Man resources. Heather Magruder writes: A Good Man…What’s in a Name? Kelly Fordon con

This is the (belated) final installment of the series of guest contributions focused on Flannery O’Connor’s story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. This post comes from a wonderful writer friend who I had the honor to spend two weeks with in a quiet, out-of-the-way place in Wyoming. (See more about our time at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in earlier blog posts.) David is a talented, warm, and giving writer. He was at his desk before me, and stayed at the task after me,

Naming our characters (or, sometimes, not naming our characters) is a big piece of the literary puzzle for many writers. This is the second essay about the names of characters in A Good Man is Hard to Find. It didn’t surprise me that my fellow writer, Andrea Cumbo, would write about the names in this O’Connor story. I’ve read a draft version of the book Andi is working on (which she mentions briefly at the end of this post) and I know how important nameless-ness is to her. He

I met Kelly Fordon while I was pursuing my MFA. She was working on a novel told from the point of view of a U.S. Congressman’s young daughter. The chapter I read had a cameo by Richard Nixon. I was hooked. Kelly is also a published poet and all-around great person to hang out with. (I also featured a link to one of her stories in a Friendly Friday post a while back…) Good versus Evil in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” <img class="size-medium wp-image-1196 lazyload" title="2607_7

Over the next few days (with a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, naturally) I’ve asked some of my favorite writer friends to help out by providing their reactions to one of my favorite short stories: Flannery O’Connor’s, A Good Man is Hard to Find. It’s a story that deserves to be read and re-read, and studied thoroughly. It is a story I assign to my fiction writing students and I can’t wait to read the responses to the story from these wonderful writers. I’m pretty sure yo

It all started with Ken Mueller of Inkling Media. (If you know Ken, you can imagine several ways that sentence makes sense…) Ken wrote an interesting post on his blog about having one of his blog posts stolen, word for word, and reprinted, without attribution (or, obviously, permission). Ken does a nice job of laying out some strategies for keeping this from happening (you should read his blog), but the bottom line is this: The things we write are more and more available to b