Sarah Stone's Blog
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Feb.23.2011
“Aunt Margaret had one single piece of jewelry, besides her fat gold wedding ring. This was a curious necklace which she wore on Sunday afternoons after lunch, when she changed from her drab, black, weekday clothes into her best dress. The week’s work was done and she waited for another hard week...
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2 comments
Dec.13.2010
I like the article you’ve posted. I like the video you’ve linked to. I like the newspaper article that tells me more about what actually happened in Cancun and whether we’re going to get anything like a climate agreement before we all boil to death. I like the pictures of your kids. Also your cat....
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5 comments
Nov.02.2010
How hard it is to evoke the real experience of publishing a book, the way one teeters on the edge of losing perspective, the way one regains it (if lucky), the way we (and our characters) enter/re-enter the world. Thaisa Frank writes about the release of her novel, Heidegger's Glasses, with a...
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Oct.12.2010
A king in tears, about to kill his daughter in order to appease a goddess and call up favorable winds for war, moves offstage to make way for girls in tiny dresses singing rock ballads about “Syrian flutes and Lydian lutes” and groaning with desire for Achilles. A young woman in a Louisiana housing...
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5 comments
Sep.23.2010
These days I'm writing so often about performers, whether experimental performers or inadvertent performers -- those performing their lives (life as theater). So I was enchanted by this entry by the fabulous Randall Babtkis, writing about Beryl Bainbridge, one of those writers you can turn over and...
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Aug.30.2010
Tradition, resistance to tradition, private experience, and innate belief go into any author’s choice of how many imagined minutes or years a story needs to make itself clear and felt. How much time it covers has everything to do with what it means.
Joan Silber...
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7 comments
Jun.04.2010
Electrical, memorable moments of happiness: not just the big ones of falling in love or having adventures out in the world, but also the inside adventures, like finding a writer who changes everything for you. The shock of pleasure -- trying to get your mind into and around a whole new sensibility...
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6 comments
Apr.17.2010
“The progressive cultural evolution of humanity will lead us to understand that we are animals among other animals.” (Sandy Skoglund)
It’s an animal thing, how writers need the other arts. We need to be fed differently, to be knocked down differently, in order to understand everything we don’t see...
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Feb.11.2010
People who want to be artists/writers often say, “I don’t have any discipline.” We imagine discipline as a character trait we do or don’t have, just as we imagine that talent is something we’re somehow born with, rather than a set of abilities developed over time. Very often, what looks like “lack...
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10 comments
Dec.27.2009
A friend who’s been caught up for months in editing and teaching, and then in all the demands of the holidays, writes that she’s going to enter her “spider-webbed writing room” to see what’s in there. Many writers are in the same position right about now. One common piece of advice for this...
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3 comments
Nov.13.2009
A.S. Byatt, in her delicious, capacious, didactic, magical, magisterial new novel, The Children’s Book, both makes/recreates a world and tells a long, rich story. I confess that, though I love many minimalist works, this is the kind of writing that brought me into a life of reading and writing...
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4 comments
Sep.21.2009
One of my favorite parties of the year is always LitCrawl -- how fabulous to be a writer and reader in a community of writers and readers! LitCrawl, Phase 2: Saturday, Oct. 17 , Phase 2: 7:15-8:15 pmHer Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper, 3520 20thEast-Meets-West “Be”-In: Faculty & Friends of the...
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May.07.2009
Today all I want to do is to include a link to a brilliant story, "Aesthetic Discipline," by Carolyn Cooke, a part of the series "Fifty-two Stories with Cal Morgan." I don't want to give away too much but will just let anyone coming across this inhabit the story directly. Here's...
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Mar.16.2009
We live in a noisy culture -- deliciously, horribly, overwhelmingly, fascinatingly noisy. The kind of work we do as writers and artists both arises from our lives and has to resist those circumstances, in order to happen at all. How is it possible to write poetry or fiction, to create a...
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Nov.12.2008
This is a very short list -- it could easily be twice as long -- just a few of the books that my students and friends and I have found useful and illuminating. Some of the books on this list move into the territory of theory. A few of these are “career” books, though I include them with some...
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If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything.(Toni Morrison)
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About Sarah
Sarah Stone has written for Korean television, reported on human rights in Burundi, and looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute. Her novel The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday/Anchor) has been taught in courses on literature, ethics,...
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