Being Seen: An Interview with Tyler Barton by Curtis Smith
I think the stories reflect the purpose for which they were written, which was: to be read aloud to a room full of other writers at a community open mic.
I think the stories reflect the purpose for which they were written, which was: to be read aloud to a room full of other writers at a community open mic.
I found myself drawn to the idea of taking these big, comic book concepts and applying them to a quiet story about loss and the poison of nostalgia.
I try to write something new at least 3 to 5 times a week, and I tell myself that it doesn’t have to be good.
Everything I write is part of a life-long continuum of work that informs each other, and if I look at something I’m working now, I’ll see its origin in something I was thinking about maybe twenty or thirty years ago.
For every 1,000 word story I filed on some aspect of the city, there were 15 pages of notes that didn’t make it into the article. From those marginal observations have sprung a lot of my fiction.
“I don’t know if I’d say that writers “owe it” to be involved in their communities, per say. But I think it’s one way that we can connect to other people and defeat the stereotype that writers prefer isolation/solitary existence.”
I’m with Grace Paley, who said “Write from what you know into what you don’t know.”
So much of our experience falls between the seams of language, simply because language is human-made, but our emotions aren’t.
You don’t have time for anger, depression, hostility, whatever, when you’re involved in and absorbing something so much bigger than yourself.
Three Men, a collection of novellas just released in September 2017 by Texture Press, is Nathan Leslie’s tenth book of fiction. He is also the author of Root and Shoot, Sibs, […]