Ten Questions for Patrick Ryan

“Stop telling yourself you can’t do this.” —Patrick Ryan, author of Buckeye
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“Stop telling yourself you can’t do this.” —Patrick Ryan, author of Buckeye
A novelist explores the craft of imagining a fictional setting based on a real-world location that holds a capacity for convergence, a place where many threads intersect and many stories are born.
The author of Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) reflects on how writers can turn grief into literature.
Writing a book is a daunting challenge—but the texts we know and love can help. A nonfiction writer describes how a methodically organized spreadsheet of favorite quotes aided her journey from proposal to finished memoir.
Originally an umbrella site for literary journals, this book publisher looks to the wider writing community for inspiration, camaraderie, and collaborators in the art that it makes and promotes.
When you venture to inhabit identities and communities beyond your experience, seek people and places to ground your work. A journalist and novelist explains how research skills help fortify one’s imagined realities.
Every poetry collection has its “maybes” and “almosts,” the poems that didn’t make it to publication. A debut poet considers the poems that haunt a book from the outside.
Workshop isn’t about fixing, but building together—instead of giving prescriptive suggestions on a piece, a widely published poet recommends offering specific notes as an invitation to explore further possibilities.
The author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction confronts the question every writer inevitably faces: Is my compulsion to tell the truth stronger than my fear of the consequences?
“Don’t stop writing, no matter what.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures