WRITERS ASK  ISSUE 83 EXCERPTS

I suppose what I am telling you is that the vein of strangeness running though you might very well be the best thing about your writing. You just have to make peace with it and listen carefully to what it has to say. —Erin Rose Belair

I didn't change anything in the piece. When it's blown out the door of one place, you just take it to another. —Bob Shacochis, interviewed by Kevin Rabalais

The answer has everything to do with capturing the complexity of happiness, the contradictions it contains—why, after all, do we weep of happiness, for instance? Happiness is not a sterile, undifferentiated state like the glare of a sunlamp. It is made up of light, but also of shadow. —Carrie Brown

I like having the prompt of history. History can give you a narrative shape, and finding the shape of a story is the most difficult thing for me. —Kent Wascom, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

Once, a class I was in read two versions of the same Carver story—one edited down, one fleshed out. Most of us admired the shorter one, but were more moved by the longer. —Josh Weil