Open Loop Press

Listen Aid

editor — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 05:33:43 +0000

Guest Contributor: Dena Ratner Plugged into Clinic, your thirty-minute journey to work is colored by the band’s coke-induced fast tracks. What started out as a bleary-eyed trudge is transformed into matutinal elation as you’re gliding down the street past person after person, cars cars cars and building after building, everything is rocking with your aural jubilation As you climb up the stairs and come back forever / Summer’s in the house, untamed it was / Walking with thee / Walking with thee / Walking with thee / Walking with thee until you arrive at work and barely remember how you ...

The Writer Who Will Help You Finish Your Novel is on Facebook

amjwms — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 23:06:17 +0000

Hundreds of writers keep up with their readers on Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site; Paul Harding is on Facebook, Susan Orlean is on Facebook, Jericho Brown is on Facebook. We writers have been told that having a presence on Facebook will help increase our readership, but will it help us hone our craft? When a reader imagines a writer at work he may call up the image of a gentle genius alone in a rickety garret, candle flickering against the damp. But the writer’s vocation requires less of a sudden stroke of solitary insight than it does perseverance, collaboration ...

Jericho Brown Writes What’s On His Mind

editor — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:05:38 +0000

"I think we've been telling our students so long, 'Write what you know. Write your lived experience,' and I think our students have this idea that that means write about the time A, B, and C happened to me, but that's not really it. It's more, write what you can't stop thinking about. Write what’s on your mind."

Documenting Discovery: Lisa Olstein on the Art of Observation

editor — Sun, 09 May 2010 03:51:50 +0000

"We all love to receive something either really beautiful or really intelligent, but what’s most exciting or engaging is when a work of art stimulates in you a new kind of thinking, or a new set of questions, or a new set of ideas that are happening in your own brain but that were instigated by the art."

Tune Into Detail

editor — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:17:22 +0000

In the pre-spring lull, bright again now in New York, the snow piles have melted from the curbs and the park across the street seems right out of the books of Narnia, I think about contradictions, and about detail. OLP’s February/March interviewee Salvatore Scibona in his award-winning novel The End transports us back to a Cleveland summer in August 1953 when the sticky heat hangs about the shoulders of the crowd and music wraps the Feast of the Assumption parade-goers in late summer’s enveloping mirth. “Behind the clergy came the Virgin, smirking, her porcelain skin dark like an Arab’s, ...

On Listening: Salvatore Scibona Tunes in to Detail

editor — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:44:08 +0000

"I think for a writer you don’t see a thing until you use the word for it and the more precise the word you can use the more precisely you see it. On the other hand, the word is an instrument in order to lead you to the thing and you can spin a whole lot of words around yourself for years and years and years, as the jeweler does, until it gets to the point where your primary relationship is with the language and not with the thing."

Loving the Questions

editor — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:20:45 +0000

As 2010 begins and a new decade stretches before us many of us will articulate goals for the new year — exercise thirty minutes a day, eat more vegetables, meet our best friends for drinks every other week. And for many of us, nestled between these goals will be a quiet, albeit fierce resolution to deepen our commitment to our craft. We’ve read Gene Fowler’s remark: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” We know that the act of creation takes time and attention. ...

The Literary Horologist: Paul Harding “Tinkers” With Time

editor — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:09:52 +0000

"… I don't write the book in any order, I just literally wake up and wonder about whatever immediately strikes me as interesting. Usually I have a question about something: 'What does she think at that point?' Or, 'What does he do?' Or, 'What does the cemetery look like in the autumn?' And I just start writing."

Bellevue Literary Press’s Erika Goldman

editor — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:23:58 +0000

"BLP's mission is to publish high quality fiction and nonfiction at the intersection of the arts and the sciences, with a special focus on medicine. Our books address the impact of illness on the body, consciousness, and all human experience."

— Erika Goldman

Telling the Untold Story: Leslie T. Chang’s “Factory Girls”

editor — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:02:05 +0000

"…what I wanted to do was start out inside the mind of a factory girl and describe the world: What it was like when you met a woman from another factory, what it was like when your friend helped you because you lost your job, what it felt like on payday when everyone crowded into the post office to send money home… I felt like I had gotten to know enough of these young women well enough that I felt confident to write the beginning of the book in this way, thrusting you into this world."