Over on the Powell's blog, I spoke with Susan DeFreitas, author of Hot Season, about blurring genre boundaries, political fiction, and fairy tales. In the process we touched on a slew of authors: Clarice Lispector, Nikolai Gogol, Kate Bernheimer, Lydia Millet, Denis Johnson, Ralph Ellison, Günter Grass, Angela Carter, Maya Sonenberg, Robert Coover, Rikki Ducornet, Lily Hoang, Anne Carson, and Haruki Murakami. Whew! Makes me want hug a bookcase. You can read the Q & A here.If you're in the Portland area, I hope you'll join us at Powell's City of Books on Monday, February 19 at 7:30 pm. (And if you can't make it, you can still preorder a signed edition here to be shipped to you!)

My 15th set of writing prompts for the Ploughshares blog explores triangular relationships in fiction, with discussions of Mavis Gallant's "Lena", Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, and Peter Mountford's The Dismal Science, and featuring Kathleen Skeels' wonderfully suggestive drawings. Here's how it begins:

In a previous blog post, I mentioned my difficulty with conflict and tension.  For this reason, I love triangular relationships, which bring up conflicting desires, competing loyalties, and dilemmas. All the things that make a juicy story go. When I was just starting out writing fiction, when my writing tended to be a formless blob and I learned that good writing needs a shape, a design, I turned to the idea of things happening in threes, and then I turned to triangles. As I learned along the way, there are many, many ways you might use triangles in your fiction.Continue reading