My Very Own Blog

Books :              Private Acts .  (Short Story Collection).  Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1990.             Jack's Universe .  (Novel).  Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1994.             Imagine a Moment .  (Fiction Chapbook).  Meadow Press (Iowa City), 1976. Stories, Essays in Journals :          "Bingham's Orchard," Creative Writing (January 1973); 1, 14-18. "For the Child," Samovar , 1, no. 1 (Spring 1973); 23-26. "Q," New Writers , nos. 1/2 (1974); 83-89. "Solitary," Denver Quarterly , 9, no. 3 (Fall 1974); 46-54. "Circa 1918," Fiction International , 4, no 5 (1975); 31-34. "Saturday Night Special," Samovar , 3 (Spring 1975); 75-82. "The Pattern in the Blanket," Chicago Review , 28, no. 2 (Fall 1976); 65-77...

From Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners: http://soundcloud.com/ryknight/a-good-man-is-hard-to-find   Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners From: “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” I think we have to begin thinking about stories at a much more fundamental level, so I want to talk about one quality of fiction which I think is its least common denominator—the fact that it is concrete—and about a few of the qualities that follow from this.  We will be concerned in this with the reader in his fundamental human sense, because the nature of fiction is in large determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus.  The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where perception begins.  He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.  It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see....