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The fastest (and maybe the funnest) six minutes of writing life: being on the radio
Karen Brown interviews Steve Yates on Mississippi Edition, MPB Think Radio Time perception is an extraordinary thing. My wife is always tickled to recall to me that when microwaves first came into offices and homes, people waiting on snacks and lunches eagerly watched the digital timers winding down, and many starving seekers would bounce on their…
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The family of the bookstore–Lemuria Books and Some Kinds of Love: Stories
Steve Yates reads the Green Tomato Marquesa’s Night of a Thousand and One Triumphs at Lemuria Books from Steven B Yates on Vimeo. I have often thought about family, that embracing, nurturing metaphor, when I travel to visit the many Mississippi independent bookstores I serve for University Press of Mississippi. You can learn about this…
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Offer It Up and Out of Body: two early stages of publishing
There are two stages I’m finally perceiving to the inception of a book, two distinct states of mind and heart. Let’s call the first stage Offer It Up, and set its parameters this way: Everything has gone right. Cooperative author and enthusiastic publisher have communicated mutual and realistic goals. The publisher has bound handsome advance…
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Arkansas Literary Festival
Arkansas Literary Festival from Steven B Yates on Vimeo. It was an honor to take Morkan’s Quarry (Moon City Press 2010) back to Arkansas and talk about it at the Arkansas Literary Festival. As I say in the vimeo here, Arkansas gave Tammy and me eight of the best years of our lives, at the…
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Dan Bush and Missouri Skies on the cover of Some Kinds of Love: Stories
It’s pouring this Sunday morning in Mississippi. But I am listening to spring peepers from Missouri on Dan Bush’s website, Missouri Skies (http://www.missouriskies.org/). Bush is a really wonderful photographer from Albany, Missouri, a way up north from the Ozarks. His photograph, Milky Way and Fairview Church, McFall, Missouri, 2009. Photo © Dan Bush, is the…
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Q & A with Steve Yates author of Some Kinds of Love: Stories (University of Massachusetts Press)
Steve Yates won the 2012 Juniper Prize for fiction, established in 2004 by the University of Massachusetts Press in collaboration with the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers, presented annually for an outstanding work of literary fiction. His collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in…
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What does the title, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, mean? What’s it from?
So what does the title, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, mean? What’s it from? Well, this collection of twelve short stories, all published in literary journals from 1992-2010, is dedicated to my wife, Tamara Gebhart Yates, also of Springfield, Missouri, for a lot of reasons. For a major inspirational reason in that she was the…
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The Uses, Misuses, and Boundaries of History in Fiction about Missouri’s Civil War
[March 22, 2013, I’ll be on a panel at the Missouri Conference on History in Cape Girardeau put on by the State Historical Society of Missouri. A double honor, in that all through graduate school and my stint at University of Arkansas Press I was a subscriber and devoted reader of the Missouri Historical Review,…
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Not my manuscript, but our book: a little Zen on the happy miracle of collaborative creation
Having delivered my manuscript to a publisher and having experienced in 2010 the transformation from “my manuscript” to “our book,” and having now delivered a second manuscript to the hands of a very different publisher, I am even more amazed and saddened now when I hear about an author losing perspective on the power of…
