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The Writer You Were Before: Revising or Accepting Your Own Monstrous Writing History
Here’s a conflict I never supposed I would face; for the most it is a welcome dilemma, certainly a worthy struggle. I learned early last week that my short story collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, won the 2012 Juniper Prize and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. So over…
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Price’s Lost Campaign grapples with fiction in the historical record
1864 raid into Missouri rightly remains a brutal enigma in Mark Lause’s Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri Even as General Sterling Price’s fall 1864 campaign deep into Missouri proceeded, its participants and victims shifted their conception of it so rapidly as to push the fog of war into a realm of nightmarish…
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Ozarks Studies Symposium lecture
Michael Norman and others have asked me to post what I said on September 22 at the Ozarks Studies Symposium at Missouri State-West Plains. There was a great crowd, including Marideth Sisco of Blackberry Winter from the film Winter’s Bone. And they gave me a warm welcome and the blessing of a keen listening. Wish…
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More ideas on the historical novel: Halbwachs, dreams, recollections
Finishing Maurice Halbwachs’ On Collective Memory, I find some concepts that I want to roll around. My 1992 edition is a Lewis A. Coser translation from University of Chicago Press. I think a reading of this volume will be of great benefit to any writer who has written or is attempting to write books set…
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Missouri Literary Festival 2011
A quick post to show the Morkan’s Quarry reading at the Missouri Literary Festival. My favorite comment comes at the end, when a listener says she was present at the Brentwood Library lecture in April and has since read the novel and gone on a tear of reading through histories and researching the Civil War…
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Ozark Studies Symposium: Head to West Plains!
5th annual Ozarks Studies Symposium set for Sept. 22-24 WEST PLAINS, Mo. – “Internal Conflict and Civil Wars: 1861-2011” is the theme of the fifth annual Ozarks Studies Symposium set for Sept. 22-24 at the West Plains Civic Center. The event celebrates the unique culture of the Ozarks by providing presentations and performances by representatives…
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End times and why we write fiction from history
And why we sell books… This last trip to New York City brought many currents into collision, many strains that I wonder about sparking as they crossed. When I was a child in the Ozarks, there were only two television stations on early Saturday morning. One carried agricultural news—large men in western-style sport coats, plaid…
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What I did say at Voices of Conflict: From Battlefields to Springfield and Beyond
Voices of Conflict: The American Civil War from Steven B Yates on Vimeo. Brentwood Public Library, Monday, April 18: Steve Yates, Dr. William Garrett Piston, and Dr. Randall Fuller talk about the genesis of their books. This vimeo link at http://www.vimeo.com/22632952 will take you to the full lecture and Q&A from Monday night.
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How I was banned from the Brentwood Library
This was Plan B for last night’s lecture at the Brentwood Library I want to thank Marilyn Prosser, Kathleen O’Dell, and Lorraine Sandstrom for inviting me here to the Brentwood Library. And I want to say what an honor it is to be on a panel with two excellent scholars with such fine books. Of…
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One more trick to writing historical fiction: the timely metaphor
Bill Harrison used to say to us in workshop, Block that metaphor, Block that metaphor. You could imagine that in some Golden Age back at Vanderbilt there existed sophisticated cheerleaders cruising in tasteful but devastating skirts and sweaters, chanting, Block that metaphor. If you are going to write a metaphor into historical fiction and make…
Fiction and History 