In his famous Confessions, Augustine observes that memory is a place that’s not a place. Locus non locus. He privileges memory as the most sublime human capacity. “Great is the power of memory,” he says, “a fearful thing, oh my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind and this am I myself” (194).

After some reflection I decided to coin the word ‘enstrange,’ ‘enstrangement,’ built on the same cognate root.”

William Maxwell, discussing how he came to devise the structures for his books, said, “I always had to discover the form from the materials.” What he had already written, he said, was of no use to him, nor was what he knew, abstractly, about fiction. The material, he said, is always the best guide to the form and also, presumably, to the voice and

When Tommy Wilhelm (not his real name) in Seize the Day looks at a subway crowd, he sees “in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want” (115). To give each soul an essence, and each body a name and a face

All that looking leaks out; the sentiment is the purplest hue of purple prose. The ravens were in mourning. They settled in the branches, sending messages arranged in black dollops, notes on staff, encoding cloudy medium of the gloaming. That day, the last telegram said simply this: This is the last telegram.

He coedited, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, and, with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work.

In a superior mirage the image of the object appears above its actual position on the horizon, a result of light rays refracting through a cool layer of air close to the ground. Depending on the density and structure of this air column, the image can appear stretched and elevated, free-floating, or inverted.

the Writer’s Chronicle

Breathe. She coedited, with Peter Turchi, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work.