Mac Ford

The history of Bakota’s St. Michael’s Cave Monastery has started back in pre-Christian times. Age of caves reaches almost 4 thousand years. Almost all this time they served to worship natural elements. Until now, some pagan artifacts have been saved: a man’s foot etched in stone, stone idols and altars.

I don't know about you, but I'd prefer a more practical strategy for getting the job done than just imagining I could get to the end by putting numbers on blank pages. My own experience with writing novels tells me that the first steps onto the page begin to lay out a trail I can follow as I go. I'm convinced we can learn to let our novels write... See more

So much of writing a novel is a matter of arousing your own curiosity and then paying attention to the cues you yourself set down as you write. Isak Dinensen said, "I write a little every day without hope, without despair." If you can do that, and if you can let your own desire to know propel you into narrative, you can fill those numbered pages of... See more

"It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so... See more

Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what... See more