Illusion and Reality in Art
by Carla Dominguez There are two main schools of thought about illusions in creative work—schools that often are in opposition. First, there is a general belief that illusion is essential to art. At the same time, it is also generally accepted that creative works, whether it be writing, visual or performance, are an essential part of truth. It’s...
The Real People Behind Characters
It’s common literary practice to use the people around you as inspiration for fictional characters. Sometimes, truth can be more interesting than fiction, and, as writers, we come across people who give us inspiration for a story to tell. These truths might mean more than what one can think up from scratch. Many authors have used the facts of the...
Reading About Misery
by Carla Dominguez Misery lit is a strange genre. The term, ostensibly coined by The Bookseller magazine in the late 2000s, is used to describe biographical literature mostly concerned with the protagonists’ triumph over personal trauma or abuse. Although misery lit as a genre encompasses many types of traumatic stories, the most common storyline is about someone’s life as a child: children with...
“In Defiance of Genre: on Octavia Butler,” by Jamal Stone.
by Jamal Stone Kindred, Octavia Butler’s 1979 best-seller, defies genre conventions. It is an intensely emotional novel that blends elements of sci-fi time travel with an antebellum first-person slave narrative. The novel takes African American protagonist Dana back to slave times at seemingly random intervals, leaving her to survive in a cruel world as she tries...
Truth by Lying
At the banquet for his Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, J.M. Coetzee, author of Foe, mused about truth and authorship. He recalled the moment in his childhood where he realized that Robinson Crusoe was not, in fact, written by Robinson Crusoe. Then, rather than delivering the traditional lecture, Coetzee told a strange story in which he claimed...
