“This morning on her way home from church (Val is the only one of us who goes), she stopped at the kids’ new house.” Continue reading
Category Archives: Fiction
Bloom Creative Writing: Speaking Ill of the Dead
These days, I only come to the café alone. I do not lie to myself about what this café means. I know it is simply a familiar shell into which, like the hermit crab that I have become, I scurry, knowing full well it is a home borrowed from someone else’s past. Continue reading
From Wall Street to the Writer’s Life
Anne Elliott talks to Bloom about transitions: from financial analyst to fiction writer, from New York to Maine, from wanting the writing life to living it. Leah De Forest: You’ve been writing a long time. Can we go back and talk about what your life was like, say, twenty or thirty years ago? Anne Elliott: … Continue reading
Q&A with Hilma Wolitzer
by Lisa Peet
“I never think in terms of topics, and I never think in terms of readers. What happens is that, at the risk of sounding like Joan of Arc, I hear a voice in my head that just says the first sentence of the story.” Continue reading
Q&A with Kimberly Olson Fakih on Little Miseries and Little Graces
by Lisa Peet
“I’m not comforted by happy endings. I’m deeply comforted by always being in the middle of a story. I tell myself, this is the middle, and I hang on to that—I don’t know the ending and I’ve got to see this through.” Continue reading
BEST OF BLOOM: The Years by Annie Ernaux: Memoir of a Generation
By Alice Lowe
I have no frame of reference for Ernaux’s memories of the restrictions and reconstruction of postwar Europe, of the domination of the Catholic Church and attending all-girl convent schools. I’m not yet a part of her collective “we.” But then she describes a photo of herself in 1955, wearing a short-sleeved sweater, polka-dot skirt, and ballerina flats, and I see myself. Continue reading
Arrivals and Departures: Q & A with Estela González
Writing “Arribada” is a way of expressing my heartbreak about beautiful places loved yet neglected by their inhabitants; and at the same time, the undying hope, optimism, and courage people who advocate to save these places give me for the future. Continue reading
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