Craft Notes: Knowing My Place

The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". A large part of the “work” my novel sets out to accomplish is to foreground the way in which self-knowledge is not an exact match for the narrative-of-self we carry around with us in our minds, a narrative subject to constant revision and emendation,…

Craft Notes: Voice Lessons

The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". In his afterword to Paul West’s novel Tenement of Clay, critic Bill Marx quotes West on the nature of his narratives (what Marx refers to, somewhat irritatingly, as West’s “streams of dreams”). These narratives, West said, “...which appear to be the voices of those…