I have no advice to give
Every so often, I get a spate of DMs and emails asking for my opinion or advice on matters sexual. This post is mostly so I don’t have to keep repeating myself. It feels rotten to just turn people away, but I do. I’m just a writer. I just write about people and sex. That […]
The Death of the Editor…
There is someone else in the writer-text-reader relationship that is not spoken of much anymore. And it’s sad, because a good editor (I’m using the old sense of the word here) really can make a good book excellent. They can, of course, also make a poor book readable. But when an editor works with a […]
The Living, Breathing World of the Reader-Writer Relationship
If there had not been a web, I would probably never have been a writer. I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have the kind of dialogue I have with the people who read my stories and my essays. Of course, the interaction does get addictive. And I have been accused of […]
Battlements
The walls of your keep, miles high thick as a pre-dawn panic, bridge drawn as tight as virgin thighs the birds fly over and come out songless and feather-charred. Years of scrabbling have taught me the meaning of futility, the pathos of patience, and the knack of being a good outsider looking in through the […]
Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction
Revisiting Umberto Eco’s ‘The Future of the Book’
Sixteen years after it was presented at a symposium, Umberto Eco’s paper ‘The Future of the Book’ would seem to be ridiculously out of date and yet, surprisingly, it challenged assumptions and brought up questions that are just as relevant – sometimes more – today as they were then. The text of this paper is […]
On Reading Foucault’s ‘What is an author?”
By the time you read this, I’ll be gone from here. I will have left this stain on the page and you will call it me.
Author – Who Decides What a Text Means?
In preparation for putting together my PhD proposal, I’ve had to do a survey of the theories surrounding reading. At the core of it lies the question of who has the right to interpret and determine what any given piece of text means. You’d think this would be obvious, but of course it’s not and […]
Listening for Mistakes
I tweeted about this today, and several people thanked me and told me they’d never thought about doing this before, so – as it helps me so much – I thought I’d write a short post about it. After I write a story or, if it’s long, about halfway through, I use the text to […]
HeartEater Anthology
On May 14, 2010, I wrote a short piece of #twitterfiction called ‘Amnesia’s Heart‘. After tweeting it, I asked people to tell me what they thought the moral or the meaning of the story was, and CD Christian said: “Don’t let someone take and eat your heart”. It seemed like a great theme to use […]