Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing

Who says you can't teach creativity?

Ideal for individual or classroom use, ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY theorizes and questions the often unconscious assumptions behind such traditional writing gestures as temporality, scene, and characterization; offers various suggestions for generating writing that resists, rethinks, and/or expands the very notion of narrativity; visits a number of important concerns/trends/obsessions in current writing (both on the page and off); discusses marketplace (ir)realities; hones critical reading and manuscript editing capabilities; and strengthens problem-solving muscles from brainstorming to literary activism.

Exercises and supplemental reading lists challenge authors to push their work into self-aware and surprising territory. In addition, ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY features something entirely lacking in most books about creative writing: more than 40 interviews with contemporary innovative authors, editors, and publishers (including Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Brian Evenson, Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Steve Tomasula, Deb Olin Unferth, Joe Wenderoth, and Lidia Yuknavitch) working in diverse media, providing significant insights into the multifaceted worlds of experimental writers' writing.

"Through examples and samples, through exercises designed to pique your brain, even through interviews with authors, this book lays the groundwork for the birth of new ideas. It is a honeycomb filled with thousands of blastocysts from which you—each of you—can nurture and grow new literary children."—Daulton Dickey