I have assembled my busy life in such a way that when I get these snatches of time, I am desperate to write.Ĭertainly, in the writing of “Peanuts Aren’t Nuts,” I had multiple endings, for example. I have two small children and a full-time job, and so I’m never at a loss for material. Of course, writing is not an easy process, and it’s not like every time I sit down the words pour out of my fingertips. What do you do when the writing does not come, when no words appear on the page? In other words, how do you manage writer’s block?Ĭourtney Zoffness: I am a little unsure about the technical definition of writer’s block, so I wonder if that refers to sitting down and wanting to write something, but not knowing what to write or knowing what you want to write but not knowing how to do that. A recipient of two residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere and was listed as “notable” in The Best American Essays 2018. Zoffness directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.īrian DiNuzzo: It has been said that no writer is immune from at least some creative frustration.

Her story “Peanuts Aren’t Nuts” won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, and she has won the American Literary Review Fiction Prize, the Arts & Letters Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Center for Fiction.

In Wake in the Night, we are reminded why we must push beyond easy categories and find new ways of understanding the roles we play.Courtney Zoffness writes fiction and nonfiction. By employing forms that break with convention in the same spirited ways her characters do, Laura Krughoff creates a world of stunning detail that examines just what people will do when expectations stifle truth. 'Spanning the last century with narrators aged 10 to 100, these stories reveal women struggling to fit a definition of womanhood that cannot contain them. In the small towns of the Midwest, girls and women dream of finding voice and forcing the world to listen. Marriages occur in the 1930s for lack of other opportunities a young girl dances to Thriller for her friend's older brother a pastor remembers her childhood spent fantasizing that she is the prophet John the Baptist. Six stories span a century of rural American women. 'Laura Kroghoff's stories have the lyrical exuberance of a Grace Paley in their bones.' Christopher Grimes, author of The Pornographers and Public Works: Short Fiction and a Novella

Wake in the Night by Laura Krughoff