December 1999 
The Self as a Literary Construct
Jocelyn Bartkevicius
Just a few weeks ago, a student in my literary nonfiction workshop wrote 19 vivid pages about his struggles with bipolar disorder. The pivotal scene describes a manic episode he experienced while trying to work in the computer lab with a woman he'd been hoping to date.
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An Interview with Andrea Barrett
Marian Ryan
Andrea Barrett's latest work, The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), has received accolades for its deft and compelling exploration of characters caught up in the currents of science and natural history. Her collection of stories, Ship Fever, winner of the 1996 National Book Award, marked her first experiments with this subject matter. She is also the author of four previous novels: Lucid Stars (1988), Secret Harmonies (1989), The Middle Kingdom (1991), and The Forms of Water (1993).
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An Interview with Miller Williams
Beth Ann Fennelly
Miller Williams, University Professor of English and Foreign Languages at the University of Arkansas, is the author, co-author, or translator of 29 books, including 12 poetry collections, most recently Some Jazz A While: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1999). His major awards include the Poets' Prize, both the Academy Award for Literature and the Prix de Rome for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship in Poetry, the Henry Bellaman Poetry Award, the New York Arts Fund Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, and the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.
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The Public Nature of End-Rhymed Poems
Jonathan Holden
Skirmishes between advocates of so-called "free verse" and accentual-syllabic prosody are a common sport in contemporary poetry. In a recent essay in The Nation, Alice Fulton complained that "The formalist debate has had American poetry in its grip since the early eighties. It's as if our aggregate imagination has been buttonholed by an obsessive cocktail-party bore for fourteen years."
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Experience, Imagination, & the Poet as Fictionist
Stephen Dunn
Broadly speaking, I encounter two kinds of incomplete poets in my workshops, one who waits to be inspired by an event, the other for whom the act of writing is its own inspiration. The former tends to be most wedded to personal experience, the latter to language and its combinations.
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An Interview with David Guterson
Stuart Coleman
David Guterson is the author of Snow Falling on Cedars, the bestselling novel which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1995 and will be released as a film from Universal Pictures in January 2000. The film stars Ethan Hawke, Youki Kudoh, Sam Shepard, Max von Sydow, and James Cromwell. Set on an island in the Puget Sound in the 1950s after the controversial internment of Japanese-American residents during World War II, this lyrical and historical novel, which Annie Dillard called "a grand achievement," took seven years to complete.
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Strangers in Stranger Lands
Lance Olsen
Although he never elaborated on his indifference towards science fiction (SF), scores of other readers have elaborated on theirs, charging that SF is a genre short on multidimensional, resonant human characters. While this conventional emphasis on plot and idea rather than psychology and subtlety is true of much SF-especially thin series such as the Star Wars novels or deliciously over-the-top films such as Purple Death from Outer Space and Judge Dredd-it's also true that some of the best serious science fiction evinces a sense of character that, if not precisely matching the sort found in literary realist fiction, at least harmonizes with it.
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The Struggle of the Independent Bookseller
Belle Waring
Unhappy Gogol—broke, brilliant, and vexed by the censors. At least he was spared the frothing dogfight known as the American bookselling industry. As we go to press, Publishers Weekly reports an 8.3% rise in retail book sales for the first seven months of 1999. Yet it's too soon to call this a trend. Although books are available from Wal-Mart to the Web, and are being hawked more aggressively than ever, the glum fact is that, for most of the decade, book sales have been decidedly flat.
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