September is upon us, and with it, so is another Gulf Coast Blogger in residence. We're pleased to bring you discussions on craft, interviews and other media from R. A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria (winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize). He is…

The book opens in heavy rain. While the rest of the town is securing storm shutters and stockpiling batteries, Norma is mourning the death of her closest friend, Donna, who drove off the road after a late night at a bar.

I’m not going to lie to you.  I just wrote a novel that disassembles most of what we think of when we say “novel.”  But before you dismiss the idea, consider another:  the entire enterprise of the novel contains within it the seeds of its own unmaking,…

The Gulf Coast Blog is gearing up for another month-long resident blogger: Help us welcome Lidia Yuknavitch to the GC Blog starting Monday, July 6th.   Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novel The Small Backs of Children (Harper, July 2015 ), the anti-memoir…

The Schooner Bar By Ed Bok Lee NOTE: Your screen size may affect line breaks in this poem. Click to read it at its home in Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Farther inside this long bar near Lake and Hiawatha, they burn Over beers in the dark, these men and two…

Tomorrow's blog post marks the end of a month at GC Online with David Mura as guest blogger. Our hope in having David as a guest was to engage in the conversations online, not only about artistic craft and process, but also about a larger landscape, about…

        If in the world of our stories, we as authors resemble God, it is because we visit trials and tribulations upon our protagonists, while we sit removed from their world, watching them suffer, investigating their suffering, rendering their suffering. …

On a friend’s Facebook page today, I found a photo of abandoned row houses, presumably in Baltimore, with the caption: “Where were all the folks concerned with Baltimore’s private property when Wells Fargo Bank first pushed sup-prime mortages on Bmore’s…

        At what point does the social contract end? If violence can be wreaked upon you without cause? If your life can be taken from you while you are unarmed and your murderer goes unpunished? If your rights as a citizen have been taken away simply…

Memoir presents a past self--the experiences of that past self and how that self understood those events.  But in addition, memoir frequently presents a present self who sees these past events and the past self differently from the way the past self viewed…