Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, and The Hero of This Book. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.
What are you working/currently trying to work on these days?
I’ve just finished a book on writing called A Long Game: Notes on Fiction, which will be published this December, and I’ve (for the first time in my life) filled a notebook with notes for a novel before I start writing it in earnest. Ordinarily I write nothing ahead of time.
What’s your workshop style, and what can people expect at Lit Fest?
I always want people in a workshop to read work looking for the writer’s grandest ambitions, and to offer advice on how to achieve it. I believe in no rules except those that the work itself sets. I like strangeness, and encouraging writers to find what’s strangest in their own work.
If you could only bring three books with you on a deserted island, which ones would you choose, and why?
The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones; Roget’s Thesaurus. Within these three books is so much variety, oddity, and truth, I would never be bored.
What’s one artist or writer more people should know about?
Dorothy Allison, who recently left us. Also the brilliant painter Paula Rego.
At Lit Fest this summer, Elizabeth McCracken will be teaching her Advanced Weeklong Prose Workshop: Your Best Work. Interested in working with her? Apply today!
To learn more about Lit Fest, tuition, fellowships, and advanced class admittance, click here.
