Bloggasm

You can find Alan DeNiro’s blog over here.

Simon Owens: On your blog, you often engage in literary criticism. Do you feel that examining literature from a critic’s perspective helps you improve your own writing?

Alan DeNiro: I don’t know if I’m much of a critic as it’s generally conceived. I’m usually working things out in my own head on the blog, not presenting findings. Often I’m just posing questions because I’m interested in what people have to say about them. But maybe “the critic’s” role in the 21st century will change to accommodate this open-endedness more.

I guess more specifically in answer to your question…it’s interesting in the way you phrased the question–that there is a differentiation between “criticism” and “writing.” It’s all writing. I do think that writing and thinking about poetics (in a very general sense) and the relationship between art and the political sphere, etc. has altered my fiction and poetry writing for the better. I have a LOT of catching up to do, and I’m open to my mind being changed about things, definitely.

SO: The writing I’ve read of yours has been very unconventional. Have you ever tried to branch off into more conventional writing?

AD: It depends what you mean by “conventional” and “unconventional” (sorry to keep doing this!). I have a recent story that I’ve written that is on one level straightforward SF, in that it has a recognizable beginning, middle, end–you know, that kind of stuff–is set in an extrapolated future, etc. But I wrote the story as a kind of “Alice Munro in the future” kind of story. The end–ok, maybe the end is open-ended in SF’nal terms. But cracking open, say, I don’t know, Prairie Schooner, you’re going to come across stories with that kind of slice-of-life ending. A more vignette ending. At any rate, what I’m trying to say was that I saw this loose framework as a way to push myself into something I wasn’t as familiar with. Also, I don’t know if I’m deliberately trying to write unconventional stories a lot of the time. I don’t know a lot of times what people will think is weird or not.

SO: Do you think that skills picked up while writing poetry can later be used to write fiction? What is the bridge between the two genres?

AD: Absolutely, for the first part of the question: skills regarding metaphors, pacing, knowing when to be concise vs. long-winded, etc. The bridge between poetry and fiction–at least the type of fiction I’m interested in–is pretty strong and fluid at the same time. They both can take stabs as the creation of worlds through language.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

AD: There are probably dozens of others that I could list here, but I’ll list 5 that might not be as familiar to readers of SF/F:

http://www.janedark.com
http://www.grandtextauto.org
http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/
http://garysullivan.blogspot.com
http://www.writtennerd.blogspot.com/