Ask the Author: M. Allen Cunningham
Answered Questions (5)
M. Allen Cunningham
PERPETUA'S KIN, my new novel, initially emerged from pieces of my own genealogy -- old family letters and other written scraps from the nineteenth century, as well as family rumors going back to the Civil War and earlier. There were so many evocative tidbits that I couldn't help but tease out an imagined cast of characters, an imagined story that I felt could touch on a few inherently American questions and problems: geography and family, memory and Manifest Destiny, optimism and war, technology and human communication, and so on.
M. Allen Cunningham
I read, or re-read writers whose voices remind me of everything that is possible on the page.
M. Allen Cunningham
I'm preparing my new book, Q&A, for publication. It's a large, somewhat experimental hybrid work about media and society, our culturally widespread self-deception via screens, the eclipse of print traditions amid the bombardment of visuals, advertisements, and sound-bytes (what McLuhan called the "image bath"). It will appear next year from Regal House. I'm also at work on a quasi-autobiographical nonfiction book.
M. Allen Cunningham
Read, read, read. Find writers whose work you respond to strongly at some cellular level, writers whose work makes you want to write. Then read everything you can read by those authors, studying the work closely. That means copying out lengthy passages by hand, perhaps committing them to memory, absorbing them into your writerly bones. This practice will take you far.
M. Allen Cunningham
I refuse to believe in writer's block, and this has worked well for me. You sit down and work. Sometimes this means sitting down and waiting. But waiting is essential in the discipline of writing.
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