Julianna Baggott

Acre Books is the newly established book-publishing arm of The Cincinnati Review. The anthology will be Acre’s only spring offering, but we plan to bring out three or four books for the fall season. When assessing an image or a manuscript, I often ask myself the same questions: what’s the goal; what’s the dominance; what’s the focal point; how are the edges handled; is there follow-through, attention to detail? Mason worked for many years at The Southern Review and Louisiana State University Press before moving to Cincinnati and founding The Cincinnati Review in 2003.

I work and rework for hours and days (or years, if it’s a novel), until I start to figure out how I’m going to organize this thing and what I want to get across It’s not hard for me to start writing. though I can usually tell when someone’s critique is fair and when it’s motivated by dread of the subject matter, competitiveness, a drastically different value system, or some other factor that makes it less useful for me, except as information about the various ways the work can be perceived. I taught at universities and privately over several decades, as well as doing editing and writing for hire, and now I’ve managed to build a business that’s an outgrowth of my fiction writing and teaching.

But if it’s a drama or psychological thriller or dark and you can’t afford tonal shifts — especially maybe if you’re in the realm of sci-fi I should say that in first-person I always allow my characters to have a sense of humor — if nothing else than a realistic coping mechanism and how I personally process — and it can really high-jack a scene. The longer I’ve been writing the harder it is to choose point of view and tense — For example, Pressia in The Pure Trilogy couldn’t have a first-person point of view because the coping mechanisms for a doll-head fused to your fist were too comedic.

He talks about inspiration and the blue-collar work of writing, about trespassing and stealing, about impeccable research and twenty-years of rejection, about the fourth novel becoming the first one to get published, about endurance and interminable effort. His novel THE STANDARD GRAND has just been published by St. Martin’s Press and has been belovedly praised by the likes of Dennis Lehane, Pam Houston, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Nick Flynn. When I began writing TSG, Thisbe and I stole into a number of the abandoned Catskill resorts: The Concord, The Nevele, Kutcher’s, on and on. But I don’t think that’s it.