— August 31, 2009

 

— July 10, 2009

 

"I would say that if anyone really wanted to track the course of the short story through the time period mentioned, they would do well to review The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, SciFiction, edited by Ellen Datlow, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, and The Year's Best Science Fiction by Gardner Dozois. It's not that there are not other equally great anthologies and magazines (both print and on-line) but these mentioned are pretty much a guarantee of quality. ...If I was going to add novels, there are three I can think of that I would most definitely include -- The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, The House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman."

— June 10, 2009

 

"The short fiction market? You mean like money? From this writer's point of view, and that's the only point of view I can legitimately speak for on this topic, it seems to me like the pay pretty roundly blows. I suppose, if you really hustled, you could make a living at it, but even then you'd be shitting a slim turd."

— April 16, 2008

 

— Fall 2007

 

— 2006

 

— June 19, 2005

 

— January 1, 2005

 

— December 27, 2004

 

— December 24, 2004

 

— December 21, 2004

 

— December 29, 2003

 

— January 26, 2002

 

— 2002

 

— June 2000

 

— April 1999

 

Essay: A Year of Jeffrey Ford, Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker

(December 30, 2008)

Excerpt—
"Between the time I read The Physiognomy and Memoranda, something in me had changed. I reread "Creation" and started cursing myself for not realizing the brilliance of Ford sooner. Here was a well-crafted story filled with minute details that felt very real and made the protagonist's father larger than life. And the ambiguity of the ending was simply genius."

 

LBC's Jeffrey Ford Week, THE LITBLOG CO-OP

(May 2006)

 

Collaborating with a Ford, Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus

(May 3, 2006)

 

Kafka's Ford , Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus

(November 22, 2005)

 

On John Gardner, Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus

(September 14, 2004)

Excerpt—
"Above all else, Gardner was a great teacher of writing (not just my estimation but also attested to by scores of his students, including Raymond Carver). I'd take him these thirty page stories written in pencil on torn out sheets of notebook paper and slip them under his office door. Then, who knew when, sometimes late at night, once in the middle of a blizzard, he'd call me and say, "I'm reading your story." I lived in a motel across the highway from the college and I'd just drop what I was doing and go. Then he'd sit there with a pen in his hand and go through the lines of the piece one by one. He was brutal, but not without a sense of humor. By the time he'd be done, there would be about five lines left. "These are good," he'd tell me. "Write another one." ... He'd say weird stuff too, like "I believe that consciousness exists outside the body and it plays the physical being like an instrument." It made me wonder if everything he told me was total lunacy, but, luckily, I was dumber than a sac of shit and knew it, which allowed me to just push forward and trust him."

 

Essay on "Rabbit Test" by Jeffrey Ford , Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus

(May 24, 2004)

Excerpt—
"Readers new to Ford would probably not realize the story uses elements of his life, but anyone who has read his earlier work will notice a few details suggesting this is another story in the series. I don't think it particularly matters for this story -- certainly not in the way it does for "Bright Morning", where the entire premise of the story plays with, among other things, the duality Borges pointed out with "Borges & I" -- but it does give an extra and even painful verisimilitude to the events, though for all I know the central problem for the characters could be entirely fictional. The more we wonder "what is real?" while reading the story, the more satisfying it is in the end, even if the question extends beyond the fictional reality of the narrative and into the reality of the author's life, creating an ambiguous membrane between the actual and the possible. It's an unsettling effect."