Blog of Week: Maud Newton

Scouring the Internet looking for Good Reads, we came across two items from Maud Newton in the last week. The titles – “On the interconnectedness of stories and ideas” and “On being intimidated by a favorite writer’s work” – give you an idea of the kind of essential subject Ms. Newton likes to take on, and these short pieces live up to their titles. Maud Newton is a New York City-based fiction writer and editor who has been blogging the literary scene since 2002. She has the high-lit credentials – pieces published in the likes of the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and Granta, and a gig with NPR – but, more to the point, everything she posts displays a lively mind and accessible writing style. The comment chains on this blog are first-rate, and Ms. Newton does some of her best work there. Here’s a nice bit of hers responding to a comment about the post on the connection between stories and ideas:

“Still, American writing instruction, by and large, tends to discourage philosophy from bleeding into fiction. And of course this makes a certain amount of sense, because that kind of writing is often done very poorly by beginners. On the other hand, most writing is done poorly by beginners. And forbidding a writer to grapple directly with ideas in fiction often means closing off the things that led him or her to writing in the first place. Imagine if someone had told Thomas Mann to stick with character and scene. Or if Marilynne Robinson had been encouraged to write something less contemplative than Gilead.”