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Literary Cocktail Hour - Grant Faulkner with Brian Mooney
- 421 reads
On Friday, June 10 at 5:00 pm Literary Cocktail Hour featured NaNoWriMo director Grant Faulkner who was in conversation with Storymatic creator Brian Mooney.
National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days.Now, each year on November 1, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with 50,000 words of a brand new novel. They enter the month as elementary school teachers, mechanics, or stay-at-home parents. They leave as novelists. In 2021, 427,653 writers participated in NaNoWriMo programs, including 90,561 students and educators in the Young Writers Program. It is the largest writing event in the world.
Grant Faulkner’s newest book, "All the Comfort Sin Can Provide," delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise—tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, he chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence. Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page—honest, cutting, and wise.
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, a collection of short stories, Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions. He’s also the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. He lives in San Francisco.
Brian David Mooney has published essays, fiction, and poetry in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary, Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, and other journals. His essays about the creative process were presented by Leonard Nimoy for United States Artists at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Paramount Studios, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He is the creator of The Storymatic family of creative prompts, which includes Rememory and Synapsis and he lives in Vermont.
