Mylene Dressler's Blog
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Apr.12.2013
Pick up the May 2013 issue of Reader's Digest to read my essay about how I left the ground . . . available at your magazine or checkout stand now!
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Feb.22.2013
In 2007, I came to live, for a humid fall season, in the home where I am writing this now. In this home a woman, now long dead, hunched over a typewriter--at least, I always imagine Carson McCullers hunching when she wrote, because her shoulders in photos always look slightly rounded, and her body...
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Nov.03.2012
My new novella, The Wedding of Anna F., has been published this week in Big Fiction. Here is how the story, about a woman who believes she is Anne Frank, begins:
The interviewer is coming today. So. Here is the simple part: choosing what to wear. I’ve told my little assistant buzzing downstairs—...
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Sep.08.2012
It's been a while since I posted on American Stories NOW.
I could tell you I have been busy. I have been. I can tell you I am sometimes overwhelmed by stories, that I don't always feel up to the challenge of honoring the real people I meet; that sometimes it's easier to write fiction; that...
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Aug.25.2012
So: today I completed the final edits to my novella, The Wedding of Anna F., which will be published later this fall. Which leaves me time and brings me back to my questions from earlier this week:
Why do I, a novelist, find myself writing in this shorter form? And what are the challenges of...
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Aug.22.2012
Dear Friends,
This week the Atticus Review has published some of my flash fiction, a very short story about the day a strange force arose from the sea:
http://atticusreview.org/the-occupation/
Later this fall, my novella--or very short novel--will be published by the (wonderfully named) small press...
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Jun.16.2012
I've been thinking about my ballet-dancing days today. As some of you know, before I was a writer, I was a professional ballet dancer, a career I loved to the moon and back; the stage also taught me a great deal I would use on the page--about rhythm, pacing, arc, tempo, movement, stamina,...
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4 comments
May.01.2012
At Fifth and Market
An old woman sits at a window. A street runs below her. It once shuttled fattened taxis past her building. Now buses, on natural fuel, run silent as fog.
Men, one day, stopped wearing hats. Young people dressed...
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1 comment
Apr.29.2012
Dear Friends,
Yesterday I led a writing workshop at a writers conference, and today was contacted by a participant with questions that still burned: How do we keep going? How do we make ourselves keep writing, without any real deadline or urgency? How on earth do we stick to it?
Here,...
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8 comments
Apr.26.2012
Dear Friends,
I'm very proud to announce that I am now part of new graffiti, a grassroots publishing project that gets literature out of our iPads and Kindles, off of our bookshelves, and onto the streets! Want to get involved? Go to http://newgraffitipublishing.com/ and check out its...
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Mar.17.2012
Darkness, black. "PERMISSION." Brightness, white. --Soobin Park
Dear Friends,
Warmest thanks for following the link below, and posting--if you feel so moved--comments on the six-word memoirs of my students at Guilford College. These are young people who have not, until now,...
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4 comments
Mar.15.2012
My husband, wonderful man, asks questions. He collects stories. He loves to listen to you. He is not, by choice, a writer. He's simply very curious, and attentive; and he would much rather speak to you about something moving and unexpected than about something dull and...
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2 comments
Mar.10.2012
Friends, thanks so much for the love you have shown my Red Room blog, which in recent days has received its highest numbers of visitors--ever! In return, we've dropped my two novels published by Penguin Putnam (The Deadwood Beetle and The Floodmakers) from $5.99 to $1.99. It's a Spring...
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Mar.08.2012
Quite often, I find myself in a position known as that of the "Visiting Writer." I have to admit, I have a fondness for the title. It seems so deliciously appropriate. What is a writer if not a visitor? One who arrives, looks around, settles in, makes herself...
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Mar.07.2012
My room on the 19th floor of the Palmer House in Chicago faces the open air, and then a mirror of brick. Out the window, across a gap of thirty feet, lies another wing of the hotel and another bank of windows, exactly like mine. Each has sheer curtains overlaid with heavier ones;...
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5 comments
About Mylene
Mylène Dressler is a writer and a "superb" speaker whose work has been hailed by the New York Times as "splendid' and by the Christian Science Monitor as "haunting," "demanding" and "perfect."
Mylène was born in...
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Causes Mylene Dressler Supports
The Women's Media Center