Tag: multiculturalism

  • The Art of Fiction: Outline Your Novel, or Don’t…Or, Yeah, Maybe

    The Art of Fiction: Outline Your Novel, or Don’t…Or, Yeah, Maybe

    In class, the subject always comes up: should you outline your story, or not? That is, should you make a road map for your novel, one that you will follow like a disciple, from page one to the climax, three hundred pages later? Or, will you dare to step off the outline, if the story…

  • An Interview With Pico Iyer

    An Interview With Pico Iyer

    This is an interview with memoirist and travel author Pico Iyer, about his book Sun After Dark. It is about traveling and empathy–what does it mean to dwell in someone else’s culture for a while, especially we who come from the States, who are more privileged than most of the world? What does our home become, in…

  • Gracias, México, for Saving My Salvadoran Soul

    Gracias, México, for Saving My Salvadoran Soul

    Once my Uncle Paco–the pain-in-the-ass Salvadoran revolutionary in exile in Mexico–saw how much books meant to me, he backed off. After I shook the novel Cien años de soledad in his face and swore I’d read it until I understood it, I holed up in his guest bedroom and started on the first paragraph, with a…