Prairie Schooner

At the recent Nebraska Summer Writer’s Conference I took a workshop called “Two Truths and a Lie,” the object of which was to explore the intersections between memoir and fiction, self-writing and other-writing, autobiography and the novel…you get the point. It was taught by Michelle Tea, herself the author of several hybrid books that she referred to as “fictional memoirs,” a term I don’t think I’d heard before. Tea’s books, which are amazing sort of punk queer coming of age narratives, are all deeply informed by her own history but slide between non-fiction and fiction in representing specific characters and situations.

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of the novella A Field Guide to the North American Family. His stories and essays have been published in Best New American Voices, The New York Times Magazine, Prairie Schooner, New York, Glimmer Train, Slate, Canteen, and The Pinch, as well as at The Millions, where he’s a contributing editor. A 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction, Garth teaches at Fordham University and Sarah Lawrence College.

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Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. He teaches at the Pratt Institute and at New York University. He collects cover songs, standards, and photos of text at askforgiveness.tumblr.com. His own work is collected at justindtaylor.net.

This is the fifth installment of an ongoing series written for the blog by Richard Graham. Richard is an associate professor and media services librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he studies the educational use of comics and serves as the film and art history liaison. His posts examine UNL’s, Nebraska’s, and the larger literary world’s connections with the comics medium.

In light of Father's Day I’ve found myself contemplating one of the staples of conflict often found throughout the arts and humanities: father-and-son-relationships. While my own family dynamics certainly have had, and continue to experience, moments of drama, it is not nearly dysfunctional enough to prove as compelling as some of the depictions I’ve encountered vicariously.