We made it to the long-list~ The 2025 Somerset Long List for Literary & Contemporary Fiction… See more chantireviews.com The 2025 Somerset Long List for Literary & Contemporary Fiction | Chanticleer The last of the Long Lists are here! It’s Short Lists all the way down after this! Congratulations to these authors who made the…

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I won’t let my students use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in my Creative Writing class and I won’t use it myself. It’s technically possible to use GAI to “create” something that looks like literature, i.e., an essay, a poem, or story. And a would-be writer can create a prompt and ask (tell?) Chat-GPT to write…

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How does a writer learn about main characters? That’s another way of asking how does a writer ensure that these characters are round, meaning interesting and complex and, therefore, completely believable as human beings? I would guess that all writers have different strategies for achieving this effect. One way that works for me is to…

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There had to be a first time when I decided to knock on doors on behalf of a political campaign, and today was the day, chilly and cloudy, but not terribly uncomfortable. I volunteered to help the Wexton campaign in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District. Naturally, I was early to the meeting in McClean Central Park…

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The biggest problem facing democracy in America is apathy: the apathy of people who don’t even want to talk to other people about what our problems are. I encounter this apathy when I canvass for Congressional candidates, something I’ve done a few times over the last month on behalf of a candidate for the Democratic…

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The best way to approach issues of faith in a novel – or anywhere else – is to do so with great respect. Yet, try as one might, novels such as these are not for everyone. The imperative of writing any novel is that it must tell a good story, by which I mean one…

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