Notes on Character and Conclave on NewPages

NewPages Blog recently listed an entry about the editorials in Conclave: A Journal of Character and American Short Fiction:

Some Notes on Character

“I ran across a couple of great editorials in the most recent issues of American Short Fiction and Conclave. Both speak the the nature of character in writing as well as, for Conclave, in photography. Below are some excerpted portions which create a kind of conversation between them.

From Editor Stacey Swann of American Short Fiction (44, Summer 2009):

Like most writers, I grew up reading books—loving the characters and their stories. But I also loved learning about the world. While I understood that Narnia was not a real place or Tom Sawyer a real person, I still invested a great deal of authority in authors: the way they viewed the world was correct on a fundamental level. This explains why studying John Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in high school remains a vivid memory for me. It was the first time I strongly disagreed with what an author was espousing. No matter what Keats thought, no matter what my English teacher echoed, I was certain that beauty was not truth and truth was not beauty. It wasn’t just that many fundamental truths about the world were ugly; beauty wasn’t important enough to equate with truth.”

Click here to read more.

(To read the complete Foreword and Introduction, as well as other works from our inaugural issue, go to the Conclave: A Journal of Character website.)
 

Published by Valya

Valya Dudycz Lupescu has been making magic with food and words for more than 20 years, incorporating folklore from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth. She’s a writer, content developer, instructor, and mother of three teenagers. Valya is the author of MOTHER CHRISTMAS, THE SILENCE OF TREES, and the founding editor of CONCLAVE: A Journal of Character. Along with Stephen H. Segal, she is the co-author of FORKING GOOD: An Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of The Good Place and GEEK PARENTING: What Joffrey, Jor-El, Maleficent, and the McFlys Teach Us about Raising a Family (Quirk Books), and co-founder of the Wyrd Words storytelling laboratory. Valya earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her poetry and prose have been published in anthologies and magazines that include, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Kenyon Review, Culture, Gargoyle Magazine, Gone Lawn, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium. You can find her on Twitter @valya and on Mastodon.social @valya

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