Literary Birthday – 28 June – Aimee Bender

Happy Birthday, Aimee Bender, born 28 June 1969.

Eight Quotes On Writing

I started to write not long after everyone was trying to be Carver. I am still inﬂuenced by Carver; I admire his writing a lot. And I love Hemingway.
I have a very rigid schedule where I write for two hours in the morning, five or six days a week, which I’ve been doing since 1995 and it really changed my writing once I set that in place.
I’m not subtle. The violent impulses in my ﬁction are pretty much laid out on the table. I crave the opportunity to let out in the ﬁction some of the darker thoughts that are not as accessible in a regular conversation.
[Writing] comes from a love of language — I really enjoy words and the beauty of words. It comes from an interest in telling stories, and something invisible I can’t define.
Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.
Inspired by the highly regular routines of writers like Stephen King, Flannery O’Connor, Trollope, and many more, I tried to tailor mine to my own idiosyncrasies. In my rule book, I don’t have to do anything except sit at the computer, but I’m not allowed to do anything else, and I usually get so bored I start to work.
As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
Writing is so weird. I like doing interviews because we talk about this thing that’s impossible to talk about. We can’t address it directly, but it’s fun to talk around it.

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me – I felt the wash of her love every day, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.
I want to be violated by insight.
I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.
That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone.
I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.

Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal plots and characters. Her most recent novel is The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC.

Source for image: Author’s Website / Photo credit : Mark Miller