Robert Shapard has been a member of WLT for five years and will be attending the 2014 Summer Writing Retreat in Alpine next month. He lives in Austin, TX.
Scribe: In what genre(s) do you write?
Robert Shapard: Fiction mostly, and the occasional short article or review.
Scribe: What authors would you like to have coffee or a beer with and which beverage?
RS: Ron Carlson, beer and Tana French, tea.
Scribe: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what book would you want to have with you to keep you sane?
RS: A big book, that floats.
Scribe: What have you learned from your association with the Writers’ League?
RS: Lots of useful things, from good classes and panels, led by outstanding people.
Scribe: Where do you see your writing taking you (or you taking it) in the future?
RS: I taught in college for years and did a lot of literary editing but had never enough time, it seemed, to do my own writing, or to read with no motive but pleasure—now I want to keep doing both.
Scribe: Is there anything else about you that you would like to share with the world? An opportunity for blatant self-promotion!
RS: You might like to know there’s new collection of great 1-3 page stories, Flash Fiction International, to be published by W.W. Norton next March. It can be preordered on Amazon. The collection includes 83 of the most beautiful, provocative, and moving narratives by authors from six continents, including best-selling writer Etgar Keret, Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, Korean screenwriter Kim Young-ha, Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, and Argentinian “Queen of the Microstory” Ana María Shua, among many others.” James Thomas and I are coeditors (we’ve done a series for Norton) and are joined this time by Christopher Merrill, who directs the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.
If you’d like to learn more about our Summer Writing Retreat in Alpine or register for one of our workshops, you can find more information here:
https://writersleague.org/37/Summer-Writing-Retreat
