Category: News

excerpt in Publishers Weekly: “Beyond Freytag’s Triangle”

Why should anything as inventive as fiction follow a fixed form, the “narrative arc”? Like its equivalent in nature, a wave, the arc is a beautiful shape, but so many other natural patterns form our world. . . . Two novels that I see following other patterns are Mary Robison’s Why Did Did I Ever, a helter-skelter narrative spinning around a trauma; and Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter, a slow, spiraling conjuring of an absent father.
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Deeply Wacky

The New Yorker‘s Katy Waldman finds “deeply wacky pleasures” in Meander, Spiral, Explode:

“The book’s stakes are surprisingly erotic. . . . Like Peter Brooks, Alison sees narrative shapes as expressions of desire. She wants to invest a scholarly project—that of expanding fiction’s formal possibilities—with erotic promise, a sense of liberation.”

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April 4, 2019: Experimental Forms in Narrative with Jane Alison

Old Town Books
104 S. Union Street
Alexandria, VA

Event Page: https://www.visitalexandriava.com/event/experimental-forms-in-narrative-with-jane-alison/14876/

“Join us for a technique-focused talk about writing experimental narrative forms.

UVA writing professor Jane Alison illuminates the many shapes other than the usual wavelike “narrative arc” that can move fiction forward. The stories she loves most follow other organic patterns found in nature—spirals, meanders, and explosions, among others.

Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. In this liberating manifesto Alison issues a call to action: Let’s leave the outdated modes behind bring feeling back to experimentation on the page. This book on the craft of writing will appeal to readers and writers alike.”

© Jane Alison, 2016