Weston Cutter

I’m not real keen on the choose-a-genre thing, and I’m not good enough at any of them to call myself one kind of writer or another. Like probably everybody, I’m into sentences that click and/or buzz and/or sing, but that’s about as specific as I can think to get it. If there’s any theme connecting what I write, it’s either passion and how it fixes and unfixes people, or its got something to do with loneliness and/or hope—which, side by side like that, may very well be close to the same thing, but whatever.

It’s safe to say that I’ve been saved and sustained by antiquated works of literature––19th and early-20th century stories nobody reads anymore––for about as long as I can remember. I guess that’s why my writing is a little old-fashioned, and usually, I’m okay with that.

When I sit down at my computer, I picture a reader who feels out of place around too much chrome or glass or Scandinavian furniture – somebody who can admire the clean lines of one sharp, spare sentence, but who never feels completely at home there. So I write about objects with a lot of fingerprints on them, people and places through which the past has worn a heavy track. When my sentences get cluttered and haphazard, a little bit like the inside of a good antique shop, I feel like I’m doing something right.

I invented the elbow.

I am regarded as a diety in several Indonesian cities, the study of which is often referred to as "post-Griffinism."

I breathe concrete.

I am known to levitate in my spare time.

The Force is the strongest with me.

I am a second-year MFA candidate who writes short stories.  I received my B.A. from The American University in International Studies and Economics.

Michael Dirda, writing recently in The Washington Post, observed that “Over the past 25 years, literary fiction has increasingly disdained the strict tenets of social realism.  Our finest writers are now producing what is essentially science fiction (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), alternate history (Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) and absurdist fantasy (the short stories of George Saunders).”  It is this new tradition that I explore in my own creative writing.  My short stories have been published or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, Red Rock Review, and The Portland Review, among other places.

My interest in creative writing is rooted in the stories of my family, stories that changed form, shape, and meaning depending on who told them.  My grandmother was my first storybook, and she molded accounts of hardship and loss into tales aimed at teaching me the moral values she held so dear:  kindness, forgiveness, and endurance.  I am selfish in my creative endeavors; I write to learn, and remember, who I am.

Manisha Sharma

I am an M.F.A. student in Creative Writing.  Fiction is the primary genre I work in, though I’ve also been experimenting with poetry and playwriting.  Occasionally, I’m interested in non-fiction, too.  My writing springs from experience and observation of life in India and the United States.  It usually centers on the cultural interaction between the east and west.  I am fascinated by the works of Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri, to name but two.  Practicing yoga is my other strong interest.