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.)
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