Letters to a Young Writer by Ann Beattie

Ann Beattie’s advent in the 1970s as the voice of a generation helped create a global short story renaissance. Her explorations of the subtle cruelties and desires of the heart have continually sustained and advanced the story form, and she has been honored with the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for the Short Story. She is the author of numerous books, including the collections Onlookers (Scribner, 2023), Follies, The State We’re In, and The Accomplished Guest, as well as the novels Chilly Scenes of Winter, Another You, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, and A Wonderful Stroke of Luck. Beattie lives in Maine and Key West.

Photograph by Sigrid Estrada.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University School of the Arts and was named a 2014–2016 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. The winner of numerous awards for her work, including First Place in Narrative’s Fall 2008 Story Contest for her story “You Cannot Lie about a Mountain,” she writes for many national periodicals, and several of her pieces are available in our Archive. Thomas-Kennedy lives in Massachusetts.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the novel The Incendiaries (Riverhead, 2018). A graduate of the MFA program at Brooklyn College, where she won the Himan Brown Award, Kwon was featured as one of Narrative’s Best New Writers for “Superhero,” her first published short story. Born in South Korea, she has mostly lived in the United States.

QUICK TAGS

Advice
Youth
Solitude
Growing Old
Education

+ MORE

In a reversal to our usual Letters to a Young Writer format, in which a featured Narrative author responds to comments and questions from a young writer, here Ann Beattie poses a question about a writer’s responsibility, and two young writers, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy and R. O. Kwon, respond.

To continue reading please sign in.

Join for free