Few would question that we’ve entered an era of unprecedented cultural fragmentation. People can no longer agree on the most fundamental things: what is good or bad, right or wrong, true or false. Writers, too, have felt the effects of this trend. As a professor of English and a novelist, I’ve spent the better part of my life advocating for…
When I was a little boy, my father, a carpenter, would take me to work with him. He brought me along because my mother worked full-time as a cleaning lady and when I went with her I invariably broke things or was too loud and rambunctious for the old rich ladies, so my father often got me. Later, when I…
My wife, a cancer physician, recently asked me where a story for a novelist begins. As a scientist and as a very close and insightful reader of my novels, she was articulating a question that many non-writers and beginning writers have about the creative process; namely, where does a novel start? I’m not a scientist, nor am I someone who…
Michael C. White | Summer 2022 “As for those citizens in Camus’s world, America is not a friendly place to be sick even in good times; during a plague, it’s a disaster.” Recently I told a writer friend I was rereading Camus’s The Plague. He laughed and asked if I were crazy. He thought reading such a “downer” of a…
How does a parent survive the death of a child? Losing a child suggests that the world has been turned topsy-turvy, upside-down. Parents are supposed to die before their children. That’s the natural order of things. So how does one survive that most unnatural and unimaginable events? That’s the problem I posed for my main character, Elizabeth, in Resting Places.…
Recently, I visited the Clark art museum in Williamstown. I happened upon Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s moving sculpture, Mater Dolorosa. Unlike so many works of art about Mary’s grief over the death of her son, this one depicts only the woman’s bust, alone, in terrible anguish. The story about the sculpture was even more moving. In a park, the artist Carpeaux had…