David Jauss

David Jauss at the Savage River Writers Retreat

Please click here to purchase a copy of Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing, a collection of essays Bret Lott has called "an invaluable course of study" by "a writer whose work I respect and admire utterly, and from I myself have learned a great deal about writing."

Please click here to purchase a copy of Words Overflown by Stars: Creative Writing Instruction and Insight from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program

Please click here to purchase a copy of Black Maps, a "moving, impressive, deeply rewarding collection from a very talented writer" (Lorrie Moore)

Please click here to purchase a copy of You Are Not Here, which Leslie Ullman praised for its "elegant, timeless poems" of "quiet courage"

Please click here to purchase a copy of Improvising Rivers, a collection of poems whose "surface details, as on a river, float gracefully over hidden but powerful currents" (Maura Stanton)

Please click here to purchase a copy of A Crack in Everything: How We Know What's Done Is Done, a monograph exploring the idea of completion in a work of art.

Please click here to purchase a copy of Strong Measures, which Judson Jerome called "a sparkling anthology" that is "also a study guide" for poets interested in honing their craft

Please click here to purchase The Best of Crazyhorse, an anthology of poems and stories from one of America's leading literary journals

Please click here to purchase a copy of Crimes of Passion, a collection of stories H.E. Francis described as "complex, profound, beautiful in form"

News/Events

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

My essay “The Reverse Side: The Poetry of Stephen Dunn” is forthcoming in Shenandoah (www.shenandoahliterary.org) in November and in A Better Way To Be Alone: The Mind and Poetry of Stephen Dunn, edited by Laura McCullough.

My short story “Blizzards” is forthcoming in upstreet in July 2012.

My poem “Lazarus” is forthcoming in Afterwords: Poems That Continue the Stories, edited by Kurt Brown and Howard Schechter (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012).

My essay "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Abstraction?: Modes of Conveying Emotion" is forthcoming in The Writer's Chronicle.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

On Writing Fiction, a collection of seven of my essays on the craft of fiction, was published in July by Writer's Digest Books. (It was originally published under the title Alone With All That Could Happen in 2008. It contains a foreword by Bret Lott. For excerpts from the essays, click on the link under Essay Collections on the right.

A short craft essay, "11 Strategies for Ending Works of Fiction,” Hunger Mountain (www.hungermtn.org/on-endings-11-strategies/), June 2011.

A guest "MFA Insider" column, "The Real Story Behind Low-Residency MFA Programs," Writer's Digest Magazine, Feb. 2011.

"A Crack in Everything: How We Know What’s Done Is Done," an essay exploring the issue of completion in a work of art, in The Haystack Reader: Collected Essays on Craft, 1991-2009, ed. Michael Alpert (Orono and Deer Isle, ME: University of Maine Press and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 2010).

A short story, "Depositions," in upstreet, No. 6 (Summer 2010).

A poem, "The Proposition of Any River," in The Island Journal (Summer 2010).

An essay, "Returning Characters to Life: Chekhov's Subversive Endings," in The Writer's Chronicle (March/April 2010).

Two poems, "Elk-Hair Caddis" and "Against Sunsets," in The Island Journal (2009).

Words Overflown by Stars: Creative Writing Instruction and Insight from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program, an anthology of thirty-two essays on writing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that I edited, was published in January 2009 by Writer's Digest Books. For the Table of Contents and an excerpt from the Preface, click on the link under Anthologies on the right.

My essay "Remembering Lynda Hull” appears in a special feature entitled "Lynda Hull Remembered" in the Spring 2008 issue of Blackbird (www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n1/). Both a text and audio version of this essay, which I read as part of the panel “A Tribute to Lynda Hull” at the Association of Writers and Writing Progams’ annual conference in New York in January 2007, appears along with other essays from the AWP tribute by David Wojahn, Mark Doty, Elizabeth Alexander, and Brenda Shaughnessy. The special feature also includes an essay by Susan Aizenberg, two previously unpublished poems by Lynda Hull, and a video of Lynda reading her poem "The Window."

Selected Works

ESSAY COLLECTIONS

Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction (reprinted in paperback as On Writing Fiction)
Seven essays on such subjects as writing what you don't know, point of view, the music of syntax, epiphanies, structuring story collections, and the role of contradiction in the creative process. (To read excerpts from these essays, please click on the title above.)

ANTHOLOGIES

Words Overflown by Stars: Creative Writing Instruction and Insight from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program
Thirty-two essays on the craft of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by past and present faculty of the acclaimed Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. (For the Table of Contents and an excerpt from the Preface, please click on the title above.)

Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms
A showcase for the finest contemporary examples of nearly 75 traditional forms, ranging from ballads and sonnets to kyrielles and pantoums, by nearly 200 poets, this anthology demonstrates how today's poets have experimented with the old forms to make them "new" and relevant to our times. (To read an excerpt, please click on the title above.)

The Best of Crazyhorse: Thirty Years of Poetry and Fiction
An anthology of the finest poems and short stories published in Crazyhorse, the journal Raymond Carver called "an indispensable literary magazine of the first order." (To read an excerpt, please click on the title above.)

FICTION COLLECTIONS

Black Maps
Winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction. "Black Maps is a moving, impressive, deeply rewarding collection from a very talented writer."--Lorrie Moore (To read excerpts, please click on the title above.)

Crimes of Passion
"The stories are executed with verve and wit, and one of them--'Shards'--is terrifying enough to have vexed my sleep for two nights running. A fine collection."--Tobias Wolff (To read excerpts, please click on the title above.)

POETRY COLLECTIONS

You Are Not Here
Winner of the Fleur-de-Lis Press National Poetry Book Competition. "Compassion, humor, restless intelligence, and flawless technique come together brilliantly in You Are Not Here to create poems of real tenderness and classical restraint."--Maura Stanton (To read excerpts, please click on the title above.)

Improvising Rivers
"Jauss sees the exercise of style as a form of pilgrimage to the human heart. And he knows the heart in all of its intricacies, misery, and splendor. It is hardly the fashion anymore to label a book as noble--but no other word will suffice."--David Wojahn (To read excerpts, please click on the title above.)

MISCELLANEOUS MONGRAPHS, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS

Miscellaneous Monographs, Essays, and Interviews
Selected monographs, essays, and interviews on the craft of writing, jazz poetry, minimalism, Lynda Hull, James Wright, Flannery O'Connor, William Carlos Williams, and other writers and subjects. (To read excerpts, please click on heading above.)

Quick Links

If your e-mail uses Outlook Express, click here to contact me directly. Otherwise, contact me at davidjauss@sbcglobal.net.

Learn About the West Memphis Three

Free the West Memphis Three

The MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts

Hunger Mountain, The Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal of Arts & Letters

Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs

The Writer's Chronicle

Authors Guild