One Question Interview: Christian Winn
A semi-regular series, One Question Interview examines the nature of "good" things in fields as disparate as art, advertising, business, film, food, music, and prose, via one question answered by someone in the know.
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One Question Interview: Christian Winn
This week's One Question Interview features writer Christian Winn. Winn is a fiction writer, poet, journalist, and teacher of creative writing. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, Ploughshares, The Chicago Tribune's Printers Row Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, Gulf Coast, Bat City Review, Every Day Fiction, The Pinch, Santa Monica Review, Handful of Dust, The Strip, Revolver and elsewhere.
Winn's collection of short stories, NAKED ME, is out from Dock Street Press. He has written for The Boise Weekly, Thrive, The Idaho Statesman, and Idaho Magazine. He is the founder of the Writers Write fiction workshop series, co-founder and committee member of Storyfort, and curator of Modern Campfire Stories. He teaches fiction writing at Boise State University, as well as through Writers In The Schools and The Cabin's summer writing camps.
Joel Wayne: What's good writing?
Christian Winn: As primarily a fiction writer and poet I will speak more directly here to the notion of creative writing, of storytelling, of writing that is not intended as reportage, or opinion, writing that is intended to move the spirit and imagination of the reader artfully beyond themselves, and/or deeper within.
"Great writing peels away the layers of who we are as human beings. It gets to the heart and spirit of what it means to push through this life. Great writing pays attention to the details of sense and emotion, and delivers the specifics of both the internal and external."
Great writing is honest, and it is fearless, it splays wide the true nature of love and fear, desire and hope and joy. Great writing peels away the layers of who we are as human beings. It gets to the heart and spirit of what it means to push through this life. Great writing pays attention to the details of sense and emotion, and delivers the specifics of both the internal and external. Great writing intends to break our hearts, make us laugh, tremble with fear, let us know ourselves with a new clarity, allow us to live in another's body and mind and soul. Great writing delivers trouble, crisis, a method of resolution. Great writing punches us in the gut, makes us jealous, reveals new truths in the ordinary and everyday, exposes us to images and ideas we had never even imagined existed. Great writing operates leanly, yet robustly. Great writing artfully conveys narrative, poetics, image, metaphor, character, setting, dialogue, simile in a manner that is singular and impossible to convey in any other form.