Howard Norman, author of the Bird Artist
MELANCHOLIC INSPIRATION: Place might be the unifying element in my writing. The most common intensifying element to my fiction, however, is definitely melancholy.
Melancholy can derive from the weather, from a character’s own nature, from some uncanny elixir of fates, from many sources.
The noirish way fog obfuscates reality at night along Halifax Harbor is a visual equivalent of melancholy, in that it forces a person to look inward, to impose an introspection, and from that you come to some knowledge of yourself you would not otherwise have.
I don’t have any fancy of even fully realized hypotheses about this. It is mostly subjective and experimental. With each book I get more puzzled by my own fictional inclinations and yet at the same time deepen my fealty toward them.
So it has been and so probably it will always be.
– Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
Here are some of our top creative writers. But we can’t list everyone. Who do you think should be here? Paste your comments below.
Prize-winning poet Jehanne Dubrow’s erudition, wit, craftsmanship, and use of metaphor (The Hardship Post, From the Fever-World) have ensured her place on the U.S. literary scene.
Famousdc.com’s contributors anonymous mix of wonks, pols, hacks, and flacks, produce funny and often annoying reports on the Washington political, media, and sport scene.
Washington Post writer Wil Haygood has received great acclaim for his biographies of Sugar Ray Robinson, Adam Clayton Powell, and Sammy Davis Jr. as well as a family memoir, “The Haygoods of Columbus.”
Dylan Landis made an audacious debut with Normal People Don’t Like This, her 10-installment novel about an alienated, vulnerable teen-age girl living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1970s.
Harvard-educated lawyer and former Time drama critic Brad Leithauser is the author of numerous works of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including the highly unusual novel-in-verse Darlington’s Fall.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Dinaw Mengestu’s prize-winning story about an Ethiopian immigrant’s life, has been called “a great African novel, a great Washington novel, and a great American novel.”
Johns Hopkins University professor Azar Nafisi’s vivid portrayal of the Islamic revolution in Iran, Reading Lolita in Tehrna: A Memoir of Books, spent 117 weeks on the New York Times’ bestseller list and has been translated into 32 languages.
The many works of detective fiction George Pelecanos set amid the cultural landmarks and grittier neighborhoods of Washington have inspired a cult following, as have the episodes he penned for five seasons of HBO’s The Wire.
