(Photo Credit: Audubon Society) A number of years ago, while visiting the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, I was struck by the fact that many science fiction authors had envisioned the future in their novels, then watched as their vision become reality. Well, guess what? It’s happened at the Fictional Café, too! We recently published a short story by Kathryn Holzman entitled “Rattlesnakes.” It concerned a group of people demonstrating against creating a sanctuary on an island in a Massachusetts reservoir for…yep, rattlesnakes. Oooo, I thought, that’s a creepy idea! But I liked the story a lot, especially the dream-like ending. So it was with some surprise that I read this article by Jan Gardner in the Boston Globe a few months later: “Tale of the timber rattler” “After a public outcry, the state of Massachusetts earlier this…

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By Simran P. Gupta The author Jhumpa Lahiri is an inspiration to me, particularly with her latest memoir, In Other Words. In this work, she chronicles her journey with learning to write exclusively (as well as read and speak) in Italian. As a South Asian learning a language that is not from that subcontinent, her thoughts resonated strongly with me, and led to some reflection of my own. I am not by any means embarking on a mission to write exclusively in French yet, but thanks to my French major I have been reading more and more French and Francophone literature. I have quickly realized that this literature is not the same beast as the film or literature I study for my English major. French literature takes me almost twice as long to read, is…

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For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is the portmanteau for National Novel Writing Month, a social initiative to encourage writers – from amateur to seasoned – to take that leap from “I’ve got an idea for a story” to “Hey, I’m pretty far along on the novel I’m writing.” While it’s certainly not for everyone, it is an interesting, well-thought-out guide to helping people write and finish a first draft of a novel with the help of other writers and support via social media. On the other hand, the very thought of finishing a novel, even just a draft, in a month seems preposterous to some, especially with setting a deadline by which to finish it and a word-count goal for each day. So, NaNoWriMo: Love it? Hate it? Let us know in the comments section below….

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