Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become an historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night on her twenty-first birthday with the revelation she wanted to write fiction. "I wanted to Live, not spend my life in a library. Of course, my conception of being a writer was to wear a cape and have Adventures."
Fitch has published short stories in literary journals such as A Room of One's Own, briefly attended film school in the director's program at the University of Southern California, worked at various times as a typesetter, a proofreader, a graphic artist, a freelance journalist, the managing editor of American Film magazine, and the editor of The Mancos Times Tribune, a weekly newspaper in the mountains of Southwestern Colorado. Currently, she teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern California's Masters of Professional Writing program. She lives in Los Angeles.
Janet Fitch's website
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"White Oleander," the story which grew into her novel, was named as
a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 1994.
Interestingly enough, the story was rejected from The Ontario Review with a
note from Joyce Carol Oates, stating that while she enjoyed it, it seemed more like the
first chapter of a novel than a short story. It had not occurred to Fitch to extend the
story, but she decided to take a chance on this advice and wrote her novel.
Her writing process is simple. "I write all the time, whether I feel like it or
not," she says. "I never get inspired unless I'm already writing. I write every
day, including weekends. For writers there are no weekends. It's just that your family is
around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them."
Her journalistic experience proved a vaccination against writer's block. "When I
had the newspaper, I had to come up with 12 or 15 stories a week regardless of whether
there was anything to write about. Someone would call me up and say, "My kid just
caught a big fish, come over and take a picture of it." So you'd go take a picture of
the fish and then interview the kid...
Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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