The latest updates.
I’ll be teaching two courses at the always wonderful Iowa Writing Festival in June. June 16-21, I’ll be teaching the week-long course, Re-Visioning Your Story, and June 22-23 the weekend course, From Fact to Fiction. You can find out more about my classes and the other great courses offered at the festival here.
“It’s this complexity, the incommunicability of our pain, that makes us unreachable to one another…this novel conveys the problem; it is also, in its unsentimental sensitivity, a kind of corrective.” Read the review here.
Looking forward to my panel at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival! I’ll be part of the panel “The Home Front” on Saturday, April 20, 3:30 pm, at the Annenberg Auditorium at USC. You can see the schedule for the whole festival here.
Julian Callos shares his process of coming up with the drawings that illustrated my New York Times essay, “The Accidental Writer.” You can see the drawings here.
I talk to the website Litwrap about point of view and process. You can read the interview here.
You can listen to the interview here.
You can read my interview with David Ulin for the Los Angeles Times here.
When I was six years old, I was hit on the head with a rock. How did this lead to my life as a writer? Read my essay here.
Read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Review here.
“In the very best of fiction, an intimate, spiritual communion momentarily transpires between reader and author. In the case of Bender’s novel, these moments occur during these flawless passages of authentic longing and isolation. Like some of today’s best contemporary realistic authors, Bender skillfully excavates and animates the human fragilities and missteps of life…” Read the rest of this great review here.
“This book would be a great discussion piece on the interplay between religion and society as we navigate the personal and the public and the place of religious life in our culture at large.”
Read the rest of his terrific review here.
Ben Steelman interviews me for the Star-News. Read the interview here.
Read an excerpt of my novel here.
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/