Jane Bradley

About Me

Jane Bradley is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Toledo where she teaches fiction workshops and screenwriting. You Believers is her fifth book and has received numerous rave reviews including a Starred Review in Booklist. She has published a novella, a screenwriting text, and two collections of fiction. Her collection Power Lines was listed as an “Editor’s Choice” by The New York Times Book Review. She has received both NEA and Ohio Arts Council Fellowships for her work as well as three grants from the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo. She is currently at work on a new novel, The Snow Queen of Atlanta. Originally from the hills of Tennessee, she is still trying to make sense of the funny accents and the multitude of parking lots all around her in Toledo. Check out her webpage at www.janebradley.net

Why do you write?

Snippets of truth that I hear and see It can be--and often is--a line overheard. It can be an image. A fleeting interaction between strangers. I refer to them as "loaded" moments that tend to go unnoticed. I feel they are worth examination; when explored they open up new insights into just how and why we do the things we do. When I experience such a thing, the moment hums and I know I will write about it. Hanging with smart writers with a sense of humor certainly helps my creativity.
Why do I write? To recreate experience in a way that opens up some kind of insight and/or connection. I consider myself pathologically empathetic. I can feel/identify sometimes with the most unlikely people, people with whom I have nothing in common except the fact that we are human. I write because I'm constantly curious and want to know the whys and hows of all the things we are.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Oh my this changes. But I have some steady faves: Flaubert, Chekov, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Kundera. More current ones: Kate Braverman, Dan Chaon, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, Ed Falco, Kyle Minor.

Books, again, this changes and as soon as I post this, I'll recall obvious books and writers that I should have noted. In addition to at least one book by the above writers, I'd say Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, In Cold Blood, Butcher's Crossing, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Crooked Letter Crooked Letter, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. And I'm knocked out by the revolutionary take on addition and the "war on drugs" in the non-fiction book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.