Richard Lutman

About Me

Richard Lutman lives in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He has a MFA in Writing from Vermont College. He currently teaches short story classes as part of Coastal Carolina University's Lifelong Learning program. His fiction has appeared in Crazyquilt, Verdad, Slow Trains, The Green Silk Journal, Dark Sky Magazine, The Bicycle Review, Epiphany Magazine, The Petigru Review, Deep South Magazine, The Newport Review, Dew on the Kudzu, The Corner Cupboard Press and WritingRaw. A novella “Iron Butterfly” was a short list sekection in the 2012 Santa Fe Writers Project competition. He has also won awards for his short stories, nonfiction, and screenplays. He was a 2008 Push Cart Nominee. A chapbook of his flash fiction was published in June 2009 and a long narrative poem in 2011 by The Last Automat Press. A novella entitled “I Like a Little Bit of the Handsome Americans Myself” can be found on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle.

Why do you write?

Just about anything. Truman Capote once said: “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about but the inner music the words make.” I disagree. Stories have to be about something—they have to go somewhere and they have to prove something. Literature touches the soul and confronts the human condition and can reach the deepest because it is the medium of the conscious. Although I've just finished my first novel, I love the novella because it is the most cinematic of all literature and it gives me the ability to accommodate dramatic development with compactness. Most of all, I like the challenge of the short story where one's writing must be lean as a snake. For me it is the jewel of the literary canon.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Davis Grubb, Scott Momaday, D. H. Lawrence, Laurence Durrell, Chekov.

"I Dream of Kings" and "The Shadow of my Brother" by Grubb.; Momaday's "House Made of Dawn"; Anything by Lawrence; Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet"; anything by Chekhov, particularly "The Lady with a Dog" and "The Kiss."