Craft Advice with Cynthia Weiner
On a room of one's own, fictionalizing true crime stories, writing good dialogue, finding the right distance to tell your story, and writing the stuff you don't want to write about.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Cynthia Weiner’s writing is a marvel of restraint, precision, and bountiful beauty. From the moment I read the first paragraph of her short story Aftertaste, I fell madly in love. She knows how to carry both suffering and abundance, both hardness and tenderness, both to-the-bone despair and to-the-bone glory.
All of this and more, makes its way onto the pages of her debut novel, A Gorgeous Excitement. Inspired by Robert Chambers’ murder of Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986 (aka the “Preppy Murder”), Cynthia pushes back on the slut-shaming headlines that followed and offers us an insightful and wild and compelling exploration of growing up in that time amongst that crowd. A crowd she was well acquainted with as she grew up frequenting many of the same places Chambers did and even casually knew him.
Cynthia’s work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Ploughshares, and Epiphany and been awarded a Pushcart. She’s the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City where she has taught for decades.
If you missed part one of our interview, you can read it here.
I loved speaking with Cynthia about her work She has such a fresh way of seeing the world. As always, let me know what you think in the comments!
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Where do you write?
I live in Beacon in the Hudson Valley, and I have a tiny office in what was the old Beacon High School. They made all the rooms into offices. It’s really cool, actually. It’s an art studio, and has regular offices, too. I have a little room at the top of the stairs.
Are the other people writers?