Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

Having just read The Advocate article, "How The Tenth Challenges the Image of Black Queer Men," I thought I would repost the post I did for Queer Romance Month in October. I read. A lot. And I collect books. I have hundreds. Many are classics—Fitzgerald, Wells, Dickens, the Brontés. Virginia Wolfe. But many more are contemporary gay fiction ranging from newer, lesser known writers to the literary lions of gay literature: Felice Picano, Mark Merlis, E.M. Forster, Baldwin, Burroughs (William, not Augusten), Alan Hollinghurst, William J. Mann, David Leavitt. The first queer novel I read was Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner . I remember finding it at the book store at Penn freshman year. My roommates, who were on the track team, were at an away meet that weekend. I read the entire book before they returned, barely stopping to sleep and eat. I read The Fancy Dancer, too. But it was The Front Runner that started me on the pursuit of queer fiction. From then on I read...

This week I’m chatting with the remarkable Mark William Lindberg, a queer author, artist, performer, and educator, whose new novella, Queer on a Bench just came out. Let’s just dive write in, shall we?   As a writer, I am always interested in other writers' writing process and what inspires them, so can you talk a little about what inspires your stories and what your writing process is like? I'm really interested in form, so a lot of the time—certainly with my two books so far—I'll start with a what-if question. 81 Nightmares came from asking myself, "What if all you had was one character's dreams? What if that was the whole story? What could you learn about that person? What would you think you knew about them? Is it possible to tell a complete story that lives only in a character's dream life?" My new book, Queer on a Bench , began with the question, "What if the whole story has to happen between the time a character sits down on a bench an...