Scott Blackwood

2009-12-03T11:18:00.001-08:00

Praise for We Agreed to Meet Just Here

2009-04-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

This little gem of a book puts on lush display Scott Blackwood's talent for measuring and connecting the previously un-connectable in lived experience, and making of it an entirely new whole which we immediately accept as true, natural, exhilarating, even inevitable. He is a lovely sentence writer, and this first novel sparkles with invention.

--Richard Ford

As we enter debut novelist Scott Blackwood's intimate world, Winnie Lipsy is sitting in her backyard in Austin, staring up into a tree. She's not bird-watching, but imploring her 8-year-old son to please come down before he falls and breaks his arm. Isaac falls, breaks his arm. That's about the only thing predictable about the Texas writer's revelatory debut novel, which builds on the solid foundation of Blackwood's 2001 story collection "In the Shadow of Our House." What's most amazing about "We agreed to meet just here" — the title pops into the hit-and-run driver's mind when Natalie, smiling, "explodes in the Blazer's highbeams" — is Blackwood's trenchant and expedient use of ideas and language.

--Steve Bennett, San Antonio Express-News [Named a best of 2009 book]

Scott Blackwood's new novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, manages somehow to be both spare and all-encompassing, a mystery that delves into the very nature of disappearance: Once gone, is anyone ever really gone? Blackwood proves himself a master of connection; he depicts with almost miraculous brevity (the book is only 164 pages long) how seemingly unrelated events, actions, even thoughts, dangle strings that eventually get caught up in one another and weave a community together. Sometimes the stitches are uneven, or a patch is left bare, but everything eventually ties together...Blackwood grew up in Texas and... until recently, he taught creative writing at the University of Texas. He has decamped to Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he is director of the MFA Creative Writing Program. Pity us, but great news for them – they just latched onto a major talent.

--Joy Tripping, The Dallas Morning News

2008-12-22T10:03:00.000-08:00

A sense of imminent and unskirtable dread hangs over Texas native Scott Blackwood's finely wrought first novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here...a triumph of language and atmospherics and--as we're drawn deeper into the characters' private worlds, hallucinations, and dreams--a travelogue of unfamiliar emotional terrain.

--Texas Monthly

Entering Blackwood’s debut novel is like plunging straight into a dense, white fog. You have to keep your arms up, because you know something is coming, even if you can’t see it. And Blackwood plumbs that sense of dreadful anticipation for all it’s worth in this numinous, abbreviated tale of suburban woe.

--Time Out Chicago

Long after you’ve closed the book, you’ll find yourself haunted by...random passages, like the leaping man from the helicopter who forever falls in the mind of the pilot. But for all the novel’s fleeting, almost ghostly quality, its crowded telling leaves a reader with ears ringing, wanting more.

--The Rumpus

We Agreed to Meet Just Here is not a story about redemption, and it is not a story about making peace and meaning out of terrible events. Instead, this lyrical portrait of mystery and longing functions like a piece of music—a sad piece of music that gives voice to a yearning that is both general and specific. The narrative voice alternates between the songs of soloists and the swell of the full choir. Blackwood constructs his movements like a conductor, artfully choosing scenes that echo each other, and in this way the novel’s sections play out the different sounds of the novel’s theme: “See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?”

--RainTaxi