Alice Mattison’s The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale, will be published by Viking on August 16, 2016. She is also the author of six novels, most recently When We Argued All Night, published in 2012 by Harper Perennial, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice; four collections of stories, including In Case We’re Separated, which won the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book; and a book of poems. She teaches fiction in the MFA program in writing and literature at Bennington College, and lives in New Haven, CT.