January 31, 2019
On the Epistolary Form and Writing Letters About Your Imagined Writing
So often I give my students the advice I need to hear myself. This week I assigned them to write someone a letter about the piece they wanted to compose […]
January 28, 2019
Both Genres Depend on High Stakes: A Conversation with Erica Wright on Poetry and Crime Fiction
Erica Wright writes both poetry and crime fiction. Wright’s first crime novel was one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books for Summer 2014, and her most recent work of […]
January 18, 2019
Tully: Savoir Mermaids and “the Wild Heart that Still Beats Inside the Docile Cow” of the Mother
[Spoiler Alert] At the simplest level, Jason Reitman’s Tully tells the tale of Marlo’s (Charlize Theron) struggle with the arrival of her third child and consequent hiring of a night […]
January 10, 2019
A Novel From the Perspective of Marilyn Monroe’s Dog
Marilyn Monroe’s dog Maf, or Mafia Honey as his pneumatic mistress dubs him, is a present from Frank Sinatra–just one of many colorful celebrities to grace the pages of Andrew […]
December 31, 2018
Thinking on Dystopia: The Giver and The Time Machine
Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine both present ostensible utopias that are, in fact, dystopias. This makes sense given that a dystopia is defined by its […]
December 26, 2018
Teaching About Designer Babies/Designing Humans (and the story of American Eugenics)
When I was asking around about teaching methods or topics that excited students, I was particularly intrigued to hear about Dr. Phyllis van Slyck’s course, “Designer Babies/Designing Humans (and the story of […]
December 18, 2018
What Special Ed Has to Teach Ed: Speaking With the Woman Who Taught Me To Read When No One Else Could
My own struggle with learning disabilities left me with very strong feelings on education. With the help of one very brilliant and patient woman, Veronica Russo, I was given the […]
December 6, 2018
Asking College and High School Students How They Want to be Taught
After teaching college for ten years, some days I feel like a wrinkled old pro, but many days I still find the practice of conveying information to young people to […]
November 30, 2018
What I Learned About Teaching College From Being a Parent of Young Kids and Vice Versa
When I got the email asking preschool parents to lead an activity with their kids, I started preparing a poetry writing exercise. I could tell the teachers were dubious as […]
November 27, 2018
The American Dream and the American Nightmare
I’ve been thinking about how the history of American literature can help us understand our current xenophobic sociopolitical climate. It has long been the role of the author to articulate […]
November 16, 2018
Adventures in Pedagogy: Teaching Your Students to Become Textual Flâneurs (plus pedagogy links)
This is the first essay in my new series on teaching for the Kenyon Review, Adventures in Pedagogy. Each year that I teach college English, film, composition, and creative writing, […]
November 6, 2018
An Interview With Maryse Meijer
Carmen Maria Machado wrote of Maryse Meijer’s Northwood, which comes out this week, “This strange and beautiful novella has everything I want: formal play, myths and fairy tales, the politics […]