February 14, 2019
“The impossible becomes possible with hybrid forms”: A Conversation with Katie Farris
Katie Farris is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and translator. She is the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011) and the chapbooks Thirteen Intimacies (Fivehundred Places, 2017), […]
February 13, 2019
On George Orwell and Sensory Detail in Writing
In a previous blog post on long sentences, I critiqued George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” specifically because I felt its list of rules was too restrictive, […]
February 11, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – February
It’s happening again. Even as we speak, elsewhere—in a college dorm, maybe, or some recess of the internet—a word is changing. Just as “cool” evolved in African-American jazz circles of the […]
February 5, 2019
Mina Loy’s Poetics of Rupture & Resistance: A Retrospective
Grammar as Causation and Ideology During her lifetime, Mina Loy was active as a painter, actress, writer, poet, and proponent of the decorative arts. Although working across genres and mediums, […]
February 5, 2019
Mixtape VI: The Aha Moment & When It Switches {On}
After taking some time away from this space to complete a few projects, I thought what better way to return than to share a new mixtape for a new […]
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 30, 2019
On Elisa Gabbert’s Lydia Davis and Completeness
I like to finish things, which is a failure; as James Richardson maintains in one of his (amazing) aphorisms, all stones are broken stones and to pretend otherwise is willful folly. I’ve […]
January 25, 2019
THE PAGE AS A VISUAL FIELD: NEW BOOKS BY ASIYA WADUD, GRACIE LEAVITT, & EVE EWING
IN A RECENT ISSUE OF THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, Carol Ann Johnston notes that “The early avant-garde’s play with poetic language as visual art grasped the change in poetic emphasis […]
January 23, 2019
On Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”
For many writers, nothing is more exciting than seeing in some work of fiction, be it a short story or a novel or a play or even a movie, a […]
January 17, 2019
“What’s at stake is the production of knowledge”: A Conversation with Chris Campanioni
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American and the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland. He has worked as a journalist, model, and actor, and today teaches Latinx literature and creative writing […]
January 16, 2019
On the Creative Value of Unproductive Time
There’s a scene in the fifth episode of the third season of Mad Men in which Lane Pryce, one of the new managers in charge of the company’s finances, complains […]
January 11, 2019
On the Three-Act Structure
One of the central lessons I learned back when I was still attempting to become a screenwriter as well as a fiction writer (something I’ve discussed on this blog a […]