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 […]
January 3, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – January
“Education is not the filling of a pail,” reads the sign above my colleague’s desk, “but the lighting of a fire.” These lines—often attributed to the poet W. B. Yeats—happen […]
January 2, 2019
Textual Difficulty: A Performance of Otherness & Difference
In her hybrid text The End of the Sentimental Journey, Sarah Vap asserts that “we spend our lives both translating into and refusing, to some degree or another, (the nonexistent) […]
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 31, 2018
Publisher Spotlight: Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press & Studio
A writer and visual artist, Kristy Bowen is the author of several book, chapbook and zine projects, including major characters in minor films (Sundress Publications, 2015), the shared properties of […]
December 28, 2018
On Rereading Books
Each year, as I look over my list of all the books I’ve read (and listened to) in the past year, I always take note of the books I chose […]
December 26, 2018
“Let Her Balance on Nothing”: Notes on Victimization, Complicity, & the Gaze
Maria Lugones observes that “through traveling to other people’s ‘worlds’ we discover there are ‘worlds’ in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, […]
December 19, 2018
On Character Motivation: The Personal vs The Political
Years ago, when I was still interested in being a screenwriter as well as a novelist (the Dark Ages of my literary life), I heard a screenwriting teacher say during […]
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 17, 2018
“Transformed this way into your own atlas of being”: A Conversation with Gillian Cummings
Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, selected by John Yau as the winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry (The Center for Literary Publishing […]
December 13, 2018
On Eckes, Harvey and Myles
It sounds like a middling 70’s folk rock act, right? Maybe in some alternate universe it is a middling 70’s folk rock act, but in my own universe it’s been […]
December 12, 2018
In Defense of Long Sentences
When it comes to prose style in contemporary literature, no two works have had a greater influence than George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” and Strunk and […]