August 27, 2019
An Interview with Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Author of White Dancing Elephants
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of reading Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut short story collection White Dancing Elephants. It’s a mesmerizing group of stories, filled with both joy and sorrow, […]
August 23, 2019
It Will Be Empowering: An Interview with David Mura, Author of A Stranger’s Journey; Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing
This post is the eighth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
August 19, 2019
To See How It’s Made: An Interview with Margot Livesey, Author of The Hidden Machinery
This post is the seventh in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
August 14, 2019
The Story the Storytelling Tells: A Note on the Ramayana
Every God has his consort, his corresponding Goddess—so Brahma, the Creator-God, has Saraswati, the Goddess of arts and letters, a match made in heaven, so to speak. Shiva’s consort is […]
August 14, 2019
On Capturing the Banality of History
In the first chapter of the sixth book of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s twelve-book series chronicling upper-class English social life in the early twentieth century, […]
August 9, 2019
We Need Fresh Perspectives: An Interview with Amy Sayre Baptista and Meagan Cass, Series Editors, Craft Chaps
This post is the sixth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
August 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – August
Forget the Pulitzers. Forget the MacArthur “Genius” grant, The New Yorker, and all the other laurels too. The greatest honor for a poet—and for a poem—is to be known by […]
August 5, 2019
The Most Direct Good: An Interview with Matthew Salesses, Author of Craft in the Real World
This post is the fifth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
July 31, 2019
The Struggle Between the Visual and Verbal in Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”
A paradigmatic ekphrastic poem, such as W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, with its central description of how the everyday life of the painting goes on as usual in Breughel’s […]
July 29, 2019
Interview with Preti Taneja
Preti Taneja teaches writing in prisons and universities. She is the 2019 UNESCO Fellow in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, a Leverhulme Research Fellow in writing and […]
July 26, 2019
On the Importance of the Authorial Voice
In his book The Art of Perspective, part of Graywolf Press’s series of craft books on writing (which I’ve written about a few times before on this blog), Christopher Castellani […]
July 24, 2019
Organic Choreography: An Interview with Jane Alison, Author of Meander, Spiral, Explode
This post is the third in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]