July 16, 2019
On Writing as Wish Fulfillment
I was in elementary school when I first started “writing” stories—I would take the Hot Wheels toy cars I’d collected since I was a toddler, name them all after my […]
July 15, 2019
Verve {in} Verse: In Conversation with Emilia Phillips
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. […]
July 12, 2019
So That’s How You Do It: An Interview with Michael Noll, Author of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction
This post is the second 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 9, 2019
On Reading Your Work Out Loud
When I wrote my first novel, Portrait of Sebastian Khan, I often worked in cafes, if I was lucky at a corner table where I could angle my screen away […]
July 3, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – July
Sometimes a mismatched couple wanders by, and the whispers begin before they’ve even passed. Meanwhile, they stroll on, blissfully unaware, as if they were the most obvious pair in the […]
June 28, 2019
Checking Your Pedagogical Receipts
Lesson planning is by nature a fraught endeavor. It necessitates thinking not just about the content of the class but the shape of the course as a whole, the juxtaposition […]
June 26, 2019
Verve {in} Verse: In Conversation with Jared Harél
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. […]
June 19, 2019
Ken Kesey’s “Keyhole of Literature”
In an essay published in The New York Times in 1989 (incidentally, the year I was born), Ken Kesey recounts a writing lesson he once received from short story writer […]
June 13, 2019
Open Secrets: Alyssa’s Secret, Christina Rossetti, and the Closet
The challenge was to create a commercial for a new brand of perfume. Expectations were high: not only were the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5 expected to concoct, bottle, […]
June 12, 2019
Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
Often as conceptually layered as the texts it considers, for a current project I recently looked again at To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1994), Eric […]
June 10, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – June
But does poetry actually change anything? Does it need to? Maybe poets are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Or maybe W.H. Auden is right that […]
June 7, 2019
On the World War II Novel
Writing fiction about World War II from the vantage of the twenty-first century presents a rare challenge. Of all of history’s wars, this one has always felt the most uncomplicated, […]