July 18, 2018
In Defense of Long Descriptions
When I was young (middle school) my favorite novels were The Lord of the Rings, though my friends always complained that they were too long and boring, with too much […]
July 11, 2018
Goth Tendencies, Cy Twombly, and Turnstile Hearts: a conversation with Dean Rader and Melissa Stein
Recently Melissa Stein and Dean Rader, two San Francisco Copper Canyon poets, chatted at length about short poems, oxymorons, killing their darlings, lyrical gears, and inner/outer worlds on the occasion […]
July 10, 2018
On a Novel’s First Line
Perhaps it’s the economic realities of trying to publish literary fiction in an age of late capitalism, or perhaps it’s simply our culture’s diminishing attention span, but the first line […]
July 3, 2018
A Writer’s Misadventures in Writing
Sure, sometimes writing is a many-splendored thing, but sometimes it sucks. There are always the half-finished manifestos, the botched verbal symphonies, the sleepless nights staring at a computer, more insomniac […]
June 30, 2018
The Writer as Liar
I was quite the liar as a child. The stuff I invented seems pretty stunning now as I look back. I am still struggling to decipher whether these untruths were […]
June 29, 2018
How Fiction “Works”
Last week, I was at a reading by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer at Book Soup in West Hollywood, and I had the good fortune to hear him answer […]
June 26, 2018
Scaffolding
[Continued from “Pros[onn]e[t]”] * Where the title of Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace, published by Bloof Books in 2017, pointed the reader toward the collections’s subversive sonnet form as an enactment of both interiority […]
June 25, 2018
Staging a Coup Against Writer’s Block
Although I often suffer from its opposite, verbal diarrhea—that most unfortunate state in which mediocre words indiscriminately pour forth–no writer is a stranger to the dreaded squeak of the brain […]
June 19, 2018
On Aesthetics and Politics: Alisa Ganieva’s The Mountain and the Wall
There’s a facile distinction that’s often drawn between a novel’s aesthetics and its politics, one generally made by those in favor of the former over the latter, as if literature […]
June 15, 2018
Pros[onn]e[t]
[Continued from “Crawlspace”] * Thinking about contemporary sonnets, shadow sonnets, American Sonnets, and so on and so[nnet] on, I’m fascinated both by the poems themselves and by what the poems […]
June 11, 2018
Against the Nineteenth-Century Novel
In a negative review last fall of Nathan Hill’s The Nix, Brianna Rennix of the leftist magazine Current Affairs critiqued what she described as the novel’s “postmodern” elements and argued […]
June 8, 2018
The Quest for the Enchanted Writing Tip
Many writers spend their whole careers chasing that enchanted writing tip that will make them extraordinary, and there’s certainly no shortage of craft advice. Some authors (I’m looking at you, […]