June 5, 2018
Crawlspace
[Continued from Age of Glass] * Face me in your sonnets so I can permanently grieve is really what the roses say to the antebellum purling dog tags of myself. […]
May 31, 2018
Should Fiction Writers Study Literary Theory?
In her 2010 review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, Elif Batuman makes the following observation: a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in […]
May 24, 2018
On “The Death of the Novel”
Declaring that the novel is dead sometimes feels like a pastime as old as the novel itself. Even men in the nineteenth century would lament how the novel was being […]
May 18, 2018
On Character Motivation
In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that […]
May 15, 2018
Finding the Magic Writing Ritual
Writers’ rituals are central to the way they work and are often treated as acts of spirituality or even seance. Haruki Murakami refers to his routine as “a form of […]
May 14, 2018
On Historical Accuracy in Historical Fiction
In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, when he describes how he came to determine the specific setting for his novel—the particular time period (the fourteenth century), the […]
May 11, 2018
A Conversation with poet July Westhale
The Necessity of Dangerous Poetry and the Power of Voice July Westhale visited Kirsten Ogden’s class at Pasadena City College in April 2018 and continued a conversation with students over […]
May 4, 2018
Stuff People Say When You Tell Them You Write Poetry
1) Is this a hoax? 2) And they pay you for that? 3) And you tell people this? 4) Does your husband know? 5) Is that still a thing? […]
April 23, 2018
Fiction as Atonement
I came across William Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow after reading an analysis of it in Stacy D’Erasmo’s The Art of Intimacy, another volume in Greywolf’s series […]
April 16, 2018
Write a Book
At the Cleveland International Film Festival this year, one of the many films I watched with my screener’s pass was Mountain Miracle, a German/Italian film about a teenage girl, Amelie, […]
April 13, 2018
Against Relatability
In a recent article in The Baffler, Soraya Roberts argues that the new genre of “Instapoetry,” most famously practiced by Rupi Kaur, is nothing more than a narcissistic feedback loop, […]
April 11, 2018
Marty Skoble on Why Poetry Matters
(Photo Credit: Noah Davis) For National Poetry Month, I spoke to Marty Skoble, the brilliant man who “teaches” poetry to the students (from lower school to high school) at Saint […]