March 18, 2019
Making the Familiar Strange: A Conversation With Wendy Chin-Tanner
Wendy Chin-Tanner has published two poetry books with Sibling Rivalry Press, Turn (2014), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards, and Anyone Will Tell You (April 2019). She […]
March 14, 2019
The Art of Attending to Our Surroundings: Self-Portrait with Dogwood by Christopher Merrill
Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and […]
March 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – March
“Rhymes can make sense of the world in a way that regular speech can’t.” Hip hop mogul Jay-Z (Sean Carter) says it better than I can. It’s no coincidence that […]
March 5, 2019
On Novels that Span a Lifetime
There’s a famous theory (attributed to Aristotle, though in reality the result of misinterpretations of his work made by Renaissance humanists) that a good tragedy should follow the three unities, […]
February 27, 2019
In Defense of On the Road
Two years ago, I was sitting in a Starbucks and reading On the Road (aware, of course, of the irony of reading something with such an anti-consumerist ethos in such […]
February 20, 2019
Poet to Poet Interview: Rajiv Mohabir and Craig Santos Perez
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press, 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016, winner of the Four […]
February 18, 2019
Multimedia Creative Writing and Having Students Teach Students
This week in my experimental creative writing class, we learned about using Twine, a tool for creating interactive, nonlinear stories. Fans of hypertext writing will enjoy this open-source method for […]
February 13, 2019
On George Orwell and Sensory Detail in Writing
In a previous blog post on long sentences, I critiqued George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” specifically because I felt its list of rules was too restrictive, […]
February 11, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – February
It’s happening again. Even as we speak, elsewhere—in a college dorm, maybe, or some recess of the internet—a word is changing. Just as “cool” evolved in African-American jazz circles of the […]
February 5, 2019
Mixtape VI: The Aha Moment & When It Switches {On}
After taking some time away from this space to complete a few projects, I thought what better way to return than to share a new mixtape for a new […]
January 31, 2019
On the Epistolary Form and Writing Letters About Your Imagined Writing
So often I give my students the advice I need to hear myself. This week I assigned them to write someone a letter about the piece they wanted to compose […]
January 29, 2019
On Subtlety and Meaning in Fiction
When I was a freshman in college, I took my first creative writing class, a small two week workshop that was part of a summer study abroad program. For the […]