May 15, 2019
Lynda Barry & Matt Groening on the Power of Creativity
I recently had the pleasure of seeing Lynda Barry and Matt Groening in conversation at Cuyahoga County Public Library’s William N. Skirball Writers Center Stage Series. Among other things, Barry […]
May 14, 2019
On Richard Powers’s The Overstory
It’s an almost universally accepted notion now that good literature comes down to character. Scholars have long argued that the rise of the novel in Europe coincides with the rise […]
May 13, 2019
“Generations of poetry bound together”: A Conversation with Native Voices Co-Editors CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader
CMarie Fuhrman is the co-editor of Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations (Tupelo 2019) and author of poetry and nonfiction that has appeared in multiple journals including Cutthroat […]
May 13, 2019
“What Are You Doing?” and Other Questions to Ask Your Characters
In my second year of graduate school, I attended a reading by Charles Baxter, who was at that time a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was in […]
May 10, 2019
The Music of Echo in Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”
1901 illustration to the poem by W. E. F. Britten Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” responds to the following section from Homer’s The Odyssey: “I was driven from there by […]
May 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – May
The most important hip-hop “crossover” event of my youth was not Aerosmith and Run-DMC or Anthrax and Public Enemy or even the Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan tour. […]
May 6, 2019
Why We Chose It
“Blue Hills,” by Ali Hosseini appears in the May/June 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review. The opening of Ali Hosseini’s story “Blue Hills” is marvelously economical. Roy Montgomery, the story’s […]
April 30, 2019
“Beyond the self”: A Conversation with Deborah Landau
Deborah Landau’s fourth book of poems, Soft Targets, is out this spring. Her previous collections are The Uses of the Body and The Last Usable Hour, both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon […]
April 29, 2019
Public by Varying Degrees: Understanding Audience in Relation to Emily Dickinson’s Artistic Subject
Introduction Emily Dickinson’s attitude toward the literary marketplace has been widely contested by critics, who portray her as both shy poetess and self-aware genius in search of literary immortality. Given […]
April 29, 2019
Walking the Void: The Divided World of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
The narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Miles Coverdale (and Hawthorne himself as his preface shows), inhabits the space between the internal world of the writer and the external […]
April 28, 2019
“Can’t You Rest Now?”: Nightwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Madness
I have a theory: the ending of Season 7, Episode 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Beneath You”) was inspired by Djuna Barnes’s queer modernist novel Nightwood (1936). I know it sounds […]
April 28, 2019
“An artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Literary Criticism as a Performance of Reading Practices
Introduction All too often, readers approach a writer’s forays into literary criticism as a source of insight about that individual’s tastes, aesthetic predispositions, and theoretical assumptions about literature. This type […]