April 26, 2019
“Silences cultivate a kind of cognitive dance between reader and poem”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, including Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is […]
April 26, 2019
In Defense of a Literary Canon
Mild controversy erupted on Twitter early this month after Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg released a list of his ten favorite books. To me, the list felt a little like […]
April 25, 2019
Publisher Spotlight: Leland Cheuk of 7.13 Books
A MacDowell Colony and Hawthornden Castle Fellow, Leland Cheuk is the author of three books, most recently, NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN, forthcoming from C&R Press in September 2019. His […]
April 25, 2019
Playing Dungeons & Dragons With Your Creative Writing Class
When one of my students presented on Dungeons & Dragons in class, he showed us the endless pages he had amassed in character and plot development. Then, it hit me […]
April 24, 2019
Animal Rights Versus Human Rights: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Paula Casal’s “Animals and Accommodation,” and David Hume’s “Of Justice”
In “Animals and Accommodation,” Paula Casal stresses that she is not an anti-speciest. According to her definition of the term, neither Anna Sewell nor David Hume would fit this description either. […]
April 23, 2019
The Story of My Life
When I started reading Educated, Tara Westover’s memoir of growing up in rural Idaho as a Mormon survivalist with no foundation of formal education, I was captivated by the chance to […]
April 23, 2019
Villanelle of the Grasses
for the victims of the bombings in Sri Lanka, Easter 2019 The crepitation of grass seeds sprouting is the stir of green emanation — that’s the underwriting of a grassland […]
April 23, 2019
On the Pleasures (and Pitfalls) of Pseudonyms
In August 2009, Joyce Carol Oates gave a talk at Cornell University called “The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration,” in which she discussed her long career, the effects […]
April 22, 2019
Do We Write for Others or Ourselves?
Last year, I wrote a piece for this blog about Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle,” arguing that it was the ultimate consolation for a writer, because it […]
April 21, 2019
Jordan Peele’s Us Exposes America’s Shadow Self
This is the first in my new series, American Gothic: Investigating Horror, Ghosts, Monsters, & Haunted Houses. Stay tuned for more… After Jordan Peele’s movie Us introduces the Wilson family […]
April 21, 2019
After the Cathedral Fire
It was astonishing to see the news coverage, last week, of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire in Paris. In many ways it was heartening, all of that attention to a […]
April 20, 2019
On Slow Reading, Considering, and Consuming
It’s long been understood that going to an art museum doesn’t necessarily mean one desires to look at art, at least not for prolonged, potentially edifying periods. Articles like Artnet’s […]