January 12, 2019
Publisher Spotlight: Diane Goettel of Black Lawrence Press
Diane Goettel is the Executive Editor of Black Lawrence Press and founding editor of Sapling. As an undergraduate student, Diane studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. After receiving her […]
January 11, 2019
On the Three-Act Structure
One of the central lessons I learned back when I was still attempting to become a screenwriter as well as a fiction writer (something I’ve discussed on this blog a […]
January 10, 2019
A Novel From the Perspective of Marilyn Monroe’s Dog
Marilyn Monroe’s dog Maf, or Mafia Honey as his pneumatic mistress dubs him, is a present from Frank Sinatra–just one of many colorful celebrities to grace the pages of Andrew […]
January 7, 2019
Why We Chose It
“Governing Bodies,” by Sangamithra Iyer, appears in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review. The stories of the formerly colonized are the stories of lives disrupted and fragmented, invisible […]
January 3, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – January
“Education is not the filling of a pail,” reads the sign above my colleague’s desk, “but the lighting of a fire.” These lines—often attributed to the poet W. B. Yeats—happen […]
January 2, 2019
Textual Difficulty: A Performance of Otherness & Difference
In her hybrid text The End of the Sentimental Journey, Sarah Vap asserts that “we spend our lives both translating into and refusing, to some degree or another, (the nonexistent) […]
December 31, 2018
Devils, Unicorns, and Fever Dreams: My 2018 Reading List
As 2018 drew to a close and the literary internet was flooded with “Best of 2018” book lists, I noticed a fair amount of backlash against these lists—namely, that they […]
December 31, 2018
Thinking on Dystopia: The Giver and The Time Machine
Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine both present ostensible utopias that are, in fact, dystopias. This makes sense given that a dystopia is defined by its […]
December 31, 2018
Publisher Spotlight: Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press & Studio
A writer and visual artist, Kristy Bowen is the author of several book, chapbook and zine projects, including major characters in minor films (Sundress Publications, 2015), the shared properties of […]
December 28, 2018
On Rereading Books
Each year, as I look over my list of all the books I’ve read (and listened to) in the past year, I always take note of the books I chose […]
December 27, 2018
Gentrification, the American Lie: An Interview with Stacie Williams
I met Stacie Williams a few years ago in a writing workshop I taught in Cleveland. She submitted a short story that was set in a gentrifying neighborhood, and I […]
December 26, 2018
“Let Her Balance on Nothing”: Notes on Victimization, Complicity, & the Gaze
Maria Lugones observes that “through traveling to other people’s ‘worlds’ we discover there are ‘worlds’ in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, […]