December 3, 2018
Should Writers Be Conscious of the Artistic Movements of Their Time?
There’s a scene towards the middle of At Eternity’s Gate, the new biopic about Vincent van Gogh, in which Van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) and Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) discuss in […]
August 27, 2018
In Defense of Flat Characters
Every fiction writer who’s taken even an intro to creative writing class is likely aware of E.M. Forster’s famous distinction between flat and round characters, from his book of lectures […]
July 30, 2018
On Endings
In 2014, when I was still entertaining hopes of being a screenwriter as well as a fiction writer, I went to the Austin Film Festival and heard a lecture on […]
December 23, 2014
Ruefle, Redux (Part Three)
In her lecture “On Sentimentality” (collected in Madness, Rack, and Honey), Mary Ruefle provides the full text of Hart Crane’s “Chaplinesque” and then offers Crane’s own explication of the poem’s […]
December 16, 2014
Patterns of Poetic Revolution
One of the most famous lines in English poetry about poetry is Moore’s “I, too, dislike it.” The interesting thing is just how much the best poets, historically, have […]
March 7, 2013
A Note on Sentimentality
One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed. In the world of contemporary fiction, […]
July 15, 2012
Life Alone Lives Forever: Quest Stories and the Principle of Irreplaceability
I’ve read somewhere (in more than one place, I think) that all stories, or almost all stories, are variations on one story, treasured across cultures and eras, the Quest. The […]
February 16, 2012
Mix Tape: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been
The theme park Dickens World “promised to be an ‘authentic’ re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters and strategically […]
August 3, 2010
The Sewanee Writers’ Conference: Dig Yourself
The 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference ended just over a week ago; I’m back in Ann Arbor, having Honda’d my way through Kentucky and Ohio. Still, I have all of these […]