March 8, 2016
Gender fluidity versus genre fluidity and hybridity’s hubris
In her amazing SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard writes that “Greek and Roman intellectuals were fascinated by word derivations, which they were convinced gave the key not […]
November 12, 2014
Dr. Murphy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing Abstracts
Abstract is a misleading name for an abstract, for an abstract should not be abstract. Today, I will write an abstract for my next conference paper, and it feels a […]
September 2, 2014
The Wonderful Worlds of Borges
I recently came across an edited set of interviews with one of the true masters, Jorges Luis Borges. The book is Borges at Eighty: Conversations. I first encountered the Argentinian […]
August 7, 2012
On “Literary Fiction” and “Genre”
If you look at Wikipedia’s list of the bestselling fiction writers of all time, you’ll notice that the majority are English-language authors of the 20th century. So Barbara Cartland’s on […]
March 14, 2012
Daylight Savings & The Movable Dawn: A Postscript on the Aubade
About as soon as I posted my dialogue with her on the aubade, Tarfia sent me a link to Kenyon Review Writers Workshop faculty member Carl Phillips’ own “Aubade: Some […]
March 8, 2012
A Few Notes on Craft — and Games
I remember clearly though it’s more than fifteen years past a graduate-school colleague standing up in the apartment of a friend, several hours of workshop conversation behind us, and declaring […]
January 4, 2012
The Virtues of Bad Writing
What we go to when we go to literature is an exit. Even social realism is escapist: We escape from ourselves into another self, that of the character. Readers like […]