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 […]
May 23, 2018
Your Online Dating Profile Written by Famous Writers
The Misunderstood Detective With a Poet’s Soul: About You: You love to dwell in uncertainties. You relish the chance to analyze anything, whether it be a text, film, or person. […]
May 4, 2018
Stuff People Say When You Tell Them You Write Poetry
1) Is this a hoax? 2) And they pay you for that? 3) And you tell people this? 4) Does your husband know? 5) Is that still a thing? […]
March 24, 2016
“Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake”: On Walking and Writing
Wallace Stevens makes an assertion in the opening stanza of the seventh section of his poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” that has always stuck with me. It reads, plainly: […]
August 28, 2012
Short Takes: Dickinson in the Digital Age
“Mad people = people who stand alone + burn,” wrote Susan Sontag in her journals. “I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.” Read some […]
August 2, 2010
Short Takes
good to the last drop, contemplating the intersection between writing and drinking and meals in literature the e-tide continues to rise, some push back Get the crash cart, cause once […]
December 2, 2009
Short Takes
A bookseller with a killer haircut receives Rhys “I think people are gradually starting to understand and accept the realness of unreal things,” -Haruki Murakami Van Gogh’s letters! In translation! […]
June 1, 2009
Location, Location, Location
Nabokov wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight under unusual circumstances. In a 1941 letter to Edmund Wilson (penned long before their famous feud), he tells his new friend, “I […]