June 3, 2019
The Doodles of Famous Authors
I’m not shy about my love of words, letters, and even whole sentences. So imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon a truly impressive feat of cultural curation over at […]
June 8, 2018
The Quest for the Enchanted Writing Tip
Many writers spend their whole careers chasing that enchanted writing tip that will make them extraordinary, and there’s certainly no shortage of craft advice. Some authors (I’m looking at you, […]
May 23, 2016
Forget I Said It
According to a recent essay in the New York Times, Americans feel pretty awful on Mondays. Google searches for “depression” and “anxiety” are at their highest; searches for “jokes” are […]
August 31, 2015
Ross, Pynchon, Vonnegut (Part Two)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Paris Review interview, he calls his books “mosaics of jokes.” (The PR interview, published in 1977, is itself a kind of mosaic; it draws from four different […]
August 30, 2015
Ross, Pynchon, Vonnegut (Part One)
Yesterday, at the end of my discussion of Fran Ross’s Oreo, I promised to do something that I’ll have to do anyway in a couple of months: compare Ross to Thomas […]
September 28, 2013
Matter and Antimatter
Twenty-eight years ago, at the University of Wisconsin, I took an introductory course in philosophy. Asked to write about epistemology (as espoused by Descartes, I think, or maybe Bishop Berkeley), […]
December 9, 2012
Short Takes: By the Letter, By the Draft
August Wilson: “Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are […]
September 6, 2011
Short Takes: Crying and Laughing, or Both
A kind of poetic justice, in which an Ottawa prosecutor’s rhyme helped to convict an impaired driver in court. Plugged into Google Correlate (a tool which lets you free-draw graph […]
August 9, 2010
The Kids Are All Bright
A favorite teacher of mine tipped me early on that there would be people who would tell you never to write about childhood, especially not from the perspective of a […]