June 29, 2018
How Fiction “Works”
Last week, I was at a reading by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer at Book Soup in West Hollywood, and I had the good fortune to hear him answer […]
May 18, 2018
On Character Motivation
In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that […]
April 13, 2016
Literary Magic: On Finding a Writing Group
I’m sitting down to write this post an hour after I finished teaching the final class in a community short fiction workshop. It was bittersweet to say goodbye to my […]
July 20, 2015
Poetry and Play (Part I)
When I was in Amsterdam earlier this summer, the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga came up in multiple conversations about poetry; more specifically, his 1938 book Homo Ludens: Proeve […]