September 12, 2019
Adventures in Composition and The Essay
This is the first in a series, Adventures in Composition and the Essay. Since I’m teaching the most composition courses I’ve ever taught in a single semester (three), I have […]
August 19, 2019
To See How It’s Made: An Interview with Margot Livesey, Author of The Hidden Machinery
This post is the seventh in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
July 19, 2019
A Day in the Life of a Teacher-Writer-Parent
[Pictured above: The Teacher-Writer-Parent wearing the huge, blueberry-like “Thinking Cap” her son made to “help her think of really good writing.”] 5:30 a.m.—Woken up by the five-year-old boy sitting on […]
July 12, 2019
So That’s How You Do It: An Interview with Michael Noll, Author of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction
This post is the second in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
April 11, 2019
“This thing I use to stay alive” – An Interview with Poet Husnaa Hashim
Husnaa Hashim is the author of Honey Sequence published by The Head & The Hand, a nonprofit, independent publishing company and writers’ workshop based in Philadelphia. She was the 2017-2018 Youth […]
March 5, 2019
Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation”
The title of Gertrude Stein’s essay, “Composition as Explanation,” ostensibly contradicts her literary scheme of raising form to the level of content. The name seems to imply that this piece […]
September 29, 2018
New Origins
Poetry may often come to us in small packages and brief passages, but poetry is rooted in our big human questions: who are we? how (and why) did we get […]
September 24, 2018
Little Monsters: On Time & The Consciousness of Poems
Hope is a pearl that I share I share it with you It’s a pearl that I share I share it with you, all the time I share it with […]
July 3, 2018
A Writer’s Misadventures in Writing
Sure, sometimes writing is a many-splendored thing, but sometimes it sucks. There are always the half-finished manifestos, the botched verbal symphonies, the sleepless nights staring at a computer, more insomniac […]
June 30, 2018
The Writer as Liar
I was quite the liar as a child. The stuff I invented seems pretty stunning now as I look back. I am still struggling to decipher whether these untruths were […]
June 26, 2018
Scaffolding
[Continued from “Pros[onn]e[t]”] * Where the title of Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace, published by Bloof Books in 2017, pointed the reader toward the collections’s subversive sonnet form as an enactment of both interiority […]
June 25, 2018
Staging a Coup Against Writer’s Block
Although I often suffer from its opposite, verbal diarrhea—that most unfortunate state in which mediocre words indiscriminately pour forth–no writer is a stranger to the dreaded squeak of the brain […]