Hi All, When Gulf Coast Journal and I put together this plan, the idea was always for me to run some “vintage” posts. And today is my first. See you with new material again on Thursday! Robin In …
Enough cannot be written about desire. Desire will not let us hold or master it. Instead, we are both lucky and pained to dwell in its atmosphere, an atmosphere changing so quickly we would need an …
. . . is. . . The Success Gap. I have learned to avoid absolutes, so I won’t say that I don’t know a single writer who isn’t fully aware of who among their social circle has achieved more than …
Thirty-three years ago, I took a fiction writing workshop in college - Sarah Lawrence - with the extraordinary Allan Gurganus. Allan set us to writing a story a week for the full year, an experience …
Silent gray boulders are lapped at / by waves. What’s that / in the mud where the tide is going out? / Buttons; bottle caps; small bits / of styrofoam that look like shells or coral…
For God's sake, / have a little consideration! Why wake him? / Another fisherman was sitting on a stone block, / a stone block glittering with mica.
Last week I read an article about reality, a physics theory I cannot even pretend to understand. The degree to which I don’t understand it is itself kind of enjoyable, an intellectual free fall …
This is where the wheel is broken at the cistern / and the weeds of dandelion rise to over six feet tall, / their star-shaped heads not yet in blossom.
Dear All, It’s an enormous honor and joy to be the Guest Blogger here for February. I’ve known about this for a while. Not long enough to have done anything smart like stock-piling posts, but …
"And then it was May, time to let the grapes grow and fish anchovies;" or so it went for centuries in the town of Collioure, which attributed its escape from the plague of the 14th century to its …
Our tendency to keep changing our minds was perhaps the most revealing aspect of Gauging the Grey Area—to keep our minds open and to continue the discussion amongst artists...
It was the very first poetry exchange since China opened its door to the west, a confluence of great poets across the Pacific.
Italicized, in a font distinct from the rest of the cover text, “you are invited” had me thinking “garden party,” or actually, just “party.” Literal in my following of this theme, I found …
He wasn’t a particularly good Dad (though we weren’t great kids, either, loud and ravenous, always asking for pizza or pocket change), but the holiday didn’t call for distinctions of merit.
We moved on low power since the noise neutralizers haven’t thawed from everything. We found rudimentary structures seemingly abandoned...
The coroner is piecing together the tale of the pair in his possession. / As if their corpses are jigsaw puzzles laid out on a wooden table...
Even the commentator on NPR said, in her living room concert voice, “It appears that, once again, we Americans have asserted our individuality in the universe..."
We in America have more taboos than we think and god knows that talking about race is one of them. But talking about class: well, that may be even more forbidden...
"I was also drawn to the awkward syntax of the title, the roughly translated feel of it. Who would make that pronouncement? Would he have a graying mustache?"
the bed was every damned thing a man says / before he screeches gimme my gun...