I am living on Cape Cod, at the very tip, where, on a clear day, at the top of Pilgrim Monument, you can see Boston in the distance, across the water. When the marathon bombing happened, it was a …

Last month my colleague Justine Post blogged about the early days of the protest that happened recently here at the University of Houston, in which graduate teaching fellows in the English …

Writing may be tough work but rarely is it physically taxing. Sure, writers often suffer our own vocation-driven afflictions : carpal tunnel, bleary eyes, that idiosyncratic aversion to waking up …

Relatively new to Houston, the David Shelton Gallery concentrates on the showcasing of regional emerging artists. Common Objects (January 11-February 16, 2013) brings together the work of Ted Gahl, …

Five decades of artistry which may otherwise have been disregarded--that's what senior curator Valerie Cassel-Oliver showcased through her selection of over forty exemplary artists in Radical …

The group show Present Tense , curated by Sapphire Williams ( Lawndale Art Center , January 25-March 2, 2013), revolves around the concepts of premeditated and restricted actions. These are works …

By now most of us are probably familiar with the prominent role of epiphany in contemporary American short stories. In his craft book Making Shapely Fiction , Jerome Stern describes the epiphanic …

Artist Leslie Hewitt and filmmaker Bradford Young are currently showing (until May 5, 2013) their second and most recent collaborative effort , Untitled (Structures) , at the Menil Collection . …

There is a revolution going on in the shiny, humid halls of the University of Houston's English Department. Though it is so far a small revolution, a whispered revolution, we want it to grow and …

Dear Reader, I've been working on my novel now for the last two years. I'm about six drafts in. After each draft I usually take a break to let the words sit, so that upon my return the flaws can jump …

It's easy to be overbearingly protective of our selves. Yes, selves. You know what I mean: The selves that revel in wasting time on BuzzFeed , or watching episode after episode of bad TV. The selves …

Cormac McCarthy's first novel The Orchard Keeper , released in 1965, is an often fascinating work, an evocation of a Depression-era Tennessee landscape that is as mythic and haunted as the sea in …

The year I came to the University of Houston to pursue this thing called poetry, I was supposed to have a famous classmate . Gulf Coast managing editor Karyna McGlynn at AWP with...James Franco? Of …

I'm going to use my blogging opportunity to plug the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson. Spring's coming, and what better way to usher in the season than with some melancholic Nordic fiction? You …

I used to think audiobooks were for little old ladies who were losing their vision. (Little old ladies, bless you! You are the readers of America.) I could understand the arguments for long commutes …

In 1982, children's book author Arnold Lobel published Ming Lo Moves the Mountain . In it, Ming Lo and his wife live next to a mountain that causes them nothing but trouble. Rocks fall from the …

Over a bottle of wine, a writer friend of mine once caught me telling the truth. I drained my glass and forgot how to end sentences and started telling the story about a woman I knew who had dated …

A year or so ago, I listened to a Tin House podcast, a recording of Anthony Doerr , who usefully lays out a number of the themes of his talk in an this great handout ): I argue to my students that …

I. Submit Why? Submit to the idea that submitting your work to literary magazines is an essential part of the writing process: compose, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, …

Lately I have been thinking about urgency and insistence in poetry; about those moments where the poet really reaches through the page and grabs the reader by the collar. Often these are moments when …