This is a performance. Privilege the performance first, the work you've written second. Or, privilege the work you've written through the performance you'll be giving. Before you get there, up there, …

The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet. --Baron Cuvier Whenever I find myself staring down my laptop, unkempt on the couch so the cats try to groom me; whenever it's late November and …

Sometimes I'm sitting here, trying to write more and more pages of a novel, and I feel despair and loneliness, and I think about seeing if anyone's tweeted anything funny lately ( @mat_johnson …

A few years back, after nine months of living in Houston, I started listening to heavy metal music. When I was a teenager in the '90s I was familiar with popular heavy metal bands like White Zombie …

• Last will V. S. Let's agree to this: when I die, you will put a cross on my grave. Let it be like all other crosses, but we, my friend, we will know, it is--just a signature. As on paper the …

Crystal unicorns watch, curious with silent knowledge. --from "Independent Weakness," 1999 I've sent out thousands of rejections. When I was in high school, I was an editor of the school's literary …

[a line from Sherman Alexie's "The Exaggeration of Despair"] • I am a poetry geek. I didn't quite realize the extent of my geekery until this year when I started teaching my first workshop. As I …

People don't like happy stories, and that's the truth. You may have heard, "Happiness writes white on the page," which basically means, "Keep your happy story to your damn self, because we don't want …

About a year ago, someone named Cheryl Strayed friended me on Facebook. We had a mutual friend, my wife, so I accepted. After that--the deluge. Strayed's Wild , her memoir about her partial …

[Wurzbacher, who is currently teaching first-year fiction at the University of Houston, would like to thank her English 3329 students for permission to reproduce excerpts from their …

Sometimes there are unexpected pleasures that give surprising depths of delight. And not in a Christmas Eve kind of way--me a robust nine years old, knowing my parents bought me an Atari, so I stayed …

Twenty-six years. That's how long Gulf Coast has been publishing the very best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. A lot has changed since Donald Barthelme and Philip Lopate founded the …

The Houston Fine Art Fair (Photography/Gary Fountain, September 15, 2012) Last year, Houston went from zero art fairs to two, the Houston Fine Art Fair and the Texas Contemporary , and both are back …

The other day, I was texting with a friend of mine about how, now that we were at the midway point of the semester, we'd soon be stress-crying in the closet at a local museum. She hence named it, via …

I have a friend in the poetry program here who swears up and down, side to side, that he hates poetry. I'm not talking about the kind of hatred that accompanies respect for but frustration with a …

In my fiction workshop yesterday, we had a discussion about the necessary elements of good fiction. We talked about readability and various kinds of plot; something has to happen in a story, …

I'm always a mom first. I work hard to not talk about my kids all the time--and yet I love to tell their stories. I love stories. I love to read stories. I love to write stories. And in that literary …

On homesickness, the other kind of football, and how to be yourself without expanding each use of vernacular into a sentence of glossary. • Dear Americans (and other non-Aussie readers of Gulf …

There's this novel called Fifty Shades of Grey . You've probably heard of it. A lady named E.L. James wrote it. Judging by her website she likes Twilight vampires and teacups. If you haven't heard of …

The first time I watched the 1989 movie Glory I was unimpressed, but that was mostly because I had just discovered girls, and Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington death-spooning on a South …