On the incessant nature of emails, chasing down running endorphins, and doing what you love most, no matter what. • Oh man, oh my, oh me: it's that time of year again where the hot Houston heat …
Long ago, in a reasonably distant city, I spent a brief, magical, slightly demented three years of my life as a freelance movie critic. Reviewing films was far and away the best job I've ever had. I …
Greetings, and welcome to another year of the Gulf Coast blog! We here at the magazine are pleased to be back, and are very glad you're reading. We'll be offering new posts twice a week through the …
Sitting in the circle of his letters in the grove that rustles with scorn and error, the heart blowing like a scrap of paper through the inhospitable passageways. -Tomas Tranströmer, from Gogol I …
So, the Pulitzer board pissed a lot of people off this week. They pissed off the publishing industry, as reported here , causing publishers and booksellers to give out their own awards. They pissed …
Outside the Department of English yesterday, I paused to watch a young man in a cape pass. He was striding toward the building, looking cautiously over his shoulder every few seconds, and he carried …
At the endings of things, it's normal to look backward for clues on how to make sense of what we have done, why we've been doing it, and what it will mean in the future. With that in mind, as I begin …
I refuse to chalk it entirely up to the fact that it is just "that time in the semester," but my little brain has been refusing to stay focused on any one task. This has led to a sad cycle of intense …
1. Young artists are supposed to find their voice. One of the nicest things you might hear, as a young artist, is that you seem to have found your voice. Or your voice is quite clear. Or, even …
Many readers of this post, by virtue of its place of publication, are familiar with the slow bodily decay that grad school entails. For example, as I write and revise these very words, I am …
I've been thinking recently about the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, as I do every few years. This time, it's in part because I'm doing research for a lit paper on what Foucault called the "Great …
One evening last summer, my best friend Christopher and I were drinking wine and watching the sun go down over the Atlantic Ocean when he decided that it was the perfect time to give a solemn recap …
Since its publication in Sunday's New York Times, Annie Murphy Paul's "Your Brain on Fiction" has gone viral among my friends and fellow writers. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here . In …
Friends, I do not sleep. I eat; I sip; I worry. A lot. I think of my manuscript, trapped under the desk of the judge of a book prize, unbeknownst to him, whimpering and calling out for crackers and …
Hello readers, If you're around the Chicago area, stop by our reading at Buddy Guy's Legends (700 South Wabash) tomorrow, March 1st, from 8:30-10:30 p.m. We've teamed up with Indiana Review to bring …
"Where is Kenya on the world map?" I ask freshmen every semester as part of our introductions. It's part of my evolving "teaching philosophy" which is premised on stimulating intellectual curiosity …
It's safe to say that I'm fully entrenched in the creative writing subculture. I've done the entire CWP gauntlet: undergrad, MFA, PhD. I submit to journals. I edit journals. I give people advice on …
Sometime after the New Year but before Valentine's Day, I saw an internet meme on Facebook that said: Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in …
Once a week, someone lets me into a room full of children. I am supposed to teach them creative writing. Here's the thing: I am sometimes scared of children. It is because they know the truth, and …
There is a scene during Alison Maclean's adaptation of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son in which our hero Fuckhead (Billy Crudup) and his partner Wayne are celebrating a scrap-metal windfall with cheap …