Recently a friend entrusted me with an honest confession: "I want to like poetry? but honestly I find it kind of boring." NB by the way that my friend is no intellectual lightweight--on the contrary, …

I am unabashedly a reader of science fiction and fantasy. Whenever I have a break from schoolwork, I find myself, often, in a kind of a crisis. There are the books that I need to read, because my …

The two things I love most in this world are food and stories. Perhaps this explains my attempts in the kitchen and at writing fiction (and, apparently, my penchant for rhyming words). We can eat all …

When I began writing poetry, the only agenda I had was to write poems I wasn't embarrassed to share with other people. I didn't have any loyalty to metaphor or narrative, or any other element of …

Each year, I teach classes about both fiction and film, and my students, on the first day of either type of class, always say the same thing: The book is always better than the movie. That's a …

It's the end of my first semester in Houston and I've been wishing it would snow. I came here by myself from the Northwest and I left a lot of things behind-- people, yes, but also things that are …

One day in the spring of 2007, while I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I called in sick to work and drove across the Charles River to the library at Boston University. It felt a bit wicked, …

Where does grief begin? What is the first word of grief? (This (and all of the below) is what I write in my journal while flying back to Houston after 24 hours in Ft. Lauderdale, oddly disembodied …

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row½." I memorized this poem as a schoolgirl; many of us did and still do. To me at the time it seemed evocative and tragic: "We …

I consider myself to be a rational person (although this is self proclaimed i.e. I could be wrong vis-à-vis my rationality). However, I do keep some superstitions close to my heart: I knock on wood …

As writers I think it's fairly common for us to revisit our own work from time to time, reading what we've read in the past and feeling either elation ("Hey, this isn't half bad!") or despair ("I …

I have too many books. In an age when many people don't own any books at all, as far as I can tell, I have more books than anyone I know--more than any of my friends and fellow students, more than …

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot bear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world... William Butler Yeats' post-war poem, …

1. Once I stopped being a teenager, I had very little interaction with teenagers for about seven years, until I got a job making beds at a hippie island retreat in the Pacific. We worked in pairs and …

"Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree. All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing The song of the night …

I arrived in Houston on the night of the fourth of July, after driving for four days - my partner, our sixteen-year-old dog, two cats, and I wedged into the car with suitcases and potted plants - …

When I moved from Western Australia to Houston I brought only two books with me: the novel Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, and a photography book, Silence , by Brad Rimmer. Choosing these books to fit …

The best writing articulates the indescribable and names the unnamable. Precision and clarity are important, but it's something that transcends their boundaries in a text that makes it work. Last …

I write to you this Halloween dressed as Margot Tenenbaum, excited to share a poem that never graces the "Best Scary Poems" lists so dear to poetry blogs around this time of year. The poem is "The …

It's true. I watch Glee . I know it's a show that is sometimes maudlin and cliché. I don't mind this. On Tuesdays, when I get home after teaching/workshopping/worrying about how well I'm doing at …