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 …
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 …