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 that eat only the icing off the midnight piece of leftover…

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 Moby-Dick. It also borders on unreadable. Graham Greene's…

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 course, that never happened. He deferred his acceptance…

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 probably don't need publicity if James Wood just did a piece…

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 and multitasking, and I'd even consider myself partial…

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 mountainsides, their garden is always in shadow, clouds around…

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 Voldemort. "I remember that story," my friend said. I…

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 (in most cases) verbal repetition has a blunting, even soporific…

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, submit. Submit to the idea that submitting your work…

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 the writer seems to become obsessed with some idea…