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, practice reading the work you've written. Practice…

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 I'm reading a novel for fun; whenever I find myself trying…

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 usually has), and then I think of Homeland. I'm talking about…

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 (psychedelic, campy blues metal), Korn (hip-hop laced,…

• 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 illiterate leaves his mark, I want to leave a cross in this…

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 journal, Imagery, for two years, rejecting teenage poetry…

[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 was trying to come up with a syllabus, I tried to think…

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 to hear it." This goes for life, too, and if you were…

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 through-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail that she undertook in…

[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 critiques--contrasted here with the rather dimmer pronouncements of anonymous…