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 starts to turn into that mild Houston heat, and the crape…

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 watched between two and six movies per week and wrote…

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 fall and spring semesters, courtesy of our diligent,…

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 create worlds. Probably not very successfully yet, and…

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 off Sandra McNally of the independent New York bookstore…

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 with him a Nerf bat and a toy gun capable of firing…

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 the final sprint toward a PhD in Poetry at UH this…

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 concentration, followed by failure, followed by a chastisement…

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 better: your voice, among all the voices in your workshop,…

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 simultaneously polishing off a pint of (vegan) ice cream, as…