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, this person is educated; sensible of philosophers from…

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 advisers and teachers told me to, there are the books I…

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 the finest French foods, read the entire canon of classic…

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 craft as a monolithic organizing principle. I hadn't learned…

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 subjective call to be sure, but I think that the reason behind…

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 catching up to me now, asking unspoken questions that…

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, lying to avoid my job as a textbook salesman so I could…

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 after barely sleeping on the floor of an apartment where…

"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 are the Dead. Short days ago / We lived, felt dawn, saw…

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 and throw salt over my left shoulder to guard against…