"For the female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the image - she is the image." ¶Mary Ann Doane in "Film and the Masquerade" I recently saw Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, which had many scenes of sexual and psychological violence. For many of you,…

Eavesdropping on my parents during a visit to Pittsburgh this winter, I became certain that I'd been born into an environment where becoming a writer or language-invested artist of some type was inevitable. I wasn't eavesdropping deliberately; my parent's…

I did something kind of crazy last month. I ran a marathon, my first. I know most runners like to say how incredible it feels to run a marathon, to push your body beyond your known limits, to test your mental capacity, to complete a goal often worked…

Before I ever started writing, I was a musician. I started in the fifth grade, as soon as the option to learn an instrument became available at school, and I learned first (clumsily) on the snare drum that had once been a part of my father's drumset -…

FIRST½ We're currently accepting entries for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prizes. This year we have raised the prize money to $1,500 for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry winners, plus $250 for two runners-up in each genre. That's a total of $6,000 in prizes. The…

Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I've been spending the winter break reading "campus novels." Even if you've never heard the term before, you've almost certainly read one: DeLillo's White Noise; Cather's The Professor's House; Coetzee's Disgrace;…

The last time I almost got into a fight was five years ago. There was a really obnoxious guy at a friend's house - an assistant professor of biochemistry or something from Rutgers, somebody's boyfriend, I forget his name but let's call him Dick - sitting…

I am a third-year graduate student in Creative Writing and yet, I was illiterate for most of my time in the program. I wasn't illiterate all my life--just for the past four years. Let me explain. In 1999, I began losing my vision due to what I'd find…

How to write about the recent violence coursing through the young LGBT world? I could list here the number of suicides committed by gay youth in the past year, the weight of that number, but, like the statistics of global genocide, the statistics of drug-related…

Blog readers, I can think of nothing more important than to share this link and letter from poet and UH professor Tony Hoagland. Please read the letter below, visit the link, and help in any way you can. Rebecca Wadlinger, Managing Editor http://www.transplants.org/donate/deanyoung…