Winter 2013:
Reviews, reflections, conversations.
Starved for the intellectual creativity that seemed to have ended the day I gave birth, I signed up for an art journalism class. And then one night that February, I read 'Al Roosten.' The story is not just an exercise in empathy, satire, language, or social commentary. Somehow, all these elements result in a feeling of recognition, which begets a budding kindness. more
Instead of conforming to a "publisher's readymade packaging plans," Castro continues to bravely tell her stories. She writes, "I don't fit. I don't fit, and that's okay, and that's where I write from: that jagged, smashed place of edges and fragments and grief, of feeling lost, of perilous freedom. I extract small fragile bones from the sand, dust them off with my brush, and build strange, urgent new structures." more
By Patrick McGinty
I realize that 'to segue from one scene to the next' sounds like a terribly generic description of how all narrative art functions, but few writers segue as quickly as Homes. Just as you're connecting...more
By Emily Burns Morgan
Shakespeare and Austen are, for Woolf, examples of writers who have achieved this equilibrium. Charlotte Bronte is her example of one who has not. While I understand what Woolf means, I can't help disagreeing...more
By Rachel Greben
Millet's interests here are the subterranean currents of love and attachment, and she is an expert at depicting the interplay of memory and shifting time in the real world. She conveys how learning to live with the dead is where an increasing...more
By Patrick McGinty
Great works of art bear more resemblance than disparity. We...more
I don't know much about film. I'm not sure whether I should be calling it “film” or “cinema” or “the movies.” What I do know is that one of the best books I've ever read about writing is, ostensibly, about film...more
"The difference between the student radicals and the Hells Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo." The word Thompson chooses to describe the Angels' underlying condition is perhaps ironic, given that it is a central term in the Marxist philosophy they abhor: alienation... more
By Emily Burns Morgan
The chronicler, Iris, acknowledges her own slack characterization of the men in her drama, but seems to feel this is not much of a problem. The men are not really the point, after all. The point is what happened to Iris and Laura...more
By Chelsea Bieker
If there's one thing I love, it's a bunch of good, winding, layered, place-driven stories. I want to experience the desperation of history in short fiction, the calling of a cursed land reverberating through each character...more
By Wendy Bourgeois
I'd prefer to think of the inner me as vanilla ice cream, the same all the way to the bottom of the carton. One can predict the behavior of vanilla ice cream with a fair amount of certainty. On the other hand, thinking ourselves...more
By Emily Burns Morgan
I met John Irving in college when he came to visit as part of my school’s reading series. About a week before the event, I received an invitation to a small...more
Crafted, designed, choreographed, performed.
Art form of the twentieth century.
Stolen licks and backstage passes.
Investigations and lived experience.
Language, pushed.
"Starved for the intellectual creativity that seemed to have ended the day I gave birth, I signed up for an art journalism class. And then one night that February, I read 'Al Roosten.' The story is not just an exercise in empathy, satire, language, or social commentary. Somehow, all these elements result in a feeling of recognition, which begets a budding kindness." By Rachel Greben
"In 1960, Donald Judd compared John Chamberlain's work to Willem de Kooning's. Since then, it has been compared to the works of da Vinci, Rodin, Warhol, Bernini, Calder, Transformers, etc. It has been called Minimalist, Baroque, Abstract Expressionist, and Pop. But in a pure sense, none of these juxtapositions stick any better than duct tape to a crumbling building." By Elizabeth Lopeman.
Chatting with record collectors about vinyl, tactility, and that particular sound...
"Face," "Prelude," and "Vision" from Dickey's book The Lily Will (Rescue Press, 2011), along with three brand new poems.
