Monthly Archive:: April 2010
Traveling on Foot: Werner Herzog
Guest post by Carol Keeley I first saw Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe at the Music Box, a Chicago theater with faux stars overhead and a live organist between features. While Herzog stuffs garlic and herb bundles into the toe of each boot, he invokes a “real war against
The Acrostic: A Love Story
Guest post by Bridget Lowe Most of us wrote them in grade school, our names printed in large letters down the left margin and traced over with marker, our early views of ourselves summed up in a handful of lively adjectives. A few years ago, when leaving for graduate
A Writer’s Envy, Part III: Naked People in Pain
Guest post by Scott Nadelson So I don’t envy all artists, all the time. I wouldn’t, for example, have wanted to be the Israeli performance artist Sigalit Landau while she was making her piece Barbed Hula. Pronged metal puncturing my belly? (You’ve been warned.) I’ll pass. Nor would
The Greensboro Five
Guest post by Carol Keeley Among the iconic civil rights heroes in a recent Platon portfolio in The New Yorker were the Greensboro Four. The image of these young men at a whites-only counter in Woolworth’s ignited a movement and is part of our national conscience. But this shot
Elizabeth Strout, the Subconscious Writer
Several times during her question-and-answer session at Emerson College on April 15, Elizabeth Strout admitted to making things up. No one would begrudge a fiction writer of doing that–fabrication is part of her job. But Strout “just knew” when her latest book Olive Kitteridge was ready. “Which isn’t very
Ride, Sally, Ride
Guest post by Bridget Lowe As a child of the ’80s, I was keenly aware of that vast region of “somewhere else” called space, and the astronauts who donned special outfits to venture into it. This hyper-awareness was in part due to the famed Sally Ride, the youngest and
A Writer’s Envy, Part II: The Artist’s Husband
Guest post by Scott Nadelson Of course I’m not the first writer to express envy of the visual artist. As Geoff Dyer notes in Out of Sheer Rage, his book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence (a book I can’t recommend highly enough; it’s one of the
The Culture of Fire
Welcome to another fiction writer, Carol Keeley, who will post every Friday. As always, thanks for reading, and we welcome any and all comments these guest blogs provoke. Guest post by Carol Keeley Young women of a certain temperament tend to have a Frida Kahlo period. Mine bloomed post-Plath,
Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments
Meet our second new blogger from the Spring 2010 issue: Bridget Lowe. She recently became a “Discovery”/Boston Review winner, and has poetry you can read online in Boston Review and Nth Position. Guest post by Bridget Lowe I recently stumbled upon a used copy of Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments,
Ten Quick Questions with… Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout’s had quite a year. Her third work of fiction, Olive Kitteridge, still sits on the paperback bestseller list. Last April, she earned the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This Thursday, she headlines the Ploughshares Reading Series, where she will read one of Olive’s stories (“I often make that
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