Author Archive

Machine Language

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I recently spent a long weekend collaborating with friends on a narrative outline for a point-and-click adventure video game. Relying less on twitchy button-mashing and more on logic puzzles, conversation, and critical thinking, the adventure game genre is a good project for a writer.

Feed Yourself: Jonathan Gold’s “A Neighborhood Just West of Downtown”

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Very few writers I know got any writing done last month. We posted article after article about how the apocalypse has started or could potentially be avoided, or what great writers have said about fascism and resistance, or how artists can help marginalized groups.

The Comfort of Writing Guides: On Benjamin Percy’s “Thrill Me”

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About a year ago, I heard Benjamin Percy give a craft lecture in Seattle. The talk, “Making the Extraordinary Ordinary,” concerned blending literary and genre fiction.

11 Thoughts about the Internet and Mike Meginnis’s “Angband, or His 55 Desires”

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The internet is a compost heap full of old websites and technology and expired pop culture leftovers. Every once in a while, some enterprising artist grabs his or her pitchfork and turns the heap to reach the richest, oldest, most decomposed material. That fertilizes new growth. Vaporwave, a new

Building a Writing Community in the Woods

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We came for a writing residency called Till. Unlike conferences like Breadloaf or residencies like the Fine Arts Work Center or the Millay Colony, Till is short—just a long weekend of workshops, uninterrupted writing time (with no cell phone signal), and drinking wine around bonfires.

Nothing More Punk Than Poetry: The DIY Lit Scene

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For years, the Breadline reading series brought together Seattle's writers, performers, and artists. I saw fiction writers and poets read there alongside stand-up comedians, pianists, graphic novelists, and rappers.

Nooks and Tributaries: Literary Journals in the Real World

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In graduate school, I worked on the staff of two different literary journals. I was new to the writing world and the idea of working behinds the scenes on a journal—the very kind of journal that I hoped to be published in—was thrilling.

Inferno: Reading Eileen Myles in Las Vegas

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1 I have a few hours to kill in Las Vegas and I’m looking for a quiet place to finish Eileen Myles’s Inferno. Reading here feels like a radical act; it doesn’t make anybody any money or provide a sense of spectacle. The Vegas Strip seems to discourage it.

Liber Interruptus

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For years, I finished every book I started. Short collections, slim volumes of poetry, novels fat with lyricism, the latest tome from Neal Stephenson—I soldiered through them all. Then, a few years out of grad school, on my morning bus ride to work, I found myself falling asleep in

Shelf Aware Machines

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When I was a kid, I loved the Barnes & Noble in Seattle’s University Village. It was one of Barnes & Noble’s flagship stores, at that time the largest bookstore I’d ever seen: forty-six thousand square feet over two floors. I spent hours in its expansive science fiction and