Uncategorized Archive
The Ploughshares Round-Down: Hashtags and Heresy
Hello again, Writers. So I was driving to New York City a few weeks ago for a conference at NYU, where I talked about the ways story and song benefit public discourse. To say I’d been obsessing over the political impact of storytelling would be an understatement. So maybe it’s no surprise that
Research Unleashed! And Leashed.
I knew I had a problem when I started envying my dog’s cone collar. Now, my dog’s problem was a hot spot. Allergic, itchy, hot, and double-coated, my German Shepherd had chewed her hind leg raw over the course of a single evening. My problem was research. Engrossing, surprising,
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Fear Itself” by Katie Coyle
There’s a lot to love about Katie Coyle‘s story “Fear Itself,” published in the most recent issue of One Story. To start, Coyle is so spot-on in her depiction of teenage girls that about a page in, I took out my phone and snapped a quick picture of a
Five Reasons Not To Feel Guilty About Reading YA
One of the many challenges of being a teen is navigating what’s cool and what’s uncool. Are jeans dyed deep blue or acid-washed? Which bands have sold out? Which Youtube video is hilarious and which has been over-shared? It’s way easier to maintain an overall condescending attitude and look
The Self-Publisher Who Changed the World of Baseball: On Fool’s Gold by Bill James
Under review: Solid Fool’s Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom by Bill James (2011, ACTA Publications, 224 pages) Whenever I think of Bill James I think of the following Margaret Mead quote, which probably appeared on the walls of half my high school classrooms, the words arranged
Lit GIFs: The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne lives in 17th-century Puritan Boston. She’s been branded with the scarlet letter A because supposedly she had an affair. This makes sense to everyone around her, because as far as they know her husband never made it over to the New Land and yet she currently has an infant
The Ploughshares Round-Down: Stop Stressing About the Bestseller List
BookCon sold out all 10,000 tickets! That’s kind of amazing. It’s also an opening that probably means absolutely nothing to you. It should, even if you never plan to go. Every year, the book industry has an annual conference in New York City called BookExpo America (BEA). I haven’t
The Things I Haven’t Read
Legend had it that a famous scholar of nineteenth century American literature visited my college to lecture, and someone asked him a question about Melville. He began his answer with “While I’ve never read Moby-Dick…” At this remove, I still question the man’s scholarship and sanity—but I do admire his
Walking to Write
It should be no surprise that walking relieves stress and anxiety and increases creativity, but now a recent study at Stanford University has found that walking, even for just ten minutes, increases creativity by sixty percent. (Apparently, there was no difference between walking outside and walking on a treadmill
Episodia 2.6: TV-Based Beach Reads
Ah, summer. That sweltry time of year when some of our favorite television shows go on hiatus and we head outdoors for lots of sun, swimming, and—if you’re like me—lots of literature. I love the feeling of reading poolside on a sunny afternoon, and the right book can transform