Lost Hearts and Sleepless Nights

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
Sometimes the things we remember most from childhood are the things that scared us. There is something everlasting about the visceral fears of childhood. However, it took a lot to scare me as a child. Even from a young age, I had a keen love of ghost stories and

Titles: A Typography

Author: | Categories: Reading, Writing No comments
I’ve always had a wretched time titling my writing. It’s the last thing I do with any piece, and not without a lot of deep sighing. In panic mode I have a rattling tendency to latch on to songs; just in the short history of my posts here, I’ve

Exaggeration & Distortion: What Writers Can Learn From Visual Artists

The purpose of art is not to depict reality—it is to transform reality into something more interesting and meaningful. And the only way to do this is to distort, exaggerate, or in some way embellish what is there. Supernormal stimuli excites us more than reality does. Birds, mammals, fish,

Origin Stories: Matthew Neil Null’s ALLEGHENY FRONT

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
You just don’t see enough literary fiction about bears. If, like me, you prefer your nutritious reading with a side of mauling, you should pick up Matthew Neil Null’s Allegheny Front. Erudite, unsentimental, and alert to the natural world, Null turns the history of West Virginia into stories that

“It all started when I began writing through masks”: An Interview with Tomás Q. Morín

Author: | Categories: Interviews, Poetry, Writing No comments
Tomás Q. Morín’s first book of poems, A Larger Country, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was runner-up for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. It’s a collection that brings together a series of different times, places and characters (both historical and imagined) into a new world all its own, one that

Round-Up: The Poetry Book Society, 2016 YA Book Poetry Prize, and “The Other NBA”

Author: | Categories: Round-Up No comments
From the closing of the Poetry Book Society to the 2016 YA Book Prize, here’s this week’s biggest literary news: The Poetry Book Society announced that it will be shutting its doors after over fifty years of service to the literary community. The PBS is widely known for supporting the sale of poetry:

On Sentimentality: Zoe Heller, Leslie Jamison, Nate Pritts, & Mary Ruefle

Author: | Categories: Reading, Writing No comments
When we talk about sentimentality in literature, we talk about the “contemporary, pejorative sense of the word,” Zoe Heller writes for the New York Times. A word defined by Merriam-Webster as “the quality or state of being sentimental especially to excess or in affectation.” A word with synonyms such as

A Setting out of a Horror Story: Reverse Mirdered at the Red Rim Hotel

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
A few years ago, while on a road trip, I glimpsed a sign advertising a motel that I’ll call the Red Rim Motel, because that’s close enough, and will give you some idea of why I did a double-take. The name of the motel made me immediately think of

Day Mark/Night Signature: Ginger Ko’s Motherlover

Author: | Categories: Poetry No comments
  Workshopping individual poems is one thing; working on a full chapbook or book manuscript is quite another. For the reader or writer who wants to put away the notion of poems as discrete, and to look for a demonstration of poems as part of a fuller structure or

The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Und So Weiter” by Seth Clabough

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series No comments
One person’s trash is another’s treasure. This is often as true for prose as it is for yard sales: a character’s perspective and primary concerns compose the lens through which they see the world. The narrator of Seth Clabough’s, “Und So Weiter” (Blackbird), sees his past and future in