Pro Forma, Pro poetica
Some of you would accuse me of never having had any formal instruction in Latin. Some of you would be correct! If you crack open an issue of a nationally distributed literary magazine these days, you’re unlikely to see a lot of traditional sonnets, villanelles, ballads, or other formal
Lost Classics: The Phantom Carriage
[Editor’s note: Every few months, Akshay Ahuja will dig into the archives for an old book that has either fallen out of favor or never received the recognition it deserves. Feel free to add suggestions for future rediscoveries in the comments.] The Phantom Carriage Selma Lagerlöf Norvik Press, July
The Way We Talk
When I write, I often struggle with writing what falls within the quotation marks because I’ve been told conflicting things over the years about how to write dialogue. For most of my writing career, I tried to write dialogue the way my writing instructors taught me. An often-taught rule
Reading Devoutly, Writing Devoutly
Although I’m not religious, there are days when I wish I could teleport my writing students back for just a few sessions of my childhood religious-study classes. Surely, those teachers who once schooled me in old-fashioned text learning didn’t think they were training me to be a fiction writer.
Poetry Week: Deep Field
Deep Field Philip Gross Bloodaxe Books, November 2011 64 pages $21.95 Deep Field, by T. S. Eliot Prize-winner Philip Gross, charts the slow loss of the author’s father, John, to aphasia, an irreversible decline in the brain’s language faculties. Gross’s father, who once knew five languages, has lost his
The Elements of Style
On the first day of class, my ninth grade biology teacher told us the curriculum called for us to learn science from the least abstract level to the most—biology this year, followed by chemistry, physics, and calculus. “Of course, that’s completely bogus,” he said at the end of this
Not Unlike…
The Other Poems Paul Legault Fence Books, November 2011 72 pages $15.95 Editor’s note: P. Scott Stanfield holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches literature at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Recently, I challenged him to see how many references to other works and artists he could make in a single
Erin Go Plough: Some Staff Favorites for St. Patrick’s
It’s time to get your Irish on. I come from a family where the old aunts always proudly displayed their photos of JFK, I could swear in Gaelic by sixth grade, and we had a shillelagh in the house. Although we wore green on Saint Patty’s day, my mother
Tips and Tricks: an Interview with Tom Parker
For today’s post, I am interviewing my long-time writing coach and mentor Tom Parker. I first met Tom at a writer’s workshop run out of University of California, Berkeley six years ago. He was the professor, and I was an overconfident young writer who needed guidance. Since then, he
Learning to Listen: an Interview with Susan Power
When I first started reading Susan Power’s novel, The Grass Dancer, I knew little about her. We’d met briefly through a mutual friend, and I knew that Susan had been a fellow at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute. I also knew from her bio that she was an enrolled member of