Author Archive

An Ancient Technology: Using Greek Tragedies to Heal Present-day Trauma

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Thousands of years before genetic research, MRIs, CAT scans and X-rays, we had theater. Not as entertainment, but as technology. That’s the claim of Bryan Doerries’ Outside the Wire, a theater company that brings charged readings of ancient Greek plays to communities who’ve experienced trauma.

A Transformative Act: Words Become Music—An Interview with Composer Eric Moe

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Eric Moe is a pianist with a penchant for eclectic harmonies, provocative rhythms, melody lines that curl and cling to the listener’s ear. He’s also developed, over the course of a rich career, a kind of perfect pitch for incorporating text to music.

Can’t Get It Out Of My Head: Songs in Janet Frame’s Early Fiction

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A good song is catchy: it’s quickly learned, and easily retained. It may be hard to forget, to the point of distraction. There’s a reason that the first literature was found in verse, in melodic and rhythmic patterns.

Stories are Never Neutral: Disability, Representation, and Autonomous Press

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From childhood, we’re taught to see ourselves as others see us. We learn to synthesize “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” into a whole through a complex process of self-identification. We see who and what we’re taught to see, a looping phenomena that means we’re literally made up of story.

Writing People Reading Books: Tracking the Elusive Reader

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A writer is first – perhaps foremost – a reader. Why, then, is it rare to find our characters reading? It’s not that we don’t find books given a special place in fiction. Writers love writing about books.

“Honey, I rode every pig track here to yonder”: Bookmobiles in Southern Appalachia

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Madison County, North Carolina contains roughly 450 square miles of the oldest mountains in the world, with sharply pitched forested slopes, grassy balds, rocky ridges, and swift creeks typical of the Southern Appalachian highlands.