Reading Archive
Good Bad Women: The Sea Witch
A band, made up of eight young Swedes playing steel drums, had set up just outside the bookshop where I work. I didn’t step out of the shop to watch them until, almost without realizing it, I was singing along.
The Best Poem I Read This Month: Nikki Wallschlaeger’s “Blues for A Bar So Low That It Became a Cage”
Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of the collection Houses and the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, two arrangements that undercut artifice and underline activation energies. This month, I dove into one of her new poems from the most recent incarnation of The Journal Petra.
“Why not now go towards the things I love?”: The Aftermath of Being Queer
Some part of me broke last Sunday. I kept scrolling this week through the news articles that listed the victims of the Orlando massacre, the pain in my heart growing with each name. It seems we’re being denied time and space to mourn.
Time and Opening Chapters: Gaining Trust
Lately I’ve been thinking about time in novels. How to manipulate it, whether it should be linear or nonlinear, and what that choice means for a story. I began to examine it more closely after a recent weekend novel workshop I took with Lauren Grodstein.
The Veins of the Ocean and the Politics of Grief
Despite the foothold grief retains in our lives at large, its portrayals in our art are often one-size-fits-all. It isn’t simply a question of what is appropriate to grieve—the world provides no shortage of reasons for that—but whether on the television, over Facebook, or, most perplexingly, within literary fiction,
Lost Hearts and Sleepless Nights
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
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
On Sentimentality: Zoe Heller, Leslie Jamison, Nate Pritts, & Mary Ruefle
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
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
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Und So Weiter” by Seth Clabough
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