Reinventing Writing Workshops
Like it or not, MFAs, as programs that aim at the professionalization of writing, have always been the vehicle of cultural imperialism; the propensity to remove “ideology” from writing in order to improve the latter is thus basic hypocrisy.
Doughnuts Oozing Their Secrets: Emotion by Jo Ann Beard
The scenes in my fiction that worry me the most, that I go over and over and that cause me no end of doubt, are the big, emotional moments. Falling in love. Getting dumped. The death of a loved one.
Fiction Responding to Fiction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Doris Lessing
“The Yellow Wallpaper” was published in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and remains a staple of early feminist fiction. In 1983, Doris Lessing responded to Perkins Gilman’s classic story with “To Room Nineteen,” in part to point out how little had changed in the lives of women.
The Blazing World Asks Why There Are No Great Female Artists
In The Blazing World, Harriet Burden is a widowed sixty-something artist whose work languished in relative obscurity until she recruits three men to claim her work as their own, which fundamentally changes the reception of the art, and possibly even the art itself.
The Space of Risk: An Interview With Jacob Wren
When I first encountered Jacob Wren and his work, it was in the mid-1990s, back when he was a Toronto poet known as Death Waits. Now, as co-artistic director of PME-ART, he exists as a constantly moving target, exploring performance through collaboration, text, and multiple other means.
Review: DEAR CYBORGS by Eugene Lim
For Frank Exit, a man tasked with recovering the kidnapped children of a Japanese diplomat, gone are the days of a simple ransom request for money or a getaway vehicle.
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: How Sandra Cisneros’s Chicano Literature Reimagines Chicago’s Borders
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories asks us to imagine literary regionalism as more than just literature set in a single place, but as fiction’s ability to funnel different places and the experiences they birth into one environment.
Smartphones Have Potential to Bring About Brave New World or 1984 or Both
The smartphone wasn’t specifically prophesized by either Aldous Huxley in Brave New World or George Orwell in 1984, but the device is a manifestation of the dark vision both men had for how human beings relate to one another.
Summer Travel: Ghost Hunting Across Europe With Jessa Crispin
Crispin traveled to Europe chasing literary ghosts and looking for answers. The resulting memoir and travelogue takes on the twin themes of trying to understand the lives of others while hoping to make sense of her own confusing history.
Wislawa Szymborska’s Disquieting Jokes
I think about jokes a lot when I read Wislawa Szymborska. Her poems build the way jokes do, with irony, misdirection, and distraction: setups that leave you completely unprepared for her disorienting final verses. Instead of leading to certainty, they take you somewhere else entirely.