Dogs in the Literary Imagination
From Odysseus’s faithful Argos to White Fang to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Shiloh, dogs have occupied the centers and peripheries of human stories since we began telling them. It’s no wonder; dogs were first domesticated by hunter-gatherers (not, as many believe, by agriculturalists) over 15,000 years ago, the first species
3 DoubleCross Press Chapbooks: Style Meets Sonority
DoubleCross Press makes gorgeous letter press chapbooks. But these aren’t just pretty faces; it’s what’s on the inside—poetry, poetics and "prose-ish" pieces—that counts. This month, I review three of them.
“I was a house / I was a witch” : Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us.”
“I was a house. / I was a witch” declares the middle stanza of Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us” from the newest issue of DRUNKEN BOAT. This poem, in my reading, functions to present intermingling transformations that perform whatever an opposite of distillation forecloses.
Writing Fiction from Life
Some writers that I know are at times so unsure of whether a story is theirs to tell that they will shelve a project for years at a time, waiting for some kind of permission to be granted, or for forgiveness, or for a death. But sometimes those things
The End
My Twitter timeline is big on one meme these days: me then, me now. Sometimes it’s “me in 2006, me in 2016,” but mostly it’s “me at the beginning of 2016, me at the end.”
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express
British mystery writer Agatha Christie follows the news of the ordeal with interest, using the circumstance for her classic novel, Murder on the Orient Express, first published in the U.K. on January 1, 1934.
Communists and Cassoulet: Julia Child on Dried Herbs, Dull Knives and Joseph McCarthy
If Julia Child and Avis deVoto were here today, they’d be great Facebook friends. Julia and Avis bonded over food—buying it, cooking it and eating it. But since they were without technology, they wrote letters, which Joan Reardon collected into a book titled As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis
Speaking of Megaphones: Why Reading Literature Now Might Be Useful
I could spin many narratives for why I wanted this series. Instead I'll be honest with you: it was mostly for my own sanity. Maybe you've got a better handle on this than I do, but my way of engaging with our daily media does not feel particularly healthy,
Round-Up: Hate Crimes in Public Libraries, R.L. Stine’s New Comic, and Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Speech
From the increase in hate crimes in public libraries to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines: In recent weeks, public libraries have seen a rise in hate crimes. Reported incidents include the defacement of books about Islam with racist language and imagery, anti-Semitic
Arc Poetry Magazine : An Interview with Rhonda Douglas, Poetry Editor
I originally met Rhonda Douglas back in 1992, when we took the same creative writing (poetry) workshop at the University of Ottawa, conducted by Ottawa writer Mark Frutkin.