Love and Pain: An Interview With Diane Schoemperlen
One could argue that the work of Diane Schoemperlen is highly unusual even beyond its incredible strength: a more lyric prose managing publication through larger and more mainstream Canadian publishers. Given her work, I was curious to engage with her memoir, This Is Not My Life.
Cultural Lifelines and Individual Artistry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst
In 1999, Robert Bringhurst—polyglot translator, poet, and typographic authority—published A Story as Sharp as a Knife, a book about Haida myths and mythtellers. Bringhurst retranslates the work of several Haida poets using century-old transcriptions from anthropologist John Swanton.
Nothing More Punk Than Poetry: The DIY Lit Scene
For years, the Breadline reading series brought together Seattle's writers, performers, and artists. I saw fiction writers and poets read there alongside stand-up comedians, pianists, graphic novelists, and rappers.
We Read Our Lives Wherever We Can
What happens when you read to manifest, rather than escape, your preoccupations?
The Problem of “Make It New,” the Help of Joy Williams
At whatever point "Make it new" became a phrase so canonically removed from its creator that it began to reach the minds and ears of young writers years before they'd ever pick up Pound's poetry, a particular fine-edged damage was done.
Poetry as Dialogue: Some Thoughts on Chapbooks
There's never been a better time for poetry chapbooks, with hundreds of presses publishing excellent, innovative examples each year. This proliferation invites a closer look into the chapbook's history as a medium for more direct engagement and dialogue between writers and readers.
The Myth of the Wild
Helen Macdonald’s choice to raise and train a goshawk in the wake of her father’s death is a decision tied inexorably to the notion of “wild” life and land. H is for Hawk is a sensitive, fraught, and unexpected memoir of land and what it means to be wild.
MFA vs. PhD
Last year, at 28, I attended my first writer’s conference in Virginia and a fiction workshop. I felt like a wallflower who’d only just realized all the other flowers had long ago left the wall in pursuit of something deemed extremely useful in the American literary community—the MFA.
Review: WHISKEY, ETC.: SHORT (SHORT) STORIES by Sherrie Flick
In her miniature portraits of a failed salesman transformed through food, a forgetful elderly woman, a young woman making dinner for a sometime-boyfriend at the same moment that he is dying, Flick examines seduction and heartbreak, the complications of new relationships, the dynamics of long-time ones, love, loss, and
The Best Poem I Read This Month: Joey De Jesus’s “Materia VII”
“Materia VII,” the new poem by Joey De Jesus featured in this month’s WILDNESS, an online literary arts journal published in coordination with Platypus Press, uses several relational jumping off points to supercharge the text-scene.