Writing People Reading Books: Tracking the Elusive Reader
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.
Sonja Livingston Resurrects Long-Dead Women in Hybrid Essay Collection
Women long dead become reanimated in Ladies Night at the Dreamland. We sit beside blood-splattered lovers in 19th century Tennessee, sway on a steamer across Italy with a fatally ill women, hear ghosts knock at the command of two New York sisters at the dawn of spiritualism.
Round-Up: the Highest Paid Authors, an Out-of-Print Book’s Sales, and HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD
From the sales of the newest Harry Potter story to a list of the highest paid authors of 2016, here are some of last week's most interesting literary headlines.
Also a Farmer
I started farming the year after I completed my MFA, and in the six years since I’ve been trying to figure out how anyone could possibly be a writer and a farmer at the same time.
Bodily Shifts
I’m currently about five months pregnant with our second child, and I’m finding this state no less strange the second time around. It’s plenty of other things too—miraculous, exciting, fascinating, wonderful—and I’m very grateful for it; but in describing the actual daily, bodily experience, that’s the word that first
Juan Villoro’s “The Guilty” Decenters What It Means To Be Mexican
Last month I found myself in the gardening section of a German supermarket where, on sale, I came across Mexican-themed cacti. Tiny, impossibly hairy things with googly eyes and black moustaches and pastel colored sombreros made of clay. Typical German kitsch. “That looks like my uncle Mario,” I thought.
Finding a {Digital} Home
This June, I was in Victoria, B.C. for a conference and summer institute that took me away from home for ten days. I was surrounded by water & mountains, fresh air & kindness, and it felt like just the kind of intellectual and emotional salve I needed after yet
Flowers Around Your Soft Throat: An Interview with Poet Christina Seymour
Christina Seymour is the author of the poetry chapbook Flowers Around Your Soft Throat (Structo Press, UK). Her work appears in Cider Press Review, North American Review, Cimarron Review, Wingbeats II (Dos Gatos Press), and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Maryville College in east Tennessee.
Parents Experimenting On Their Children in Fiction
It’s unsurprising that parenting is fertile ground for novelists. There are plenty of stories, both in fiction and in real life, of parental sacrifice for the sake of children. More surprising are the accounts of parents using their children for the sake of their work.
Fiction Responding to Fiction: Edith Wharton and Alice Elliott Dark
“Roman Fever,” published by Edith Wharton in 1934 just three years before her death, is one of her short story masterpieces, and it is a story that has spawned many responses, including a modernized version by Alice Elliott Dark entitled “The Secret Spot.”