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Communists and Cassoulet: Julia Child on Dried Herbs, Dull Knives and Joseph McCarthy

Author: | Categories: Book Reviews, Nonfiction No comments
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

From Swaddles to Slang: Creative Problem Solving in Translation and Motherhood

Author: | Categories: Writing No comments
In late February I finished up the translation of a novel. In mid-March my son was born. Caring for a baby is not all too different than dealing with a challenging translation, though granted the hours are less convenient and the boss often poses unreasonable demands. In both cases

On and Of the Page: The Life–Art Collapse

Author: | Categories: Reading, Writing Advice No comments
A few years ago at a conference, I read a section from my long poem “Sublimation” in which the speaker describes a miscarriage that, in its vicious pain and effusions, wakes her up in the middle of the night. After the reading, as I was mingling my way toward

Social Media and Literature

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I seem a little less in love with literature because of social media. My apologies to the Ploughshares staff who have to Tweet about this post, but it’s true. For a few months I was an intern for an online literary magazine, helping with their social media. I’d done

Is Anyone Reading Your Blog Posts?: Building a Literary Community in the Age of Facebook

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series, Writing No comments
In the creative writing for new media course I teach at the University of Iowa, we spend the first few weeks talking about ways in which technology has changed the way we communicate with one another, for better or worse. When it comes to Facebook in particular, it’s interesting