“In the body’s own words, it cannot live like a vegetable in the country.” I am twenty-one and sitting on a bunk in a shotgun house in Mid-City, New Orleans, reading C.D. Wright. After a few conversations on the phone with a professor at the University of New Orleans, I have come here, weeks after graduating college, to help with an oral history project about the experiences of people who lived through Katrina.
In the Body’s Own Words Read More »
Here’s a possibility: as writers, we have more of the one truly non-renewable resource in the world—time. And I’m not just talking about quantitative, chronological time. When we sit down in solitude and think about life, we extend life. When we read about the different permutations in which lives have been led, or when we contemplate life in our own writing—time is stretched, warped, mutated, created anew.
The Costs of Being a Writer Read More »
The new initiative is the Michigan Library Publishing Club (“Pub Club”), a quarterly book club in Ann Arbor where attendees will informally discuss recently published, open access U-M Press books over coffee, tea, and treats. The inaugural event will take place at Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery on Thursday, February 4, 2016, 3:30-5:00 PM, and will feature introductory remarks from Charles Watkinson (Associate University Librarian for Publishing and Director of the U-M Press) and the Library Staff Forum Board, as well as free, collectible bookmarks handmade by Wolverine Press.
“Pub Club” to Celebrate the Joy of Reading Read More »
Vulgar and prurient and dumb. They’re the sort of adjectives we not only often ascribe to young adult fiction, but to teenaged girls, who are overwhelmingly the protagonists of young adult fiction. It’s no surprise that culture dismisses the interests of this demographic before co-opting them. Just think about The Beatles, whose legacy now seems preserved by middle-aged men who dismiss the same population that catapulted the band to success, teenaged girls, as tasteless and frivolous. It could be my own internalized misogyny that prevents me from taking these stories seriously at first glance. When literary fiction still struggles to write women without the same invisible hand of misogyny, I’m excited to see the world of YA allows women to be heads of armies, political leaders and general badasses.
An Apology to My Friends Who Love YA Read More »
Adulthood has often been explained as the moment you are supposed to know what you are doing. With your life, your job, your hair. Yet judging from the think pieces that continue to trickle out of the Internet, and conversations I’ve been having with people as young as twenty and as old as fifty, it seems that no one really knows, or admits to, having figured out how to be an adult.
The Apparent Agency of Adults Read More »
My year was rich, and I hope yours was, too. It was full of joys and frustrations, thrombosis and the evenest sleeps, massive blizzards with fragmenting winds, rains that blurred the boundaries between body and air, and the exasperations of humidity rising off the tennis courts in the park near my home. I listened to the otherworldly gargling calls of ‘ua’u in the young but stelliferous dark of Haleakala, let the shutter out on my Nikon to see those same stars in the sapphire depth of Wisconsin’s skies, and I spent an inordinate amount of time staring out at the Chicago river from the exhibit hall in the Sheraton Grand Chicago, where I also learned how to sell books on the run.
Literary Promises: A Look at Last Year’s Books as a List of New Year’s Resolutions Read More »
In the January 2016 issue of The Wire, Stewart Smith writes of pianist Matthew Shipp’s latest album: “Of the five albums Matthew Shipp issued as leader or co-leader in 2015, The Conduct Of Jazz is perhaps the finest.” It is a fine album; I’m listening to it now, fondly remembering the sublime experience of seeing Shipp in duo with bassist Michael Bisio earlier this spring. Still, The Conduct Of Jazz doesn’t make The Wire’s year-end top 50 cut, though it does make Downbeat’s roundup. My guess is that, one way or the other, Shipp doesn’t care. “What’s the use—I’ve got too many sides out as it is,” he was quoted saying fifteen years ago, in reference to a plan to retire from recording. “I don’t feel the psychological need to continually flood the market with this material…. Embellishment for the sake of the cash advance. That’s a kind of cynicism I’d rather not get into.”
A Series of Small Failures: The Conduct of Fiction Read More »
It’s no longer taboo to admit, as an American Jew, that you have a Christmas tree. Some people call it a Hanukkah bush, which is about as absurd as someone diplomatically wishing you “happy holidays” after the eighth day of Hanukkah. It’s a Christmas tree, and some Jews, whose religious services, as a friend pointed out, will never be broadcast on the local news, long ago decided they wanted in on the holiday cheer, and that there’s no shame in that.
There’s No Such Thing as a Chanukah Bush Read More »
There comes a time in every Santa-believer’s life when that believing hits a snag. Often the seeds of doubt are planted by way of schoolyard bullies, or dream-shattering friends, or one’s own late night sneak from a bedroom to catch a parent in the act. At some point geography always gets in the way (“That’s a lot of ground to cover!”), or zoology (“Reindeer can’t fly!”), or ethics (“What kind of labor laws protect those elves anyway?”).
Unsolved Histories: Santa Claus, Childlike Wonder, & Reindeer Poop on the Roof Read More »
Two students of mine recently asked me how to go about writing the impossible. They each had a narrative that was at once their own and also not: one was trying to write through his experience of being present during a national tragedy and another was trying to write about her illness, which was advancing at an exponential rate. I told them each that there were two possibilities: either they were resistant to taking on the responsibilities inherent in the act of narrating and they needed to face and embrace them—even if that meant getting it wrong—or their stories were unlanguagable, in which case they would have to find a new framework for giving the narrative voice.
