Arts & Culture

Voices of the Middle West Literary Festival

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Can’t make AWP this year? Then come out this Saturday, March 21, for the Voices of the Middle West literary conference in Ann Arbor–a day featuring panels on writing and publishing plus words from keynote speaker Stuart Dybek. Michigan Quarterly Review will have a table at the festivities, so stop by the bookfair (in the atrium of the East Quad) to pick up a copy of our current issue. It’s dolphin-smooth and brand spanking new.

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The Mysterious Hebrew Whale

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In January, I shared with regular readers of this blog my experience reading as many editions of Moby-Dick as I could get my hands on in a university small town. I found fancy illustrated versions, and even fancier illustrated versions, and modest versions for the 1930s Everyman, and versions that had been subjected to undergraduate scribblings, and even a children’s pop-up version—albeit one so intricately cut and lovely that you would cringe to see a toddler’s hands pulling on its riggings and sails. Each edition different from the next, in its own distinctive way. And yet, they each share one thing in common. None of them know how to speak Hebrew.

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Found In Translation

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As evidenced by my previous blog posts, I have been drawn by the predicament of writing race, or writing difference. Without a doubt, I am still bothered by this question of how we, or really, I, want to go about training my work to resonate on numerous levels, without sacrificing honesty for clarity, without having to play the endless game of cultural catch-up for a mixed audience. Without a doubt, this stream of thought turns almost every thing that I read, watch, or otherwise consume into a potential craft lesson. The latest item to fall victim is a documentary that I consider one of my favorite movies: Jiro Dreams Of Sushi.

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Poiesis: On Drawing

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Ideation should always be this concise and rewarding. Many of those maps I have kept and found again and again. They end up, intact, as a bookmark for Flaubert, or at the bottom of my bedside table drawer under loose change and a pocket knife. As urgent as the notes are made, their meaning, for the life of me, has been all but lost. They are still so compelling that one can make a painting directly from them. My own thoughts dial around their archaic symbols and half-words, the key of which had been pantomimed on a cold snowy walk or cupped into a rolled-down car window—If you see this, you will know.

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I Am What Is Missing: Our Stuff, Ourselves

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A few years ago, I was teaching a middle school writing elective at a well-regarded summer camp for the arts. The students in this class were not primarily interested in writing: they were there as young musicians, or dancers, or studying “general arts” which usually meant their well-off parents thought it more edifying for them to draw with charcoal and write poems and create spliced-together musical theater out of the latest pop songs than to let them spend the summer watching TV and lighting matches in the backyard.

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Vampire Vigilante Justice: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

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Do we remember Diogenes of Sinope? Diogenes—the Greek cynic who famously wandered around holding a lantern up to all the men he passed in the marketplace, asking them, “Hey, are you full of shit?” Yes? We remember this? Good. Because that’s essentially the plot of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Vice Films, 2014), only we’re in “Bad City,” Iran and it’s always nighttime and Diogenes has been recast as a vampire, and she—the titular “Girl” (Sheila Vand)—is dope as hell.

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