“I love the act of repetition. Maybe it feels like a meditation of sorts, but I’m also interested in simplifying a technique down to a single mark or color, so as to allow space for the viewer to interpret the feeling, or to let a concept emerge if that’s what is intended.”
All These Little Landscapes: An Interview with Roanna Wells Read More »
“Writing is, in many ways, an act of faith. You have to believe in yourself. You have to work towards a goal that may, at first, seem inaccessible and far-fetched.”
On “Outside Is the Ocean”: An Interview with Matthew Lansburgh Read More »
The Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s new book of nonfiction, “The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq,” tells one aspect of this story: the kidnapping and enslavement of Yazidi women by Daesh. More specifically, The Beekeeper is about one man’s efforts to rescue these women through a network that he set up himself.
“We made room in our day for every star”: Dunya Mikhail’s “The Beekeeper” Read More »
In Ann Arbor, I’d been known as “the Alaska guy,” which now felt like a pose. Feeling too Alaska for the MFA book-world had supplanted how much of my life I’d felt too book for Alaska. Maybe that was why I’d been unable to progress on my novel. I’d left this place, after all. Had I ever really loved it, or just the way it let me represent myself?
I want to think about distance and Jane Gregory’s new book of poems, Yeah No. Or something more like gapping. A space between concepts charged with those concepts’ distance, what holds discourse together (and molecules, and planets).
Notes toward Jane Gregory’s “Yeah No” Read More »
As a toddler, I devoured reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and even in the 1970s still occasionally saw the civil defense film Duck and Cover. It was an everyday occurrence to see the yellow and black signs marking the way to the nearest fallout shelter in schools, post offices, and stores. There was no escaping the Cold War’s shadow.
Through a Russian Lens Read More »
“I really want the resources and the money that’s coming into the city to reach the bus, but I hope that gentrification never reaches the bus because there’s just so much culture and originality there.”
Riding with Aunt DDot: An Interview with Detroit Artist Bree Gant Read More »
Van Den Berg gives loveliness to the gruesome while opening up the novel’s world to all kinds of ghosts. The real emotional power of the novel, however, beyond the elegance of its language and the precision and momentum of its telling, builds from what ends up being a brutal moment of confrontation.
A Review of Laura Van Den Berg’s “The Third Hotel” Read More »
The thing about identity is, people are always trying to define who you are for you, to tell you what you mean. And we should be interrogating our positions in society, our privilege relative to our oppression, but we should also be skeptical of those who insist we are definitively one thing or another.
Writing My Way into Jewishness Read More »
To forget Etta Moten is to miss the chance to celebrate a life as eventful as the twentieth century she traversed, an American biography that boasted not only a second act but a third and a triumphant fourth.
Remembering the Forgotten Woman: The Twentieth-Century Life of Etta Moten Barnett Read More »
