MQR Online

On “My Father, The Pornographer”: An Interview with Chris Offutt

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“When I first started [writing] fiction, I avoided sex scenes because there aren’t that many ways to write about sex, and I did not want to write pornographically like my dad, so I just sort of skipped over those parts. I eventually realized, this is a part of life, and I just have to figure out a way to write about it, so I use metaphor more to describe sex.”

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A Pedagogy of Perhaps: On Mary Ruefle and Teaching Creative Writing

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In a recent conversation with a fellow prose writer, I articulated my frustration with writing my artist statement, one of the many documents I crafted on the job market this past fall and one I am still revising. (Is an artist statement ever done?) I told her while I know my work is interested in the relationship between artistic practice and social justice, I don’t yet know what that relationship is. She put down her glass and blinked at me as though I had asked her if paper was thin, then proceeded to tell me that while art itself might not be capable of instituting change in the world, it creates the space for change to be imaginable.

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Jazz Reality and Fiction: The Bright Comet of Wardell Gray

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The tired image of the guy with the horn smoking the cigarette on the street corner, the muted trumpet moment on the movie soundtrack–these tropes have inured us to the actual sound of jazz, but stop for a second and listen. Really listen. Solos like Gray’s and Parker’s are the kind that make the impossible seem casual. They’re the skateboarder doing a crazy triple flip on a ramp despite gravity, before we’d seen that a thousand times. They’re the first moon landing and the millions of people watching the event on TV from their living room sofas. They’re an unscripted feat that pushed the limits of what music could be.

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Unsolved Histories: Books Uncovered, Records Spun, and a Resurrection Gone Awry

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Let me tell you how I first met Fannie Ingram Schwahn. How I was browsing the local antique store a summer or so back when there, buried amid the flotsam and jetsam, I came upon a wedding certificate dated June 5, 1922. Fannie was listed as the bride, and though I knew nothing of her—had never even heard her name—I was entranced, nonetheless by her story. Or rather, the story of how her marriage certificate had made its ways into my hands.

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The Relevance of the Irrelevant: Ad Hominem Politics

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The rhetoric coming out of this winter’s campaign season has been a playground for my argumentation classes. Political discourse offers some of the best opportunities for studying things like how arguers tailor their arguments to specific audiences, whether sympathetic or hostile; how they employ Aristotle’s famous appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos; and especially how they repeatedly commit brazen rhetorical fallacies.

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“Boy Erased”: An Interview with Garrard Conley

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“Initially, I was wary of speaking to congregations for fear that they wouldn’t like my politics, but now I can begin to see how this message is meant for the church, too. Of course I want people to admire my sentences and my book’s structure, but I really want to reach audiences that might be on the fence about LGBTQ issues (or at least people who have relatives that might be on the fence). I just love living in that in-between space. I like the hard struggle of being between audiences.”

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A Postcard from Paris

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Traveling around Europe in the midst of all this, conducting dissertation research on the Czech interwar avant-garde and its relationship to other major artistic centers of that period, I could not but think about renewed border controls in the EU territory within the context of, and in comparison to, travel in the period between the two World Wars. At that time, Europeans (as well as travelers from further afield) enjoyed a newly open, post-war terrain. The physical movement of bodies, facilitated also by new and faster modes of travel, helped to open up an unprecedented level of exchange between artists and intellectuals of diverse backgrounds and languages. In that brief window of freedom of movement between the two World Wars, Paris was a hub of such traffic, and many visitors came from Prague.

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What Iowa Tells Us About Ourselves

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Add it to the quirky mysteries of life: along with how one of the most famous creative writing programs happens to be founded here in a city bounded by nothing much but cornfields and rolling hills, that every four years Iowans become the most important citizens in the U.S., the first to choose the next leader of the free world. And then picture me: an Asian-American, whose votes in California used to amount to nothing more than a symbol and a duty, about to caucus for the first time, holding one of the golden tickets as an undecided voter.

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Clusters

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To end this cycle without limiting myself to just one book at a time, I am attempting to curate the books that litter my home. I’m trying to cluster books together, to avoid, as best I can, the erasure of what I have read by what I am now reading. Memory instantly improves if you build a network of relations surrounding the remembered object, my theory being that the more I categorize a group of books together, the easier it will be to remember them all. And the categories, rather than being static, are constantly shifting. Certain books, I am finding, harmonize better than others. Certain books, when read together, satisfy all my literary cravings. Certain books start a conversation, one that teaches me how to read, think, and write better.

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Seasonal Affective Disorder: Winter in Wallace Stevens’s “Farewell to Florida”

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Having consoled myself in damp pubs in London, creaked across frozen lakes in the deep freeze of Minnesota, and coughed my way through Philadelphian afternoons that could never decide between rain or sleet, I can tell you: there are many different kinds of cold. It’s something Wallace Stevens knew well. His poem, “The Snow Man,” is probably the most famous winter poem in modern poetry, laying before us a “distant glitter” and, within it, the full presence of winter’s unique nothingness.

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