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On “After a While You Just Get Used to It”: An Interview with Gwendolyn Knapp

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“I do like that people read my writing as Southern and not just as that of a bland white person. But I feel like if you are a writer who’s Southern, your sensibilities should probably just be organic. I grew up poor in Florida—I have a very specific sort of family—and the characters in those stories are deeply embedded in my story, and in who I am. I feel like Southerners deal with different situations and circumstances than people in other parts of the world—we have such distinct issues with poverty and social issues that don’t get addressed because you’re dealing with crazy belief systems.”

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Free Stuff

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My husband and I are yard-sale junkies, like our mothers before us. When we walk in our neighborhood, we rarely pass a cluster of rusty tea-kettles and CD-holders without taking a closer look. In our primes, we were both shameless appropriators of sidewalk goods: in Cambridge, MA, I once carried a plywood bookshelf nearly a mile home. His greatest find: a complete set of nesting screwdrivers. Alas, the great New York bed-bug crisis of 2010, along with our adult wisdom about the protein contents of other people’s futons, has made us wary of taking home anything upholstered.

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The Vibrancy of Ann Arbor’s Literary Arts Culture

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Ann Arbor has always been a place where creativity thrives. Colorful murals, graffiti art, and whimsical fairy doors grace downtown building exteriors. Filmmakers, musicians, architects, poets, painters, publishers—artists and writers from all over the world are drawn to Ann Arbor for its diverse community, educated population, and vibrant campus atmosphere.

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Not Essay, Nor Fiction, But Prose: Of Narration

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In his manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields uses assemblage to curate a dialogue about the limits of The Real. The voices he appropriates and sequences implicitly argue that our increasingly urgent twenty-first century desire for reality is compromised by the fact that our storytelling mechanisms are growing further from it. As Shields notes (without acknowledging in the text proper that he is parroting E. L. Doctorow), “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

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“The Only Woman in the Room”: An Interview with Eileen Pollack

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“When I teach nonfiction, we talk about writing to a question. If you write what you already know, it’s not going to be interesting for your readers. You need to be looking for some kind of a discovery, and so I went to Yale to see what and what hadn’t changed, because my story needed to be contextualized. After hearing from young women that their experiences were just as bad as mine, it floored me. That’s the moment I knew I had a book.”

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On (a lack of) Diversity

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Susan Bernofsky described recently the “disheartening” numbers, when it comes to the percentage of female authors in translation. Across twenty-five presses evaluated by Women in Translation, only twenty-five percent of books in English translation were by women, and some of Bernofsky’s favorite presses (some of mine, too), like New Directions and Archipelago, were among the worst perpetrators, publishing sixteen percent and thirteen percent female authors, respectively.

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Inter-poetics: An Interview with Francesca Capone

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“There are often regulations of this sort for mechanical looms, as repeating yardage is an important economical component of the textile industry. But don’t those regulations sound like a writing prompt to you? It certainly did to me. The loom demands particular metrics, which one could also see applying to poetic form. Opportunities for the inter-poetics of writing and weaving have continued to reveal themselves so long as I’ve continued to seek them out.”

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Unsolved Histories: A Postcard, A Package, and the Pieces of a Family Unearthed

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Last July, in an attempt to spare us from the summer heat, my son and I took refuge inside an estate sale. The house was overrun with strangers, everyone ogling the goods left behind by the home’s previous owners. We, too, did our fair share of ogling—peering into rooms and closets in search of treasures left behind. Eventually, I found them: dozens of vintage postcards from around the world, none of them yet sullied by stamps.

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Bent Beneath the Low Heavens: An Interview with Dan Rosenberg

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“Philosophers have worried over the mind-body problem for centuries, but poets have ignored that problem just as fruitfully for just as long: We know that thinking happens in the body, through the body—that invulnerable Achilles still needed an intricate shield to protect his body, to celebrate it and glorify it, fated for death though it was. We know that for things to truly exist in our poems (‘No ideas but in things!’) they must be embodied: the real toads in our imaginary gardens.”

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