MQR Online

First Readers

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Reading that first chapter, I was so self-conscious. I made him lie down and turn his head away from me. I stopped frequently to ask if he’d fallen asleep. But slowly, as I reached the end of the first chapter of the first novel I’d ever written, I realized that I was enjoying myself. I had put aside the novel draft for a couple of weeks beforehand, and to revisit the characters and world was a treat, and I felt a lovely bond between myself and my first reader, as we both dove into the novel, quite literally on the same page.

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Who Gets to Imagine?

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Who really gets to imagine? Not just to make things up, but to use imagination to navigate the world? As educational tools, illustrated books that give credence not only to children’s waking, real-world experiences, but also to the transformative power of their play, seem most often earmarked for privileged children, just as, for adults, the writing of fiction rooted in pure invention or methodical research, rather than autobiographical experience, is received most seamlessly when it’s done by white authors.

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On “Pieces of My Mother”: An Interview with Melissa Cistaro

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“Geneticists, after all, are studying to see whether there are genes for empathy. I kept asking myself how people are really wired, what traits from our ancestors we carry. This motif is about all the little things we don’t know or aren’t told, or that are kept from us, but that we carry with us—the pieces of us that feel not right, or that are confusing. I’m very much fascinated with the trauma or grief that’s conceivably locked into our bodies—I believe in all that. And in many ways, those women in my past helped me tell my story. I think about them all the time—the choices they did and didn’t have, and how sad and complicated parts of their lives were. So in some ways I felt like I was writing the book to honor these women in my history.”

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A Field Guide to the Yi-Fen Chou Case and Identity Politics in the Arts

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Good poetry is good poetry because of who wrote it. If you want to get fancy about it, it’s an index of the culturally defined experiences of the author and the ways that author has taken agency within them, has interacted with his or her own received cultural and historical condition. Poetry isn’t good simply because it has kickass slant rhyme or wicked trippy imagery but because it employs those techniques mimetically to engage heritages and traditions that constitute the wisdom—and oppressions—of most acute concern at a given historical moment.

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Falling for Yoko

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For me, September is a month for reflection. It’s when the peach fuzz of summer is only an itchy memory, and the cold, dew-filled apple orchards crowd my days: the last harvest of the season. Monarchs, birds, and other creatures begin to move to new locations, readying themselves for the deep freeze of winter, a season which will eventually cover almost everything living in white dust. It’s also the month in which I was introduced to Yoko Ono’s Acorn and ever since, I’ve been falling.

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Once, Then, Gone: The Art of Recollection

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My mother has told me a beautiful story since I was quite young. The story goes like this: Once when I was very small I followed my father into the bathroom where he was replacing a broken mirror. Somehow—the events get fuzzy here—I ended up in the bathroom alone, and she found me there sitting in the middle of the pile of broken pieces, squeezing them in my small fists. At the moment she found me, there was a split second when—as she saw the blood and broken bits surrounding me—she did not move. She could see that I was watching myself amplified over and over in the strange glass. I imagine this is the first time I had ever looked in a mirror, but that is only my imagination—I don’t remember.

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The Hidden Objective Narrator in Andrea Barrett’s “The Littoral Zone”

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The uninflected prose of an objective narrator has seemingly declined in contemporary literature in favor of the “voicier” POVs such as first person, second person, or third person close. We are told that reflecting characters’ personalities in the language—such as by collapsing the distance between the way they speak and the way the story is narrated—is a good thing.

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Writing the Dead

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By now, I have been a teacher of creative writing much longer than I was a pool lifeguard. I have come to believe that one of the main jobs of literature is to see the present moment—whatever that moment may be, in the context of the text—with focus and clarity. Good writing doesn’t constantly look back or look ahead. Each word is a world, and a good writer puts that world in front of you when you read.

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