Welcome Rachel Farrell
I’m very pleased to announce that Rachel Farrell has accepted the position of Blog and Social Media Editor for MQR.
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Celebrating Eileen Cropley
To have the fire in the belly means to have the drive and the desire. But it’s more than that. In terms of dance, it means the dancer must communicate the want and need to dance, embody it, and project it outward. It’s the essential thing that sets the professional apart from the amateur.
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Farewell to Ashley David
We bid farewell and offer our appreciation to Ashley David for her four and a half years of outstanding commitment and excellent service to MQR.
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A Rant on Writers Who Dislike Craft, or Why I Still Like Vermeer
I don’t know what to say to writers who aren’t interested in craft. I don’t know what to say when they start invoking the primacy of the unconscious, of seeing the bigger picture, or of writing the plain damn Truth.
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“To Dig In and Endure”: Remembering Philip Levine, 1928-2015
Indeed, in light of economic downturns leading to greater divides between the privileged and working classes, Levine’s poetry only seems to increase in relevancy. Never has there been more urgency for, as Edward Hirsch noted in his essay “Naming the Lost: The Poetry of Philip Levine,” poetry that reflects “the stubborn will of the dispossessed to dig in and endure.”
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Ruben Östlund’s “Force Majeure”
At the end of the day, however, the confidence of Force Majeure’s brilliant surfaces may distract us from the fact that its core is regrettably conventional, buying into harmful clichés about gender norms and family values.
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“Small Things Gravitate Toward Large”: On Mary Quade’s “Giant Fiberglass Cow”
In her poem “Giant Fiberglass Cow,” Mary Quade addresses a roadside statue I might have seen while traveling.
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Sonya Clark—Coiffed, Tangled: “The Hair Craft Project”
“Hairdressers are my heroes. The poetry and politics of Black hair care specialists are central to my work as an artist and educator. Rooted in a rich legacy, their hands embody an ability to map a head with a comb and manipulate the fiber we grow into complex form. These artists have mastered a craft impossible for me to take for granted.”
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Small Talk
Writerly small talk is no less terrible than all other kinds of small talk. I expect that the coffee table or cocktail conversations of botanists, estheticians, and Sunday school teachers all have their own fallback question, their own version of a polite follow-up after the “How are you’s” have been exchanged.
Reading Badly
When I look around the room, I still see small acts of resistance, even liberation. There are a number of young female scientists in the class; they are preparing for year-long research projects on the habits of a particular freshwater fish, or developing a process related to the physical properties of gold. By definition, as female scientists, they are in the statistical minority. At some point, each said yes to science when most of society pointed them toward no. What moment of learning gave them that strength? They are not alone; there are other moments in which learning, or just reading, provide stability or connection. A young man in the class tells us about reading Harry Potter to his father over the phone after his parents’ divorce. “I am trying to save my life,” Sherman Alexie writes, in regards to his reading. He’s not the only one.