In Attendance
* Paula Mendoza *
A poem spoken before an audience is a public and amorphous act …
Query and Response: “The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison answers Antoni’s implied imperative: use yourself, your emotions and your responses, as an analytical and critical tool. Antoni’s ideas illuminate Jamison’s primary techniques—Antoni and Jamison, perhaps, share a working definition of empathy: empathy as an effort of imagination, effort of intellect; empathy as a door through which to enter art, for reader, viewer, and maker; empathy as inquiry; empathy as the site of analysis; empathy as resistance to tradition or traditional tropes; empathy as choice.
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First Films: Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket”
* Eric McDowell *
In that same spirit, I would like to put The Grand Budapest Hotel aside and travel back to 1996, the year of Anderson’s feature film debut, Bottle Rocket.
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MQR Announces 2013 Literary Awards
MQR has awarded this year’s trio of literary prizes: The Lawrence Foundation Prize goes to Cody Peace Adams, the Laurence Goldstein Prize to Benjamin Busch, and the Page Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets to Anne Barngrover.
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Warsaw Dispatch: Where Are You From?
And so it arrives. The moment when the long-haul traveler realizes that she could be from the place she currently lives.
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In-Process: A Conversation with Gina Balibrera
* Claire Skinner *
This is the first installment in what I hope will be a long and fruitful set of discussions with writers who are are engaged in the wonderful yet daunting process of writing their first books. My first interviewee is Gina Balibrera, a writer of fiction and nonfiction, who is at work on her first novel, The Volcano-Daughters.
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A Separation from “The Past”
* Eric McDowell *
Should we be surprised if a film called The Past spends a lot of time and narrative energy circling around backstory? No. But that doesn’t mean we have to excuse the film for undermining our desire to invest in its characters and their actions.
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Shelter
* A.L. Major *
The weather in Michigan this winter is stubbornly cold. March has arrived, but spring seems distant. Used to be on days of obstinate gray, I would curl up on my sofa and read a great novel, but lately I can only read a few pages before the author’s beautiful prose charges my insecurities about my own writing. Instead of relaxing I’m analyzing every sentence, thinking again of that scene I need to fix, and then I’m worrying that I’ll never finish and I will be a failure. So instead after I’ve finished writing for the day, I wrap myself in a fleece blanket, and I watch a movie, often a romantic comedy.
“Jesus Christs Forever,” by Amber Burke
* fiction by Amber Burke *
In the white bathroom light, she can see all the orange hairs poking out of her arms and her legs. She stares at the ring on her finger, the ring Bruce bought her last night on an installment plan, gold-gold with a fleck of diamond inside a flower shape.
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Emergent Modes of Seeing and Display: Helen Marten & Camille Henrot
* Nicholas Johnson *
How does an artist make something now that compels us to look longer than our modernised attention spans are accustomed to looking? The piling up, ease of access to, and relentless mutation of cultural information occasioned by the internet has so drastically altered the way we look and process images that it’s nearing impossible to remember a time when it was any different. Two artists: Camille Henrot and Helen Marten, present two new methods of dealing with this increasingly dense accrual of objects and information.
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