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Louise Erdrich “The Night Watchman” (and yeah girl I learned about this at AWP)
Posted on March 18, 2020 Leave a Comment
Which leads me to the best piece of writing advice I’ve encountered in awhile. Louise knows she can “catapult the character forward” when she spots a line that authentically, effortlessly grasps who they are.
Posted on November 29, 2019 Leave a Comment
Poetry should not be regarded as one more means of escape.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
Posted on June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment
I ordered The Cosmopolitans after hearing Sarah Schulman at an AWP panel with the gloriously strong and trenchant Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. I was proud of myself for finally getting around to the work that launched Schulman’s career as a novelist and public intellectual in 1990. But about 100 pages into The Cosmopolitans, the sort of insight and anxiety around race, marketing, […]
Posted on October 30, 2018
I suspect that any vital creative process somehow involves arranging things so that intuition is given pride of place. The individual writer’s “craft” might be understood, then, as the process of conspiring to work oneself into the necessary state of mystification, such that one is deferring to the innate energy of the story, rather than overriding it.
Posted on October 12, 2018
To be an artist — to be constantly imagining and reimagining this reality we move through — is not a hobby, or a half-comic loveable departure from the serious, adult business of ‘producing value’ — it is a form of training ourselves in expanding our ability to love.