February 2012
9 posts
6 tags
pre-AWP panic
So, AWP 2012. Chicago. It’s almost here.
And by “almost” I mean “practically already” and I’d be lying to you if I told you that I was only excited and not the least bit anxious, because there is a part of me that is terrified and suffocating.
But yes, I am excited.
I think the reason for the panic is that even though I’m a nice person (in both public and private) and a relatively outgoing one, I...
Storm watch
raynola:
I’m watching my sub tracker on Duotrope like I watch the satellite imagery on Weather Underground during hurricane season. There’s a wave of rejections just about to break over my head. The suspense is killing me. I hope it lasts.
I am totally doing this as well, except replace “Duotrope” with “Submishmash” (or is it “Submittable”? I CAN’T...
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Peripheral Surveys: Our door is always open! →
peripheralsurveys:
Yes, folks, you read that right. We’re looking for more submissions!
Peripheral Surveys+ is always looking for great new work — poetry, prose, nonfiction, fiction, and photographs. It can be fun, fancy, serious, or sad. We’re all about reading the entire gamut, so as long as it’s well-written,…
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“Good teachers convey to students the thoughts of Ernest Hemingway, who said,...”
– Charles Johnson, “Creative Adventures: The Fiction Writer’s Apprenticeship”
Black history month anger
Tonight, someone left a comment on a story that I assigned to a freelancer and then posted on my work website.
The story was about Black History Month programming at an area university, which features Civil Rights activist and organizer Diane Nash.
The commenter wrote, “Duh, when’s white history month?”
I would like to calmly ask this person why there should be a white...
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n+1: So Many Feelings >> or, Lady blogger holla →
Okay, when I first came across this link, I was skeptical. But let me just say: I have so many feelings about “So Many Feelings.” It’s good. Smart and curious. It also voices concerns that I too had once I realized (in high school) that Cosmo was a.) bullshit and b.) hypocritical. See below:
“By high school it was clear to us that women’s magazines were a dead end. We...
January 2012
6 posts
7 tags
"Night Shifts" by Elissa Wald, via The Rumpus →
“Driving home is nothing like driving away, and night is nothing like the day. Life is different at night; we are different. Night tends to strip us of our titles, our worldly roles, our formal clothing and our credentials. Most of us retreat into our private lives and often we seek out secret forms of gratification. Our fear is sharpened, our loneliness honed. Fevers run higher at night...
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"On Seeing 'Red': Or, Why I'm Selfish When It... →
My latest essay for Specter Literary Magazine & Collective is live:
“What is the purpose of art, really? It’s a question that has a myriad of potential responses. The question of art in the creative world is like asking the question of pi in the mathematical world. It’s infinite. It can represent, challenge, and call into question ideas, thoughts, culture norms, societal standards,...
“In 5-billion yrs the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember...”
– astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter five minutes ago. (via washingtonpoststyle)
BEST. TWEET. EVER.
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Yes. Rust Belt Americana is a thing.
A very real thing. And perhaps there isn’t someone who better embodies this than Chris Castle, a musician from Norwalk, Ohio.
“Chris Castle is, without a doubt, one of the last troubadours. A tall, lanky figure with a permanent, patient sort of brooding, he’s often armed with a full cup of coffee, taking a long drag off a half-smoked cigarette.”
….
“Both...
December 2011
6 posts
3 tags
November 2011
10 posts
6 tags
Post-Thanksgiving recap
Initially, my plan for Thanksgiving was to pick up some takeout from Bob Evans and eat with my dogs.
At the last minute, my dad showed up on Wednesday night and we had a great meal together on Thursday.
So I think what I’m trying to say is this: I’m thankful for family that I can’t get away from, for family that shows up where I am, no matter what.
Didion's "rhythms of obsessive memory" →
dailydidion:
Last night, Joan Didion spoke at the New York Public Library. Though I wasn’t there, plenty of acquaintances, mostly of the online variety, were. They kept me posted through Twitter, with photos, observations, and snippets of her quotes.
There was a piece in the NYTimes — rather outdated at this point, at least, considering the rapid-fire way in which every newspaper, literary...
New double issue of Peripheral Surveys is live! →
This special double-issue, with themes of mise-en-scene and chaos, is absolutely stunning (kudos to Ian Surraville for the design). There is some great work by some very talented people. Please take some time to check it out and enjoy it.
It was also my first issue in the role of managing editor of PS+, and hey! I survived!
Happy reading.
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Didion, Daily: An Essay per Day: AUDIO: Joan... →
dailydidion:
Listen to the podcast of Joan Didion, interviewed by Chris Lydon here (or download as an mp3).
“Joan Didion wore a purple scarf and her trademark oversized glasses last night at the sold-out Harvard Book Store-sponsored event at First Parish Church in Cambridge. She was in town to promote…
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On what the rattlesnake has to do with it →
My newest column, “The Unexamined Fact is a Rattlesnake” (yes, that’s a Didion quote), is up now at Specter Literary Magazine. I talk about facts, truth-telling, narrative and storytelling, and why it’s better to walk in the dark sometimes. Alone. Oh, and a touch of true crime.
“In the beginning of October, a well-known podiatrist in a small town drove his black...
Peripheral Surveys: UPDATE: PS+ double-edition set... →
peripheralsurveys:
We’re thrilled to announce that our double-issue of Peripheral Surveys (which contains work for the October and November issues) is set to publish on November 15.
- Themes for this dual issue are “mise-en-scene” and “chaos,” and we think you’ll be pleased with the work we have to offer.
- We…
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October 2011
17 posts
9 tags
From the Vault: Jacqui Corcoran's "dwindling black... →
peripheralsurveys:
“There is no roof enough high
for these fistfuls of lost breaths.
Black velvet burial suits,
Yellow trapped mouths in violet;
Small freedoms cut short – unlived.”
— From Jacqui Corcoran’s poem “dwindling black violas,” which appeared in Peripheral Surveys (Aug. 2011). Read the full poem here.
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"Positions of Privilege" from LAROB's Didion Week →
dailydidion:
The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicating a whole week to Didion. This thrills me in ways I can’t explain, especially because I’ve been on a kick of voraciously devouring everything written in the past month about Didion (there has been a lot) and greedily awaiting my copy of her upcoming memoir Blue Nights, which I pre-ordered almost two months ago (it has been too long).
...
"Joan Didion: life after death," via The Guardian →
dailydidion:
Didion on the unexamined fact:
“You’re at its mercy. I’ve always had this sense that the unexamined fact is like a rattlesnake. It’s going to come after you. And you can keep it at bay by always keeping it in your eye line.”
This piece is beautiful, drawing the eye to differences between “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights.” It highlights the comparison in a very...
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Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 1: A... →
dailydidion:
“When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the...
"Dividing loss from not-loss": a take on Didion... →
dailydidion:
Over at Specter Literary Magazine, Will Henderson talks Didion, loss, A Year of Magical Thinking and her newest, Blue Nights (which will be released Nov. 1, for those of us who are counting).
“I couldn’t read books, and I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and I wondered why I couldn’t read books, and why I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and then I was moving into a new...
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"Do It With Mourning: The Merits of Making a Mess" →
My latest article is up at Specter Literary Magazine. As you might have guessed, it’s about emotional instability and writing. Oh, and feeeeelings.
“I say it’s time to take back your damn trout. Look at that trout from every angle. Let the sun hit it and turn it a million shades into a blinding rainbow. Love every single second of it. Of course, not every feeling is exciting...
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"I Am Speaking the Language," up now at Used... →
“Let me loose in you, but not to be lost: loose like a wanderer, as I am among words, drifting back and forth over your breaths and rhythms, your syllables, your punctuation. It is cliché to say I want to learn the language of you. To invert and to subvert and to somehow make you rattle with the thrum of new possibility, to shake and then still in just one stanza.”
This is one...
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Peripheral Surveys: An introduction of sorts. →
peripheralsurveys:
Hello, future friends, readers, writers, artists, and creators. We’d like to introduce ourselves. Peripheral Surveys is a literature and arts magazine that is published monthly, with assorted pieces focused on a certain theme.
In asking ourselves what we’re doing on Tumblr — after all, so…
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"What Is Already Living: Author, Autobiography and... →
“Maybe it is the tendency to conflate a distant narrative voice with snobbery (e.g. a knock on Henry James), but in our near-universal platform culture, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and McCullers are threshold figures for American literary fiction. They offer visitors welcome to a capacious, echo-ridden structure that is said, like the mansion on which The Great Gatsby was based, to be scheduled...
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Greetings from the land of "yes." →
firstpersonsingular:
Here’s something pretty meta: a Rumpus essay that includes, among other things, the realization that just about no one reads this blog.
I loved this. As a rule, most writers tend to be really harsh on themselves. This essay inspires me to see where more of my ideas lead.
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Where I talk about what X-Men: First Class &... →
“Film sequences inspired by comic books. The distillation of time. Breaking apart the machine. These are things that X-Men: First Class and Inception do pretty well. I’m no pop culture critic, and this is not a pop culture blog. What I’m interested in is what these techniques can tell us about the writing process – not only when writing out the meat of the piece, but of the way we...
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Breaking Our Addiction to Narrative // via The... →
“The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something ‘meaningful,’ we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which, as you say, could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to...
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“In my view, one of the biggest lit sins is shitting where you eat. It takes the...”
– Now live on Ghost+Blog : Specter Magazine - “Keep Your Masthead Clean, or: Just Say No to Literary Incest” by Ashley Bethard (via specterlit)
Many thanks to Specter Literary Magazine for publishing this angry essay of mine about literary nepotism.
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September 2011
16 posts
7 tags
The Criminal Genius of Caravaggio →
“In one of the last pictures he ever painted, a grim and startling ‘Resurrection’ altarpiece, Caravaggio showed a scrawny, bedraggled Jesus Christ slipping out of the tomb and making off alone by night, ‘like a criminal escaping from his guards,’ in the words of an 18th-century Frenchman. Shock was the conventional response to this painting (eventually destroyed...
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Book reviews on Twitter (please excuse my typo, by...
The other night, @OhEmGillie (the Twitter persona of Gillian Ramos) and I had a nice little run at James Franco’s Palo Alto via Twitter, which led Editor-in-Chief of Specter Magazine Mensah DeMary to take notice and publish it as, well, a book review of sorts.
I’m not claiming that we managed to delve into a lot of the themes in an exchange of 140 characters (i.e., the nihilism and...