Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life by Jenny Boully / Coffee House Press / $16.95 / 140 pgs. Jenny Boully’s fifth book, Betwixt and Between: Essays On the Writing Life, does not neatly assimilate into the tradition of writers writing about … [Read more...]
Realism: Just How Real Is It?
We’ve been sold a bill of goods. The original crime was committed a century and a half ago when literary romanticism was kicked to the curb by Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, and other disciples of a new religion: realism. I’m not claiming that I prefer … [Read more...]
Classic Omniscience Revisited: Lessons for the Modern Novelist in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
As a craft technique, nineteenth-century omniscience is mostly brought up these days for the purposes of pointing out that it’s obsolete. It’s old. It’s passé. The presumed authority of the classic omniscient voice is no longer plausible; its sweeping … [Read more...]
The Twenty-Story Summer
Last summer I put aside work on a novel. Inspiration wasn’t hitting me for the longer work, so instead of obsessing about a lack of progress, I worked on other ideas that accumulated along the way. Then, in the middle of the summer, I had a conversation … [Read more...]
Negative Capability: Keats and Buddha
The relationship of Buddhism and the poetic process is a sublime yet unexplored topic among Western scholars. It’s about the silent space between the words, not just the word itself. The poet John Keats writes: At once it struck me what quality … [Read more...]
Building a Better Argument
Most of us would agree that a free exchange of ideas is beneficial to society. And most of us probably agree that the quality of this conversation is poorer than it could be. We just have to turn on the television or, worse, the internet, to find insults … [Read more...]
Becoming the World’s Strongest Writer
“To write, you must read.” - Kurt Vonnegut “She needs to read more poetry if she ever wants to become a better writer,” insisted my colleague when talking about one of our weaker creative writing students. I agreed heartily, having browbeat a … [Read more...]
The Poetry of Walking
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” ― Mary Oliver Would you like to journey down a path that … [Read more...]
With Crooked Legs of Hackberry
At 21, I traveled through India for six months. My world-view had been scrambled, and writing about my travels helped me unscramble it. I had never seen people starving on the streets, their limp bodies scooped up in the morning by a front-end loader. I … [Read more...]
Nature As Muse: The World of Fine Writing
The world is never “too much with us,” said Wordsworth, but not the wild glories, which he treasured, too. Natural gifts reflecting the gifts of the gods, or of Darwin’s insights and those of the plate tectonics wizards. Everything moves. All of this … [Read more...]