Celia Galey recently caught up with Jason Stoneking in Paris, to talk with him about his current series of unique, handwritten, Bespoke Books. The interview is transcribed here. Celia: So first I … [Read more...]
Why Kerouac?
People say I’m obsessed with Jack Kerouac. They point to my blog, to my checked flannel shirts, to my over 140 Kerouac or Kerouac-related books (that I read, not that I wrote), to the one book I have … [Read more...]
Where to find literary magazines and other publishers
Want to submit your poetry, fiction, or nonfiction to literary magazines, journals, and presses? On the sites below you can learn which ones are open for submissions, and what they're looking … [Read more...]
“Write What My Spirit Demands”: An Interview with Devorah Major on Writing in Multiple Genres
Writing in more than one genre can free a writer’s creativity and open up ways of interacting with the world, but writing in multiple genres means making the mental switch from one form to another. … [Read more...]
Book Review – Betwixt-and-Between: Essays On the Writing Life
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 … [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 … [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 … [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. … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [Read more...]
Fully Aboard the Flesh Wagon: Tin House Writers Workshop, Summer 2014
About a week before his fortieth birthday, virgin poet Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881) recorded in his journal that he had “received a woman’s favors” at last. His world was not rocked. … [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 … [Read more...]
