Category: Thoughts on Writing

The Value of a Literature Course

At Chronicle Vitae, Rob Jenkins has written about the ways he tries to sell students on taking literature courses. I quibble with the idea of literature as “a record” of what people thought: while the ideals, lifestyles, and assumptions of…

Book Review: Egg Heaven by Robin Parks

Egg Heaven: Stories by Robin Parks October 2014 Shade Mountain Press 160 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9913555-0-1 Robin Parks links the stories of Egg Heaven through similar settings—the restaurants that give the pieces their names, with establishments briefly mentioned in one story…

James, you know

an erasure of a conversation between Tony Hoagland and James Franco my mind is Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog. I might be cheating a little ecently, and I read drafts of that book as he was writing it. In fact, the…

Review: Lori A. May’s Square Feet

Love and loss, recovery and despair—the grand passions of traditional poetry do not take place in some rarefied other world. To write about ordinary life in domestic spaces does not exclude the ambition to depict these feelings. The poems of…

Manifesto(cean)

If I can wake up every morning and face the fallen world with an open heart, even if I know that it will hurt, If I can bring an open heart to a world in which educated people would rather…