Where is Wisława Szymborska’s Teeming Crowd?
With customary wit, the Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner Wisława Szymborska, in 1962, wryly uses an imagined tombstone to communicate—prophetically, it turns out—with the people of the future:...
View ArticleWhat to Do When No One Shows Up To Your Reading
A few days after my first novel Domestic Violets was published, I was scheduled to do a reading at the Barnes & Noble at Johns Hopkins University near my house in Baltimore. It’s difficult to...
View ArticleHow I Learned To Stop Checking My Book’s Sales
More than 30 years ago I experienced my “15 minutes” when I played a naked lesbian in John Sayles’s movie Lianna. Until that event, I thought of fame as a means to finding more work, but if I’m honest,...
View ArticleLucia Berlin: Writing Advice and More in This Never-Before Published Interview
The life of Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) came in wildly varied installments. During one of the last, she taught writing at the University of Colorado. In 1996, two of her graduate students at the...
View Article“The First Wife”
The famous do resemble the unfamous, but they are not the same species, not quite. The famous have mutated, amassed characteristics—refinements or corporeal variations—that allow their projected...
View ArticleHerman Melville Was Also a Failed Poet
When Herman Melville died, on September 28th, 1891, 125 years ago, he was still fiddling around with a small, sweet poem called “The Chipmunk:” Stock-still I stand, And him I see Prying, peeping From...
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How My Grandfather Went From the Pulitzer Prize to Complete Obscurity
My mother once told me that when she and her brother, my uncle Tim, were growing up, their father led them to believe he was the most famous writer who ever lived. This was an absurdity, of course, but...
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The Adolescent Charm of Bad Celebrity Poetry
Strange, sometimes, to think how utterly in thrall we are to a small and rarified group who have proven themselves to be, mostly, capricious and moody and immature; convinced that they have the answer...
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The Lives of the Poets Aren’t All That Cinematic
Far too often it is assumed that the creative arts are divorced from the demands of everyday existence; the image of the tortured genius in a study strewn with papers, or the artist toiling in front of...
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Encountering the Celebrity Male Gaze
I vividly remember hearing Khadijah Queen read at a packed bar in Seattle a few years ago. There was no microphone and Khadijah read very quietly; everyone in the room was straining to hear, hanging on...
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Jill Eisenstadt and Darcey Steinke on Writing, Motherhood, and Brooklyn
I have known Jill Eisenstadt for nearly 30 years. We met in the early 1990s when we were both young novelists living in a Brooklyn that was not yet a literary mecca. Her first novel From Rockaway,...
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Celebrities: They’re Not Just Like Us
Is it more embarrassing to be a celebrity or to be around one? On the one hand, a friend of mine once farted in an elevator with Kevin Spacey. On the other, Ed Sheeran exists, and so do his tattoos....
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Scott McClanahan: “Most Fiction Feels Like a Bunch of Dumb Stories”
We spend much of our lives as literary and art-loving people searching for the next thing—the thing that will move and inspire us, or even, if you are like me, the thing that will totally hold our...
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Jean Rhys Had to Leave Her Home to Truly See It
On some mornings in the capital, thick with heat and a silence punctuated only by the insomnia whine of mosquitoes, Jean Rhys would wake up, briefly smiling, for she was convinced she had gone to bed...
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“The First Wife”
The famous do resemble the unfamous, but they are not the same species, not quite. The famous have mutated, amassed characteristics—refinements or corporeal variations—that allow their projected...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Herman Melville Was Also a Failed Poet
When Herman Melville died, on September 28th, 1891, 125 years ago, he was still fiddling around with a small, sweet poem called “The Chipmunk:” Stock-still I stand, And him I see Prying, peeping From...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How My Grandfather Went From the Pulitzer Prize to Complete Obscurity
My mother once told me that when she and her brother, my uncle Tim, were growing up, their father led them to believe he was the most famous writer who ever lived. This was an absurdity, of course, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Adolescent Charm of Bad Celebrity Poetry
Strange, sometimes, to think how utterly in thrall we are to a small and rarified group who have proven themselves to be, mostly, capricious and moody and immature; convinced that they have the answer...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Lives of the Poets Aren’t All That Cinematic
Far too often it is assumed that the creative arts are divorced from the demands of everyday existence; the image of the tortured genius in a study strewn with papers, or the artist toiling in front of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Encountering the Celebrity Male Gaze
I vividly remember hearing Khadijah Queen read at a packed bar in Seattle a few years ago. There was no microphone and Khadijah read very quietly; everyone in the room was straining to hear, hanging on...
View Article