December 2010 
An Interview with Linda Sue Park
Martin Naparsteck
Linda Sue Park has been recognized as one of America's leading writers of children's literature ever since winning the Newbery Medal for her 2001 young adult novel A Single Shard.
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Tratteggio in Creative Nonfiction: How John Krakauer, Maxine Hong Kingston, & Helen Fremont Fill the Gaps
Susan Detweiler
The bedrock assumption in creative nonfiction is that its stories are basically factual and true. But writers of creative nonfiction have the liberty to shape their stories and infuse them with their interpretive meanings.
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Poetry & Memorability
Mark Irwin
...Vladimir Nabokov notes that distinguished literature often presents its material in a tripartite sequence: magic, story, lesson. He supports this notion with examples from Kafka, Proust, and Flaubert, among others.
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An Interview with Tom Perrotta
Carrie-Anne DeDeo
Read almost any of his books and one thing becomes clear: Tom Perrotta hails from New Jersey. Like Buddy, the main character in Perrotta's first book.
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The Long Approach: How I Came to Be a Very Old Formalist Poet
Maxine Kumin
I had no idea that poems could be written to encompass the actual tawdry world we lived in. The tone and the diction amazed me.
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Remembering George Hitchcock
Mark Jarman
It was George Hitchcock who made me understand Paul Éluard's famous observation, "There is another world, but it is in this one." That other world was the domain of the maker, the artist, of imagination. George Hitchcock, "Jorge," lived there all of his life.
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Inflection & the Narrative Voice: The L.A.P.D. Teaches Creative Writing
Ellen Collett
Monday through Friday, I'm enthralled by a man I've never met. His name is Martinez and he's a cop with the Los Angeles Police Department.
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Make it New/Make it Funky: An Interview with Cornelius Eady
Jona Colson
I usually question a poem when I write in long lines. But in this poem, as well as all the other poems I wrote regarding 9/11, I didn't question because I felt there was something in the subject matter that needed longer lines, a longer breath, and more information in each line.
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More Than a Writer's Writer: A Tribute to Vance Bourjaily
Virgil Suárez & Dinty W. Moore
Like those of Norman Mailer and James Jones, Bourjaily's literary career emerged out of World War II, and his novels dealt with post-war American life.
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What About the Suffering?: The Quiet Power of Minor Characters
Scott Nadelson
The majority of the people we encounter are on trajectories that cross ours in the briefest and gentlest way, but that brief crossing can nudge us in a new direction, or reveal to us what path we've actually been stumbling along.
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