February 2009 
Silence & Storytelling
Alice Mattison
Stories shortened, events left out, stories told indirectly: I may seem to be complaining about the elliptical style. I'm not-but I'm arguing against the use of the elliptical style when such a style isn't appropriate to the piece in hand; when it conceals rather than revealing.
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The Rise of Creative Writing & the New Value of Creativity
Steve Healey
What has been missing from the impressive success story of Creative Writing is an equally strong attention to its pedagogy and theory; in other words, the field has tended to avoid thinking about how it teaches and what assumptions it has about language and literature.
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The Cosmic Poetry of Octavio Paz
Pablo Medina
If prose is language in time, poetry is language in and out of time. Prose is a march, moving forward via the syntactical complexities of its sentences. Poetry is a dance, reveling in the cycles of rhythm and rhyme that its lines provide, broken here and there as they are without regard to margins or the motes of punctuation.
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Politics & the Imagination: How to Get Away with Just About Anything (in Ten Not-So-Easy Lessons)
Sarah Stone
Another way of sneaking heroes into political literature is to establish a world in which heroism is impossible,
as in Jose Saramago's Blindness. Here, among all the (literally as well as metaphorically) blind, just one woman can see, and she uses her vision to make life more bearable for those around her.
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An Interview with Anita Diamant
Celia Jeffries
n idea comes either from characters or place or some combination of the two. I'll have a beginning and ending-not written, but conceptual-for the book. So I'll have the general shape of it, and then I fill in.
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Introduction to American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry
Cole Swensen
The notion of a fundamental division in American poetry has become so ingrained that we take it for granted. Robert Lowell famously portrayed it in the 1950s and 60s as a split between "the cooked and the uncooked," and Eliot Weinberger updated the assertion over thirty years later in his 1993 anthology American Poetry Since 1950, stating, "For decades, American poetry has been divided into two camps."
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Tom Wayman, A Poet Reconsidered: A Conversation
Diane Guichon
I'd have to say that the process of writing is pretty much the same, but perhaps the audience has changed. I still look for and write from that kernel of an idea or emotion that sparks the poem for me. My style of writing has remained essentially the same-free verse, line and stanza breaks providing rhythmic cues, conversational tone but employing figurative language, including frequent elaborate development of metaphors, sometimes really employing conceits.
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Narrating Childhood: The Art of Writing About Bygone Youth in Creative Nonfiction
Laura Nathan
...the distance and closeness that one must maintain in writing about her childhood. The closeness is what allows us to feel the energy and traumas of childhood as a child might, while the distance enables the writer and readers to understand those experiences as only adults could.
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In Defense of Starting Early
Michael P. Kardos
It's true that, in the abstract, "starting late" gets us to the heart of things fast, focusing the story right away on the sticky, unpredictable mess that constitutes engaging, complex fiction.
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