February 2014
The Quick and the Dead: An Energy Crisis in Poetry
Charles Harper Webb
Just as strenuous exercise is incompatible with depression, high energy is incompatible with dullness. Both writer and reader experience poetic energy as a surge of interest and excitement. They feel inspired—filled with the breath of life.
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The Last Word: The Indelible Image
Benjamin Percy
Carve away everything else, because your reader will forget nearly everything else, their experience ultimately defined by the crescendo. If a short story, do you have at least one? If a novel, do you have at least four?
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Mess and Mayhem: The Plural Histories of Collaborative Writing
Ravi Shankar
What I am most interested in as a reader and a writer are the efforts between other writers who are pushing themselves and the genre forward by intermingling their ideas and allowing each to influence the other...
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Walk Through Darkness: An Interview with David Anthony Durham
Hunter Liguore
I think that good writing can be found in any genre, and that bad writing can too. I think that genre can be innovative and thoughtful and has an under-acknowledged influence on literary writing.
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Truthtelling and More: Voice and Context in the Poetry of Tony Hoagland
Katie Sheehan
The voices that propel Tony Hoagland's poems are that friend. These voices blare out loud and clear, unapologetic in their personalities: always male and often crass, anxious, and sarcastic.
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Printers, Bookleggers, and ‘Spicy’ Books: James Joyce in the Book Industry
Patrick Coleman
...not only was Joyce mired in all of that dirtying daily business, his writing process was influenced by and took advantage of the frustrations and limitations along the way. He was not the aloof artist we might imagine.
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Wear the Day Well: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez
Remica Bingham
Now, in the 21st century, it’s normal to have a Du Bois House, but when I talked about Du Bois and taught Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk at San Francisco State, the FBI came to my house.
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