March/April 2003 
Fiction Writers And Other Well-Intentioned Frauds
Eileen Pollack
In college in the 1970s, I became entranced by my university’s mainframe computer and wrote a Fortran program that allowed my professors to predict the scattering patterns of the subatomic particles they would smash against each other when given time on the accelerator.
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If The Writer Prefers, May This Work Be Regarded As Fiction?
Naomi Wax
If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. These words begin the preface to Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his time in Paris. And with them Hemingway shrugs off the demand for accuracy that is levied on nonfiction writers, freeing himself to tell the story he wants to tell.
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An Interview With Alicia Ostriker
Cynthia Hogue
Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Twice a finalist for a National Book Award, she is author of nine volumes of poetry, most recently The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968–1998 and The Volcano Sequence (2002). As a critic, Ostriker is the author of two pathbreaking volumes on women's poetry, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America.
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A Foreword to Irish Fairy and Folk Tales
Paul Muldoon
Growing up in the 1950s in Northern Ireland, I had any number of opportunities to experience the fairy faith. My uncle, Dinny McCool, had a cure for ringworm, and would happily have come under Yeats's category of "fairy doctors." Our neighbour, Maura McParland, delighted in the story of a man who was passing the graveyard in Collegelands when he was accosted, then pursued, by a ruddy poltergeist on a bicycle.
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Node and Network: The Electronic Literature Organization's State of the Arts Symposium
Ravi Shankar
The high-tech trappings of electronic literature-laptops, e-book readers, CD-ROMS-belie the fact that the field is framed in traditional forms of discourse, such as critical prose that can be read in a book or expounded upon from a lectern. It's a necessary irony, then, that the practitioners, theorists and publishers in the emergent field of e-literature periodically need to meet face-to-face in order to better ascertain where they are and where they are headed.
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The Essential Ed Ochester: An Interview with Ed Ochester
Lori Jakiela
Ed Ochester served two terms as the President of the The Association of Writers & Writing Programs. He is the author of 13 books, including most recently The Land of Cockaigne (Story Line Press) and Snow White Horses: Selected Poems (Autumn House Press). He is a member of the Bennington Writing Seminars faculty, and he is the 2001 recipient of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's $15,000 Creative Achievement Award.
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Telescope, Well Bucket, Furnace: Poetry Beyond the Classroom
Jane Hirshfield
There is only one real reason to read a poem, and that is to find your way to a larger life than would otherwise be yours to live. This is also the only reason to write a poem. All the other reasons a poem might come to exist-as courtship gesture, say, or the desire to communicate or to effect some change; because it has been requested of you or because it might offer some chance for expression of circumstances or of self-have their place, but they are bits of bait laid in the mousetrap.
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