May/Summer 2007 Cover Image

An Interview with Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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Niloufar Talebi
My hero's comparison is indeed far-fetched, as you say, and absurd. I used it to illustrate the feelings of a child of war victims, who is both grateful for his comparatively easy life, and, at the same time, secretly envious of his parents' knowledge of suffering, which he will never attain.
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Writing on the Brink: Peripheral Vision and the Personal Poem

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Renée Ashley
f a good personal poem is, as I believe it must be, a thing in motion, a thing on its way to some place that beckons or threatens, then Toad has it right. Look closely at what he has to say. He's talking about poetry.
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Rhyming Action in Alice Munro's Short Stories

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Maggie Bucholt
Buried deep in Munro's stories are the repetitive images and events that leave the reader to contemplate a story's meaning, which resonate like a haunting refrain....
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The God Damndest Thing: Learning From Richard Yates

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Martin Naparsteck
One conversation we had was about the possibility that consuming bad stories, whether from movies or television, or reading bad novels, was a useful way to learn to write. The idea was that if you were able to figure out why a story is bad you could avoid it in your own writing.
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Revealing Your Characters: An Interview with Steve Almond

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Sherry Ellis
I like stories where I know what's happening quickly. And I like stories where a desire or a conflict is established early on. I don't like-and I see this over and over in student work-where the protagonist wakes up and hits the alarm clock or the woman is in the bath tub, and it takes us forever to get to the place where the real source of fear or desire or danger resides. I always want to say, 'Quit clearing your throat! What is this story about?'
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An Interview with Charles Wright

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Thomas Di Salvo
Stress happens. As I said just now, I don't count them, but I do know they're there, and approximately how many, given the syllable count of the line. But it's more flexible, and not as predictable.
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Adventures in Philanthropy & the Pantheon of American Poetries

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D.W. Fenza
The poetry critic David Orr became the avenger of the Poetry Foundation in March, when the New York Times Book Review published Orr's attack on the New Yorker. Orr's piece, "Annals of Poetry," was something like a Rube Goldberg device of convoluted pneumatic tubes-one tube blowing darts at New Yorker staffers Dana Goodyear and Alice Quinn; one tube playing dour and flatulent tuba music; and one tube blowing kisses to the Poetry Foundation.
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