May/Summer 2009 
Poetcraft
John Balaban
W.H. Auden said that the aspiring poets who wanted to write poetry because they had "something important to say" were probably hopeless. On the other hand, if they said they just "liked to hang around words and overhear them talking," they had a chance.
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The Sporting Pages
Michael Downs
What do they know, the John Edgar Widemans and Joyce Carol Oateses, the Stephen Dunns and Ernest Hemingways, writers who have been preoccupied, or even fixated, with sports as subject matter? What compels such writers to return to stadiums and arenas and gymnasiums, to courts of wood, asphalt, grass and clay, to diamonds and pools and rings? In what ways might sport be their gateway to other subjects?
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Some Narrative Poets of the American West
David Mason
When I was a boy in Bellingham, Washington, a small town on the Puget Sound, closer to Vancouver B.C. than to Seattle, my family moved to a big house on a hill overlooking the bay. In my teenage years, against my mother's wishes, I would climb out my bedroom window and onto the roof of that house, clamber up to its peak and, clinging to the edge of a brick chimney, look out over the Sound at the San Juan Islands
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Recurrences in Book-Length Fiction: Connecting the Seemingly Unconnected
Nancy Priff
Traditionally, fiction relied primarily on linear storytelling, as in classics like Jane Eyre and Moby Dick. It had a built-in sense of unity and was easy to grasp because it relied on one main narrative arc and followed the actions of one main character or a group of characters. Even when classic novels employed multiple story lines, the arc of the overall narrative connected them and moved them forward together. This traditional form of storytelling was so effective that it is still widely used today. But recently and increasingly, fiction writers have, in jazz-like maneuvers, deployed fragmented, multiple, and simultaneous forms to tell their stories.
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Land of the Weird, Home of the Strange: Fabulism in American Fiction After 1945
Sabrina Orah Mark
To adequately examine what is specifically fabular about the American Fabulist, the origin of the word "fabulist" asks for a reckoning. It comes, of course, from the fable: an invented story or folktale embodying a moral folded in such a way so that the fabulist's materials become his or her lies and visions...
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A Conversation with Poet/Novelist Jack Driscoll
Duff Brenna
The recognition-and admission-of our complicity in something is a kind of truth, an owning up or coming clean, and so yes, I see my characters functioning and thus defining themselves in that way. But I'm never aware of themes, certainly not in the process of writing.
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An Interview with Cynthia Ozick
Dana Gioia
For a New York intellectual of such formidable accomplishments, writer and critic Cynthia Ozick is a woman of notable gentleness and charm. Despite a shelf-full of celebrated books bearing her name and a dozen major awards, including a National Medal of the Humanities, Ozick has grown into literary eminence without ever losing the youthful radiance of a brilliant girl enchanted by books.
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Bachelard's Non-I & the Enlarged Self
Elizabeth Anne McHale
e.e. cummings prayed that his "I" would be realized; that beyond being good or kind or smart or successful, he would be all that he held the possibility for, his essential self. I am sustained by an interest in this essential self, which I believe lies beyond the daily self or the rational self. Yet I find myself fishing for the verb-do I want to be my essential self?
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