May/Summer 2014 Cover Image

The Last Word: Demystifying the Writing Process

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Bernard Cooper
"I invariably speak with students who fear that real writers possess some kind of trade secret, some list of rules that, if followed to the letter, will transform them from a novice into a professional in much the same way that Pinocchio was transformed from a marionette into a real boy."
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Hello I Must Be Going: The Poetry of Farewell

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Daniel Tobin
"...there is, a rather subtly realized interfusion, to borrow a word from Wordsworth, between the experience of arrival and the experience of departure. Like a deeply enwound double knot or a Janus face, the two become very nearly the same thing..."
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Paintings in Fiction: Ten Lessons From the Masters of Ekphrasis

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Stephanie Coyne DeGhett
"While ekphrastic fiction never entirely abandons direct description, it has a surprisingly complex array of strategies that not only accommodate storytelling but energize it."
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Books and Islands: On Reading Lawrence Durrell in Greece

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Linda Lappin
"Willingly or not, Lawrence Durrell, like Scobie in Alexandria, has left behind in Corfu a part of himself which has mingled and merged with the spirit of place, ready to nourish all those who seek to know his essence."
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Chronicler, Risk-Taker, Breaker Of Silence: An Interview with Camille T. Dungy

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Leslie McGrath
"Why bother to say it when there is more beauty in the confusion, more creative exploration in working out the information for ourselves? There is some way that this translates to poetry for me."
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Why Do We Write?

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Annie Proulx
"...this business of tailoring your writing to readers’ tastes and expectations is disturbing. To regurgitate the tried and true, the expected, makes the writer a producer of product, an assembly line worker chunking out widgets."
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Not Releasing the Genie: On the Poetry of Stuff vs. The Poetry of Knowledge

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David Wojahn
"The list tells us something about how much the nature of contemporary poetry has changed in the past two or three generations. But it is also indicative about how much the very nature of reality has changed for us in recent decades."
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A Conversation with John Edgar Wideman & Suketu Mehta

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Sejal Shah
"The legacy of someone like Raymond Carver or Gordon Lish became a point of reference for everybody for such a long time. That’s not good. It’s suffocating. And we’re not out of that yet."
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