October/November 2009
"Advice" From
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Thomas Mallon
Depressed by springtime whenever it arrives, he recommends solitude, muses on the chance for a new androgyny in the world and talks about a state of mutual regard between lovers that sounds like D. H. Lawrence's "star-equilibrium" without the preliminary fun.
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Transcending Talk: The Role of Discussion & Context in the Creative Writing Classroom
Justin Maxwell
The pedagogy of mainstream workshop classes creates a paradoxical trap that pressures students to create derivative work and hampers their ability to grow as writers once they leave the classroom. This trap is a fundamental miscommunication that can be fixed by re-contextualizing student work to better focus on the writer's agenda for the text.
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An Interview with Sheryl St. Germain
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Allison Schuette
In my mind, we don't invent metaphors; they're already there.
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Stepping Through the Threshold: Ways to Achieve Authentic Voice in Memoir
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Sebastian Matthews
During a recent "state of creative nonfiction" panel, an audience member asked what the panelists thought of the current memoir "fad." An established nonfiction writer and author of a popular writing manual leaned forward to field the question. "Beginning writers shouldn't write memoirs," he stated matter-of-factly. "They have not lived enough."
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Voicing the Whole: The Poet's Impulse to Ascend & Descend
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Amy Pence
Although their poetic inclinations differed-Dickinson usually gazing beyond death (toward the incorporeal), and Whitman rollicking earthward among humanity, (toward the corporeal)-both poets wisely crafted a holistic vision of the world in their work.
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On Inspiration: Thomas Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, & Raymond Carver
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Douglas Unger
Writing workshop talk and teaching confined to craft and the materiality of language, augmented by the paternalistic mentor-student critique by the teacher-writer-useful and effective in so many tried and proven ways-in the main share both these prevailing aesthetics of the academy and marketplace cultures.
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Too Much of Moi?
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Cris Mazza
When she was nineteen and full of white-hot urgency, Cris Mazza impetuously told a professor, "I can't write in anything but first person."
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An Interview with Duff Brenna— Novelist, Teacher, Editor
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Thomas E. Kennedy
I really needed to write. It wasn't that I just wanted to be a writer. I needed to be a writer. It's the psyche's need that gets you through twenty years. Also, I had to work to make a living, and so I couldn't indulge my moody broodings over the piles of rejections, but had to get up each day and go to work.
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Unfair Use
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Ronald Goldfarb
As the Che photo became the image representing rebellion, anti-imperialism, and the face of Cuba, Garcia's photo and Fairey's treatment of it also played into people's passions; the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream for Afro-Americans, the end of Bush imperialism, the turning of a page in America's civil rights movement for blacks and whites, and more.
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An Interview with Lee Gutkind
![Article Image](https://cdn.awpwriter.org/uploads/content/2486/th_lgutkind.jpg)
Sam Morgan
When the topic of creative nonfiction arises, Lee Gutkind's name is often right there with it. His influence helped bring creative nonfiction into the mainstream as a third genre beside poetry and fiction.
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