September 2000 Cover Image

An Interview with Louise Glück

Article Image

Jonathan Farmer
Louise Glück, a prize-winning poet and critic, is the author of eight books of poetry, including Ararat, Descending Figure, The Triumph of Achilles, The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, and Vita Nova, and a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read more...


Busting the New Breed of Plagiarist

Article Image

Michael Bugeja
A few years ago you couldn't bust plagiarists electronically because they were too lazy to learn how to use the Internet. Plagiarists are still lazy, of course; but the new breed came of age in the computer era. They know that stealing from the Web is quicker than stealing from the library at universities which, like my own, typically provide online services.
Read more...


Adjunct Activism: Maintaining the Professionalism & Integrity of Academic Life

Liesl Swogger
Dr. Gary Zabel, a part-time professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMass), remembers what his professional life was like before the part-timers at UMass organized independently of the full-time faculty: serious depressions as a result of demoralizing working conditions, inferior status for part-timers within the university, and the part-timers' knowledge that "however many publications you have, however stellar your student evaluations are... no matter what you do, your condition (as a part-timer) makes you inferior."
Read more...


From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance & Point of View in Fiction Writing

Article Image

David Jauss
In his story "Hills Like White Elephants," Ernest Hemingway places us at a table outside a train station in Spain. Sitting at the table beside us are a man and a woman who are waiting for the train to arrive, and for the bulk of the story, we eavesdrop on their conversation, just as we might in real life. And also just as in real life, we cannot enter into their minds; we can only hear what they say and see what they do.

Read more...


An Interview with C. Michael Curtis

Lee Miller
C. Michael Curtis, a Senior Editor of The Atlantic Monthly since 1963, is now in his 38th year as The Atlantic editor who works most closely with short fiction. Before The Atlantic, Curtis completed four years of study toward a PhD in government at Cornell University, where he earned his BA in English in 1956. Prior to graduate school he had worked as a newspaper reporter for The Ithaca Journal and as an editorial assistant at both Newsweek and the New York Daily News.
Read more...


The Architecture of Possibility: Reading the Novels of Milorad Pavic

Article Image

Lance Olsen
"I thought how houses are like books," writes one of the bibliophilistic narrators of Milorad Pavic's extraordinary novel, Dictionary of the Khazars. "So many of them around you, yet you only look at a few and visit or reside in fewer still." Surely this is the case with Pavic's architectonic wonders in this country. Meeting another reader familiar with Pavic's work is a little like engaging in the literary equivalent of a secret handshake.
Read more...


A Note on Poetic Form

Article Image

Michael Ryan
The Modernist distrust of received forms (or, more precisely, Pound's and Eliot's distrust of them during their Imagist phase) derives from the conviction that they allow only certain kinds of poems to be written, the kinds of poems that are the monuments of English literature and that which had fallen into decadence at the beginning of the 20th century.
Read more...


The Other Creative Writing

Article Image

Michael Pearson
Creative writing is the art of storytelling, an art as elemental as fire and the circle of civilization. Poetry goes back to our farthest dreams of the past, joining language to our very heartbeats. Writing fiction, or telling lies to find the truth, is as old as Scheherazade and Odysseus, and playwriting is an ancient and respected activity. Our most sacrosanct anthologies include poetry, fiction, and drama, but rarely, and only very recently, do any include nonfiction as literature.
Read more...