September 2018 Cover Image

What These Ithakas Mean: Some Thoughts About Metaphor and Questing

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Tony Hoagland
Blind Homer, famous for his two great narrative poems, is also famous for his metaphors. In fact, the metaphors that populate the Iliad and Odyssey are so stylistically distinct, they are called Homeric metaphors.
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Process & Spirit

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George Saunders
Revision might just be the process of trying to better please, thrill, even shock her. And writing, maybe, could be less planned; could proceed by instinct, for fun; could be instinctual rather than conceptual.
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The Mission of the Evangelical Poet: An Interview with Richard Blanco

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William Walsh
I prefer to look at the emotional history of people often forgotten in the crossfire of politics and history.
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At the Highest Point of Tension: The Art of the Artful Pause

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Jeff P. Jones
The craft technique I’m interested in here is more than just a beat, that unit in a scene in which a character scratches her nose or ashes her cigarette between dialogue passages.
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Do you have to be one to write about one? Writing About Others

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Ian King
For many a Critical Theorist, what the white man is doing in these instances is nothing short of a new form of colonialism or imperialism: appropriating, if not stealing or commercially exploiting, others’ identities and voices—their autonomy and authenticity, in short, their right to speak for themselves.
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Ageless: An Interview with Jacqueline Woodson

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Padma Venkatraman
When I get a strong voice in my head and the dialogue starts flowing, then I begin to know the road my book is going down and just… let myself follow it.
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Buddy Up Or Learning (More) From Chekhov

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Debra Spark
Chekhov had some other notable strikes against him when it came to the under-twenty-two set. No cell phones in his stories. No texting, no Snapchat. Economic diversity but no ethnic diversity. All those hard-to-pronounce names. Too old-fashioned.
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