One of the perks of working in academia is ordering desk copies of books. While more often than not these things are tedious tomes that would put me to sleep, never mind my students, sometimes I happen upon gems, such as The Twentieth-Novel: An Introduction by R.B. Kershner. I’ll admit I don’t remember ordering this…
Stephen King has a particular knack for fictionalizing the tortured lives of writers. Scribes of varied success people the pages of his works, from protagonists to supporting characters. (Under the Dome’s Thurston Marshall is a recent Ploughshares guest editor!) Many of these characters are also readable as Author Avatars for King. Beyond his personal struggles,…
Writers love to create writer characters, so much so that fictional writers are their own sub-character set. Maybe it’s because we understand the torture of the artistic monkey better than anything else; creating fictional writers is one way of following the adage of writing what you know. Or perhaps we make our characters writers because we…
Nothing hits the literary palate with quite the delightful punch of a well-spun revenge story. Not the third-act, Scooby-Doo reveal that a killer did it all for revenge, or even the author’s personal vendetta against some person(s)—no, I’m talking of revenge plots where the actions unfurls around a quest for comeuppance. The Elizabethan revenge tragedies…
A few weeks ago, I was furious at someone on a level normally reserved for politics. For about three days I didn’t know how to defuse my anger; I just complained and ranted to any poor person who came within ear shot. It was eating at me, how much anger I had stored up. Despite…
While I may have given Graphobibliophobia a name, it would seem that it is a widespread affliction. Identifying it was the first step. Now, fellow Graphobibliophobes, what do we do about it? Traditional treatments for phobias include things like modeling, counter-conditioning, and exposure treatments. All of these involve confronting the fear in some controlled way….
Most of my phobias have rational explanations and are probably quite common. My ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) can be attributed to a West Texas upbringing punctuated with rattlesnake avoidance education. The blame for my coulrophobia, fear of clowns, rests on the shoulders of Stephen King, Tim Curry, and John Wayne Gacy. (I suspect those guys…
A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture by Margaret Atwood, during which, in response to a question about introducing students to literature, she emphasized the importance of storytelling. Not story reading. Storytelling. Stories are, she reminded us, “scores for the voice.” All those little blank markings we call writing? They…
Over the past few months, the Myth of the Literary Cowboy has explored how and why Willie was spot on when he observed that our “heroes have always been cowboys.” White hats, singers, anti-hero gunslingers, poets, pop music subjects—the role of the cowboy is part of the collective American pop culture conscience. What is left for the…
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