This June, I was in Victoria, B.C. for a conference and summer institute that took me away from home for ten days. I was surrounded by water & mountains, fresh air & kindness, and it felt like just the kind of intellectual and emotional salve I needed after yet another long, tumultuous year of teaching…
It’s unsurprising that parenting is fertile ground for novelists. There are plenty of stories, both in fiction and in real life, of parental sacrifice for the sake of children. More surprising are the accounts of parents using their children for the sake of their work.
Robert Heinlein, the prolific author of Starship Troopers and other sci-fi works, coined the term “speculative fiction” in 1947. In the essay, Heinlein defines “speculative fiction” as “the story embodying the notion ‘Just suppose—’ or ‘What would happen if—’.” For Heinlein, this narrative hypothesis creates “a new framework for human action.”
When I arrived in Florence for an extended trip, I was determined not to look like a tourist. I wanted to carry a leather-bound notebook and sit at sidewalk cafes drinking cappuccinos and looking thoughtful. Mostly, I wanted to read The Decameron and the last two books of The Divine Comedy with a Tuscan backdrop.
When I first set out to find C.P. Cavafy’s maternal home five years ago, my friends and I figured heading to the local church in Neochori (present day Yeniköy) would yield the best results. The Alexandrian Greek poet had spent three years of his life, from 1882 to 1885, in the then Greek-dominated village in…
In “Trances of the Blast,” the poem from the book by the same name, Mary Ruefle begins with a question and answer: “What is the code for happiness?/Blackberries forever.”
Although the book—Trances of the Blast—came out several years ago, this particular line has haunted me ever since.
In June of 2008, I took an “Anne-tastic” tour, as one website put it, of Prince Edward Island, home of Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. This summer, on another June day, I head back to PEI.
Emily Dickinson is known for her rumination on the anxiety surrounding death, and particularly the pain that accompanies mourning. But her poetry demonstrates a comparable mistrust of eternal life, rendering the idea of a paradisiacal afterlife as emotionally fraught as the idea of oblivion.
In recent years, the narrative ballet has reemerged, and with it, stories both forgotten and classic have appeared on the stage. Choreographers have drawn from Russian novels, Shakespeare, and modernism itself.
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