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Women long dead become reanimated in Ladies Night at the Dreamland. We sit beside blood-splattered lovers in 19th century Tennessee, sway on a steamer across Italy with a fatally ill women, hear ghosts knock at the command of two New York sisters at the dawn of spiritualism.
From the sales of the newest Harry Potter story to a list of the highest paid authors of 2016, here are some of last week’s most interesting literary headlines.
I started farming the year after I completed my MFA, and in the six years since I’ve been trying to figure out how anyone could possibly be a writer and a farmer at the same time.
I’m currently about five months pregnant with our second child, and I’m finding this state no less strange the second time around. It’s plenty of other things too—miraculous, exciting, fascinating, wonderful—and I’m very grateful for it; but in describing the actual daily, bodily experience, that’s the word that first comes to mind for me, strange.
Last month I found myself in the gardening section of a German supermarket where, on sale, I came across Mexican-themed cacti. Tiny, impossibly hairy things with googly eyes and black moustaches and pastel colored sombreros made of clay. Typical German kitsch. “That looks like my uncle Mario,” I thought. That moustache. Those manic eyes like,…
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…
Christina Seymour is the author of the poetry chapbook Flowers Around Your Soft Throat (Structo Press, UK). Her work appears in Cider Press Review, North American Review, Cimarron Review, Wingbeats II (Dos Gatos Press), and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Maryville College in east Tennessee.
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.
“Roman Fever,” published by Edith Wharton in 1934 just three years before her death, is one of her short story masterpieces, and it is a story that has spawned many responses, including a modernized version by Alice Elliott Dark entitled “The Secret Spot.”
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