Blog

Liber Interruptus

Liber Interruptus

For years, I finished every book I started. Short collections, slim volumes of poetry, novels fat with lyricism, the latest tome from Neal Stephenson—I soldiered through them all. Then, a few years out of grad school, on my morning bus ride to work, I found myself falling asleep in the same three paragraph stretch of…

man standing on glass platform on top of building looking down on ground at daytime
|

Long and Short of It

In the term short story, “short” is a little baggy. You might find, within a collection of short stories, some that are a few pages, some that are thirty or more. Compared to a five-hundred-page novel, of course, neither of these is a long piece of writing. Both are compressed worlds. But the very short…

Baby feet on pink blanket.

From Swaddles to Slang: Creative Problem Solving in Translation and Motherhood

In late February I finished up the translation of a novel. In mid-March my son was born. Caring for a baby is not all too different than dealing with a challenging translation, though granted the hours are less convenient and the boss often poses unreasonable demands. In both cases there is proper procedure—first draft, dictionary…

|

The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “My Beard” by Eric Braun

There’s a difference between what the narrator views as the story and what the reader views as the story. By playing with that distance, writers can illuminate the deeper desires of their characters, revealed by what they choose to focus on in the telling, and what they don’t. In Eric Braun’s “My Beard,” from Redivider—a…

Pictures of a couple of rows of books on a shelf.
|

The Best Poem I Read This Month: “A performance for intimate space with strangers” by Saretta Morgan

  Saretta Morgan participates in “text-based writing,” and currently attends the interdisciplinary graduate writing program at Pratt Institute. Additionally, she’s a member of the Belladonna* Collective, a feminist avant-garde group founded in New York City. These affiliations begin to orient lenses and traditions through which to read her work; but “begin” is the operative word here,…