Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Jenny Lawson Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, April 2012 336 pages $25.95 From humble beginnings (blogginnings?), Jenny “The Bloggess” Lawson has built a new media empire writing for mommy blogs, reviewing porn in her SEXIS column, and tweeting her way into a feud with William Shatner (among other…
This will be my last post for Ploughshares on small presses. It’s been fun and I’ve learned a lot in the process myself. I thought this would be a great opportunity to post about other small presses that readers have suggested. Since I’m an egalitarian type, I always wonder, who am I to make such…
1. How do your essay ideas typically come to you? Lia Purpura: Let me reroute the notion of “typical” here. Single words, images, scents, incongruities, awe, toothache—all of these offer possibilities, though the moment of launch is always, at heart, mysterious. Knowing what starts you up shouldn’t in any way suggest that you then go about…
Post by guest-blogger Michael Klein. My friends and colleagues Darcey Steinke and Douglas A. Martin and I all got together one afternoon during a break from the Goddard College MFA low-residency program where we all teach to talk about the MFA degree in general, what we feel is different about Goddard and how teaching one-on-one…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…
Last Poems Hayden Carruth Copper Canyon Press, June 2012 120 pages $16.00 Editor’s Note: P. Scott Stanfield holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches literature at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Recently, I challenged him to see how many references to other works and artists he could make in a single 500-word review. He gets one point…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…
Around the time I began working on my MFA, I started to hear other writers talk about applying for residencies at “artist colonies.” I was new to the writing world, and I wasn’t sure what a colony was. I had the vague impression of a kind of commune: poets and painters hanging out in gardens,…
It’s hard to write sentences or poems with people singing songs in the background but I think that some other music – orchestral music, smaller music involving instruments, singers singing without words – is a great and inspiring thing to have playing next to you when you are writing. I wrote a whole book listening…
No products in the cart.