Blog

a red colored pencil against a white background

Red Pens and Other Ego-Paring Tools

In “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment,” one of eleven excellent short stories in Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Connor award-winning collection The Bigness of the World, the title character despairs over the current trend in American schools to reward students for their mediocrity.  Under the new regime of the militantly optimistic, the red pen is suspect, likewise the honest…

a series of black and white measuring tapes stacked on top of each other

Patterns and Need

Our third guest blogger, Adrian Matejka, is a poet whose poem “Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins” appears in our Winter 2010-11 issue edited by Terrance Hayes.  Adrian will post on Fridays through April. Paul Hegarty said, “Noise is a system of judgments.” He was talking about the qualitative distinctions we make about music, but it…