In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week.
We’ve hit the dog-days of summer, dear readers, and the mercury is climbing. As the days get hotter, we dream of fleeing to the beach or the mountains or our back porches to relax and take a break. Vacation is not only good for us as humans, but it can also be good for us as writers. So this week Ploughshares bring you a roundup on taking your writing on vacation.
To combat the siren call of summer laziness, The Loft Literary Center offers “4 Ways to Keep up Your Writing Habit this Summer.” Useful for both your focused and beach writing.
The nineteen year old that I work with setting up the Hydration Stations on the Lakefront path told me that this was her second job ever and that she wanted to do really well because she saw a future with the company. I scoffed at her in exactly the same way I’ve scoffed at people…
Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption Nancy Mullane PublicAffairs 384 pages $26.99 American prisons hold over 140,000 lifers. Under the rallying cry “life means life,” parole is rare; some states have eliminated it. Graphed, the number of lifers over the past three decades looks like a steep mountain ascent, no cliff in…
On the first day of class, my ninth grade biology teacher told us the curriculum called for us to learn science from the least abstract level to the most—biology this year, followed by chemistry, physics, and calculus. “Of course, that’s completely bogus,” he said at the end of this explanation. “You need to learn these…