The Toxic Relationship Between Man and Boat in Two Key West Fiction Classics
Key West is an international port of entry, an island where man and boat collide violently so that the lines between them become hard to distinguish.
Ernest Hemingway
Writing in the In-Between
Writers squeeze writing in between their full-time work, even if they don’t talk about it. Journalist and TV anchor Jake Tapper did just that in writing his political thriller, which he wrote sometimes in intervals of only fifteen minutes at a time.
Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: The Tragic Possibilities
Tragedy opens up aesthetic possibilities, allowing suprahuman forces to partake as literary subjects that overwhelm individual characters. It is a mode of expression that goes beyond what realistic fiction can provide.
Writing Fiction from Life
Some writers that I know are at times so unsure of whether a story is theirs to tell that they will shelve a project for years at a time, waiting for some kind of permission to be granted, or for forgiveness, or for a death. But sometimes those things come in the wrong order.
The Affair’s Slyly Satirical Portrayal of the White Male Literary Darling
While Showtime’s The Affair has been praised for its incisive exploration of the unreliability of memory, particularly in romantic relationships, some of its most insightful commentary is on the contemporary literary community.
To Write a Page in Someone’s Shoes: On Translation and the Experience of Empathy
I translate something almost every day. Five or six days a week, you can find me in the process of drafting, editing, or proofreading a translation, clicking back and forth between the original and my translation, comparing and contrasting.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Und So Weiter” by Seth Clabough
One person’s trash is another’s treasure. This is often as true for prose as it is for yard sales: a character’s perspective and primary concerns compose the lens through which they see the world. The narrator of Seth Clabough’s, “Und So Weiter” (Blackbird), sees his past and future in a ghost ship drifting out to…
What is Your Writing Routine?
What is your writing routine? What does it look like when you sit to write? Any special rituals? I am so glad you asked. It’s really pretty great. I sit at my computer, and I check Facebook for, like, ten minutes. Okay, haha, twenty minutes. And then I write. Sometimes I outline, sometimes I do…
The Right Words
For my daughter, who just turned two, language is plastic. She pokes it and stretches it to find out what it can do. Joyfully, she tells stories (only some of them true) about her day. She loves to list the parts she and the cat do and don’t have in common. When it comes to…