I first heard of Paul Muldoon through the affectionate enthusing of Seamus Heaney, who donned his conspiratorial mien — as if agents of some imagined opposition might be lurking near — and confided that his somewhat younger compatriot was “the real thing.” I sought the work out, though I’ll confess I was some time coming…
When asked about the role of martial arts in his life, Madison Smartt Bell replies that it gave him the opportunity to be bad at something. To those of us who have followed his career as a writer, it’s something of a relief to know that this might actually be true. In sixteen years he…
Think of the word “spires” or the word “aspires,” and you see ascendance, a reaching, a rising up, a breathing upon, a breathing into life — you hear the word “spirit.” Elizabeth Spires’s work seems deeply linked with all the facets and motives of these words associated with her name. Even in her first book…
A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town’s main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet,…
Charles Baxter can’t sleep at night. An insomniac most of his adult life, he takes comfort in Nabokov’s claim: If writers don’t stay awake thinking about their work, how are they going to make their readers stay awake? Baxter — the author of two novels and four collections of stories, as well as a book…
Thomas Lux is always getting ready to leave for somewhere else: for the highway to his home in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he spends part of each week with his eleven-year-old daughter, Claudia; to his classes at Sarah Lawrence College, “each week a honk for Wallace Stevens” when passing through Hartford; to a writing residency at…
Lorrie Moore hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in three and a half years. It’s not what you think, however. She has not, like one of her characters, fallen prey to love woes or obsessive-compulsive panic. If anything, Lorrie Moore is far tougher than most people would suspect. It’s simply that she has a feisty…
Stuart Dybek works with a curious mix of spontaneity and retentiveness. He wrote most of the stories for his first collection, for instance, under a spell. He’d put on Eastern European classical music, and the words would simply pour out. To this day, Dybek relies on music for inspiration, listening to jazz, jotting in a…
There is a Zen saying, “Not knowing, we proceed.” At some level this is true for us all. For Jane Hirshfield, such moving forward through enigma can be terrifying, but is also “the richest place to be.” Having recently published a book of essays and a book of poems, she is now beginning a new…
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